Emma Jolly and Adam Barclay had planned the perfect wedding, and the bride-to-be was to walk down the aisle to the couple’s favourite love song.
But only three months before the big day, doctors discovered Adam had a serious brain tumour .
The 27-year-old died on the operating table days later, before he had the chance to say goodbye to his family.
Instead of walking down the aisle to James Vincent McMorrow’s ‘Higher Love’, Emma listened to the song as her fiancé’s coffin was carried into the church.
“It was the wrong aisle,” she says. “When it went quiet, all you could hear was crying. Every grown man in that church was sobbing.”
Adam Barclay with his children
Over 400 people turned up to pay their respects at the funeral in Watford as 'petrolhead' Adam was laid to rest in a coffin decorated with pictures of his favourite car.
“We wanted a coffin that celebrated him and didn’t represent death because he was so alive,” dental nurse Emma says. “He achieved more in 27 years than many people can achieve in a lifetime.”
Emma and Adam first met through their love of cars, even having their first date in a car park six years ago.
Emma Jolly and Adam Barclay were due to wed
After dating for a few weeks Adam took Emma to the top of the London Eye to tell her he loved her.
He proposed a year later on the anniversary of their first date when she was heavily pregnant with their first child.
“I cried I was so happy,” Emma says. “I started practicing my signature as Emma Barclay from the day he asked me.”
When Emma gave birth to their daughter Lola, and four years later to a son, Parker, the couple believed they had everything in life.
Doting Dad Adam was doing up their house and was planning to buy a husky to complete their family.
But the brain tumour growing inside Adam’s head started to pick away at his perfect life in March last year.
“We went for dinner and he had this episode where he just started at me, breathing heavily. He couldn’t speak for about 20 seconds,” Emma says.
“It wasn’t until it happened again that he said he had them once a week or so.”
The doctors told Adam he was having panic attacks, and when he went for a second appointment to refute the diagnosis, they reaffirmed it and set up a weekly phone call with a therapist.
Emma says: “He’s really not the sort of person to have panic attacks. He had everything in life and wasn’t stressed or anxious.
“When the therapist asked him questions like: ‘Are you going to kill yourself’ he felt like a massive failure and was worried about being a bad dad.”
Adam’s freezing episodes became more and more frequent and two weeks before Christmas he was severely ill.
He could not stand without getting dizzy and he suffered from excruciating headaches.
Emma, who had never seen Adam be sick or take a day off work as a garage car damage estimator, struggled to understand what was wrong.
The couple's kids Lola and Parker
She insisted he went to the accident and emergency department where doctors said Adam was suffering from a viral infection, handing him anti-sickness tablets, antibiotics and pain relief medication.
“He took those for a week but he was getting worse,” 24-year-old Emma says. “He said to me: ‘I think I’m going to die’. For him to say that was a big deal.”
Another hospital appointment on Christmas Eve was ineffective and Adam was told to take pain pills.
“On Christmas Day and Boxing Day he was okay,” Emma says, “He still had a headache but he was hopeful he was getting better.
“But it was the calm before the storm. Adam went back to A&E on the 27th and they finally did a CT scan and found a tumour.”
The dad-of-two was rushed to a specialist neurology hospital in London and that evening suffered a severe seizure which landed him in the intensive care unit.
Emma was told they would have to put Adam under anaesthetic to stop his seizures.
“I went numb. I’m not religious at all, but I was begging anyone I could because we needed him so bad,” she says.
“I told him I loved him. And he said ‘I love you too’. That was the last thing he said.
“It did stabilise his seizures, but they had to do an operation the following day to take down the swelling in his brain. He never woke up from the operation.”
Adam died on New Years Day only months before their wedding.
Emma was left to plan a funeral instead of the perfect marriage ceremony they had dreamed of.
“At 24 my life was completely destroyed. You have all these plans and you never once think something so out of control can destroy them.
“I kept thinking: ‘The kids have lost their dad’. He was so devoted to them. He wanted to take Parker for his first driving lesson, he wanted to walk Lola down the aisle - all these milestones we’ll have to face as a three not a four. It’s heartbreaking,” Emma says.
Emma changed her surname to Adam’s on March 26, the day they would have been married and she has not had the heart to take her wedding dress out the box.
But the mum-of-two has found the strength to speak out about the danger of brain tumours.
She is raising money to fund research into the disease that took her fiancé and has vowed to live by Adam’s slogan, “Dare to be different”.
“I still wake up thinking he’s lying next to me. But then the realisation hits,” she says.
“I cant bring Adam back. No one can, but if I can stop someone else going through this living hell, that would be something. I know he would be proud of that - he lived to help other people.”
Brain tumours kill more children and adults under the age of 40 than any other cancer but just 1% of the national spend on cancer research has been allocated to the disease.
