September 28, 2013, was to be the happiest day of Annette McIntosh’s life – the day she would marry her Irish sweetheart Marcus Magill.
The broad plans had been set in motion soon after he proposed in December, 2010. Annette chose an autumn wedding as she loves the colours of the season, and the pair had selected the best man and bridesmaids. The reception was to take place in Lonach hall, in the village of Strathdon where Annette was raised and the couple had already made plans to raise their own family.
However, all of this was not to be. Their future together crumpled when Marcus died unexpectedly of a heart attack nearly two years ago. He was just 38 years old.
Instead, their wedding date became a day for family and friends to honour Marcus’s memory and a chance for Annette to say a proper farewell to the man she loved.
“I had been planning an event since three or four months after he died, as I knew I didn’t want to be alone on that day,” said Annette, 27, about the charity masquerade ball which was held at Lonach Hall three weeks ago.
“In the beginning I was going to do a speech but, as the day got closer, I decided it would be too much. I wouldn’t have been able get past the first line, and so my mum and sister said a few things. We didn’t make it too much about Marcus because we didn’t want everyone to get upset, and I didn’t want to be sitting crying all night.”
Annette and I were speaking over a cup of tea in her home in Mill of Newe, just on the periphery of Strathdon. It was the cottage which she and Marcus had rented and was to be their first home together.
As the wild autumn weather howled outside, Annette took me through their lives together, from the moment they were introduced by mutual friends, Amanda and Lee McKnight, four years ago, to how they negotiated their long-distance relationship.
A joiner for an Irish firm, Marcus was primarily outsourced to London where he lived for 10 years, whereas Annette, who is an administrative assistant for the Lecht Ski Centre, remained up north.
“Marcus was always full of life, funny and happy, though a bit emotional because we were so far apart, but always looking forward to the future,” said Annette.
And despite the distance between them, it worked well. She and Marcus would use their weekends and holidays to be with each other: he flying up to Aberdeenshire, and she regularly visiting him in London – firstly in Canary Wharf, and latterly to his flat in the converted old Arsenal stadium.
They also visited his home village of Rathfriland in Northern Ireland, where she formed a close bond with his family and friends, just as he had with hers.
But it was Strathdon where Annette and Marcus were to set up home together.
“He loved it up here. It reminded him of his own home, where everybody knows everybody, and it’s quiet. He was a bit like me. We didn’t do cities really, even though we had both done them as a means of work. We wanted to have a proper home and raise a family, and out here was where we wanted to do it,” she explained.
THE PROPOSAL
When the proposal of marriage came on December 22, 2010, it was largely out of the blue, even though Marcus had already asked to get Annette’s finger measured. “For future reference”, he had maintained with an air of mystery, she recalls.
“He did it with a Haribo ring,” Annette said of his proposal, a faint grin spreading across her face.
“He kept on putting them on my finger but I kept eating them. But then he handed me a box and asked, ‘will you have this one then?’ I just sat there for 10 minutes with it unopened in case I had got the signs wrong.
“So then he opened the box and asked the question. I said yes straight away, once I got over the shock.”
Annette’s elation, however, was tempered somewhat by the fact that only a few months earlier, one of her best friends, Mandy Mathieson, had died of a heart attack. The story ended up hitting the national news as the ambulance technician had chosen not to respond to Mandy’s 999 call. As such, Annette was continuously faced with the loss of her friend as the story and inquiry rolled on.
And in a tragically ironic twist, exactly one year after she was proposed to, Annette would also lose Marcus to a heart attack.
On December 22, 2011, she drove to Aberdeen airport to collect Marcus off his flight.
“He was coming up for Christmas and we were going to go to my mum and dad’s. He phoned me the night before and said he