Smoothing the path forward after tragedy

Meet the Prentice family

John Prentice will never forget the words his 4-year-old daughter, Amelia, greeted him with when he came home from work one day in August 2021. 

“Mummy’s crying in the kitchen, Daddy.” 

His long-term partner, Sue, had just been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia, a form of cancer with some of the lowest survival rates. 

Nearly three years later, John remembers telling himself he had to stay strong so that he could support Sue and Amelia. “Then I went for a shower, where nobody could hear me cry,” he says. 

Sue began chemotherapy a couple of weeks after her diagnosis, the day after Amelia started school for the first time. “Sue and I managed to take her to school together that day,” says John. “So that was really, really good.” 

The treatment was going well – but then, a few days before Christmas Day, Sue collapsed. She was rushed to their local cancer specialist centre and taken to intensive care, where she suffered a bleed on the brain and was put in an induced coma. 

At 6.00pm on Boxing Day, she passed away with John at her side.

“I realised it was like having car insurance,” John says. “You never want to use it – and then someone hits your car.”

Jonathan suggested the couple buy policies that would pay out an income each month until Amelia was 21, should the worst ever happen to them. With Jonathan’s help, John figured out how much Sue would need to meet her expenses as a single parent in the event of his death, and vice versa. “That sum we worked out was the bare minimum, but Jonathan advised me to put some liveable money – money for fun – on top, for everything else,” says John.

He took out policies for both himself and Sue, which cost him less than £500 a year in total. “I knew I could afford it,” he says, “and I figured Sue would have the most important person to me, Amelia, to look after if I wasn’t there, and the same if anything happened the other way around. So I needed to make sure we provided for that situation as best we could and hope we never needed to use either policy. Because you never know.”

The couple also wrote mirror Wills, leaving all their assets to each other, which proved to be very helpful when Sue died. “It made the process of probate a lot more streamlined,” says John. “All the paperwork is complicated enough, even at the best of times.”

Mirror Wills

Mirror Wills are standard Wills made by a couple. As it says on the tin, they reflect each other.

A typical arrangement could be, for example: if you die first, everything will be left to your spouse or partner – or vice versa. Then, when the second person dies, everything will go to your children.

If your family circumstances are straightforward, a mirror Will can help to keep things simple after you die.

It was John who broke the news to Amelia about her mother’s death. She was 4 and a half. “I told her in the kitchen of my brother’s house and...” He breaks off. “I’ve learned that life can be cruel sometimes,” he says.

“It’s difficult enough for me to comprehend not having Sue anymore, but for Amelia, it’s really hard.” So he tries to be there for her. “We talk. I’ll say to her: ‘I miss Mummy too. I know you wish she was still here. I know you miss her.’”

The life insurance policy paid out within two months of Sue’s death, enabling John – who had, by that time, paid off his mortgage – to reduce his working hours to two days a week, as a health and safety manager for a packaging business.

“Jonathan’s advice on life insurance was the best advice I’ve ever had,” says John. “If I hadn’t had the insurance policy, I probably would have had to go back to work five days a week, and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to make time for Amelia.”

His reason for feeling this way is simple: “She doesn’t have her mummy.”