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Our wedding day was everything I dreamed it would be.
We married in September 2011 in a tiny chapel in Florence and I walked down the aisle as Andrew’s wife, amid a blur of happiness.
After an idyllic honeymoon in Bali, we returned home to married life.
Best of friends: Anna Pasternak and her mother on Anna's 21st birthday in 1988- the pair shared an extremely close bond
I felt secure and complete in a way I hadn’t experienced before. Andrew and I started writing a book together and after years of personal and professional struggle, everything had finally fallen into place. I felt blessed in every area of my life.
Six weeks later, I got a call at 6am and my world, as I knew it, shattered.
A friend was calling to say that my mother had suffered a severe stroke and we must come immediately to the hospital.
My mother had been staying with her friend in Somerset and as Andrew, my daughter Daisy and I drove from our home near Henley-on-Thames to the hospital, I knew that she was going to die.
She was drifting in and out of consciousness when we got there. The nurses told us that she could probably still hear us, so I leaned over her calm, beautiful face and told her how much I loved her.
My tears were falling onto her cheeks as I reassured her that she had been the best mother in the world to me and that a daughter could never love a mother more.
When we drove home a few hours later, I remember thinking: ‘It’s amazing, Mummy has just died and I don’t feel a thing.’
But shock has a purpose: to anaesthetise. You don’t feel your heart splintering or the foundations of your life crumbling beneath you.
When we got home, I walked through the front door and everything was different. I no longer had a mother.
Adoration: Anna says her mother was the funniest, most outrageous, politically incorrect, eccentric woman she's ever known
I am â€" and always will be â€" an unashamed mummy’s girl. I simply adored my mother.
She was the funniest, most outrageous, politically incorrect, eccentric woman I’ve ever known.
She was also unstintingly kind, highly intuitive and unbelievably wise. I asked â€" and valued â€" her opinion on everything.
My father, a scientist, was more distant when I was growing up and our relationship was different.
Since my mother died he has made touching efforts to fill the void she left, and we have grown closer.
Due to her vanity, we never knew my mother’s age. And out of respect for her, I never peeked at her passport.
Part of me thought she would live for ever.
 Despite the huge pain of major losses, most people no longer have major problems dealing with life by 18 months afterwards
Active and glamorous, I assumed she was a decade younger than she was. So her death, aged 81, was the most horrendous shock for me.
For the first three weeks afterwards, I woke up every morning at 3am and sobbed solidly for two hours until 5am.
Andrew was amazing. He held me as I wept. Even then I knew that there is only so much a man can take, so I would get up, sit alone and play the last few hours of my mother’s life incessantly in my head, clinging to my last vision of her alive.
Grief completely derailed me. The worst thing about raw loss is that it is solitary. You can’t share that ghastly moment of waking â€" when you remember after the brief respite of fractured sleep. The constant stinging disbelief. The all-consuming missing.
Shock: Active and glamorous, Anna assumed her mother was a decade younger than she was so her death was the most horrendous shock
Because Andrew and I are so close and discuss everything, I tried to explain to him that I felt homesick all the time.
This was difficult for him to hear, as we were newly married, living in our new home. But the painful truth was that my mother represented home â€" and security â€" for me. I felt cut adrift.
I felt as if my backbone had disintegrated without her standing in the wings, guiding me and loving me in that uniquely reassuring way that only a mother can.
There were times when Andrew was unbelievably patient and supportive. At her funeral, he couldn’t have been stronger or kinder, holding me as I buckled forwards from the pew, sobbing.
But as the months passed, it seemed that, more often, he wasn’t there for me. He appeared shut off, which compounded my sense of isolation and loneliness. My grief meant we stopped writing our book for three months, which highlighted that we were drifting apart â€" previously we had always found writing together bonding.
I felt increasingly disappointed as one of the things I love most about Andrew is that I always feel completely understood by him, often more than I understand myself, and that makes me feel safe. But he seemed incapable of understanding the extent of my grief.
We started to row about how I felt unsupported by him and, in a particularly low blow, I shouted: ‘I wish that you were dead and Mummy was alive.’
I was like a child having a tantrum, in such extreme pain that I would say anything. It was an agonised cry for help and I couldn’t understand why the one person I most craved help from seemed unable to come to my aid. He kept repeating that whatever he did was not enough.
My husband, Andrew Wallas, is an extremely experienced and successful psychotherapist. He has 30 years’ experience dealing with intense emotions.
And yet he told me he simply could not understand me because of the consuming nature of my grief, and that he had never experienced anything like this when his father died, which left me feeling even more isolated.
A moment of clarity came when I shouted at him: ‘If I was your client, you would be there for me.’ And he shot back: ‘But you’re not my client. You are my wife.’
Tough start: Anna and Andrew started to row about how she felt unsupported by him
And there lay the rub. I’d lost my mother. He felt he had lost his wife. And I felt that I’d lost my husband.
After about six months, we were both full of resentment. I was fuming that this compassionate man, with his endless patience and support, was there for anyone in the world, but me. He felt unappreciated and missed the funny, confident and attentive woman he’d married.
We oscillated between blissfully happy and hideous times of rowing when we questioned whether we would stay together. The level of volatility so soon after getting married shocked me. My grief cast an appalling shadow over our union.  Â
It sounds obvious, but it wasn’t until I was sitting with a friend (and feeling gloriously understood) that it finally clicked: no man can ever replace your mother.
That’s what I had been trying to do. I had naively assumed that Andrew would slot ea sily into her role; loving me unconditionally, thinking I was marvellous whatever I did and being on hand for endless support, advice and understanding.
The irony was that in wanting Andrew to fill my mother’s shoes, I lost my husband. While death exacerbates the situation, it is often a tricky triangle to negotiate â€" that of the mother and daughter who are very close and the husband. Where does he fit in? Who do you put first?
While I was undoubtedly guilty of always putting my relationship with my mother before any relationship with a man in the past, this was the first time I had put a man first. I put Andrew before my mother â€" and then she died.
 'I wish you were dead and Mummy was alive,' I screamed at Andrew
Last autumn, I knew I was unable to let my grief go. Always crying and feeling bereft, I was tired of blaming Andrew for being unsupportive and he was weary of blaming me for disappearing emotionally.
I went to Somerset to do The Arrigo Programme, which is residential deep therapy work with a wonderfully skilled psychotherapist called Fiona Arrigo. She told me: ‘Grief is the little moment before letting go.
'It is when you feel your heart and you allow the pain to come. But it does not have to be as desperate as feeling that you can’t live without her.’
She told me exactly what Andrew had been telling me â€" but, of course, I couldn’t hear it from him. My homework there one night was to write a letter to my mother, thanking her for everything she did for me and letting her go.
My mother loved being near water, so I sat by the stream that flanked the cottage I was staying in, wrote to her, then tore the letter into little shreds and threw it like confetti into the swirling stream. My last words were: ‘Goodbye Mummy, who is in Heaven and everywhere on earth.’
I had the strongest sense that she was standing behind me. The next morning, my first waking thought was: ‘Mummy is gone.’ I had finally left the fog of denial and entered the resting place of acceptance. When I left, Fiona smiled: ‘Now you can grieve with dignity, not despair.’
Irreplaceable: It finally clicked for Anna: no man can ever replace your mother
Since then, my grief feels far more manageable and my marriage has flourished. There is so much I miss about my mother every day â€" her laughter, her insight, her elegance â€" but I know that more than anything in the world, she wants me to be happy. She would have been upset that I put my marriage on hold to mourn her.
Being a good wife with a loving husband by my side makes me happy. I think that my mother would be proud of me and how I came through this last horrendous year when her death coincided with the first year of our marriage.
But love is enduring and has enabled me to discover that death is not as final as we think. Unravelling grief is a long, winding process, but we are always connected to those who love us.
Although my grief is ongoing, the foundations of my marriage are stronger than ever.Â
Call Off The Search by Anna and Andrew Wallas is pub lished by Cadogan, priced £16.99. To order your copy for £14.49, call 0844 472 4157 or visit mailbookshop.co.uk
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