1.35pm on Tuesday, October 2, 2007 will be a moment forever frozen in time for me. At Christmas 2005 I first told church members the story of my wife living with cancer while pregnant.

Three months later we learnt that the breast cancer had returned; incurable, inoperable and terminal. Nineteen months later, my amazing wife, my childhood sweetheart and mum of four under-10s, died in St Catherine's Hospice, aged 37. Sometimes life stinks.

Memories are both special and painful. I was just 13 when Linda (then 16) asked me for a date and so began what was almost 22 unbroken years together.

I asked her to marry me on Christmas Eve 1990; who was to know that after 15 years of normal, happy marriage I would be holding her hand while she fought for every breath as the evil that is cancer took away my soulmate?

I'm just an ordinary guy who happens to be a pastor, no-one special.

But I wasn't always a minister. In a previous life I was a project manager in the oil, gas, petrochem industry, before becoming first operations manager and then purchasing manager for a major government department in London.

The first week after Linda died was the worst week of my life. I didn't know that grief was physically painful – the day after she died I had pins and needles down one side all day, while my guts just screwed up inside of me for days.

I had to put two extra holes in my belt by the end of the first week. I found myself walking into rooms and asking myself why I had gone in there. In Asda, I spent five minutes staring at the shampoo shelf trying to spot the bottle of shampoo we always had.

And the tears. I have never cried so much, or so deeply ever – the whole of my body shook from somewhere inside of me I didn't know existed every day for a week.

One of the most frequent questions I get asked these days is: "How do you cope – and you a minister?"

Quite simply, I don't know how anyone could cope without faith in God.

That's not me being flippant, or religious, or a minister – it's the result of the last 17 years of learning to trust God through tough times and discovering that Christianity is true.

It was an incredible shock when, 10 days before Christmas 2002, we went to hospital with "just a cyst," only to sit in a consultant's room and be told: "You have an aggressive cancer – we can't operate or treat you because you're pregnant. Go home and choose if you want to keep the baby."

We went home stunned – there's no way I could choose between the life of my wife and my child. We turned to God for help. At the end of that week we went back to see the same consultant, having decided we couldn't choose, and asking God not to let us have to.

When we saw the consultant again, she said: "I can operate, and I have a consultant here who has carried out chemotherapy in pregnancy before." We never had to choose.

Linda went into premature labour at 30 weeks, possibly as a side-effect of being on chemo. Sitting in the delivery suite listening to the risks of brain damage etc that could occur with premature births, the registrar turned round and said: "But of course, at the end of the day it's all in God's hands!"

The labour was stopped, and five weeks later, in between two doses of chemo, Timothy was born – absolutely normal and healthy, a real miracle baby!

So by the time Linda's cancer returned last year, we had learnt that although things might not go the way we want, trusting God is not some blind superstitious leap in the dark.

Eighteen months earlier, Linda had been very ill in the Ribblesdale Unit with people dying around her, screaming all night. She looked at me then and said: "I don't want to go out like that." When Linda walked into St Catherine's Hospice, her pain, discomfort and fatigue were debilitating. She looked at me and said: "I've had enough now."

The kids played around her feet while she had her tea in the day room and we said goodbye. By the time I returned the following day, she couldn't even acknowledge them. That broke my heart.

But death came quickly, just four days after entering St Catherine's.

We were on our own, and having been unable to really communicate for three days, Linda looked me in the eyes, mouthed I love you and simply breathed out.

She never once complained throughout her illness, rather just got on with it and was so easy to be around. She faced her death as she had faced all her battle with cancer – with grace, dignity, gentleness and faith.

But for the Christian, death is just the beginning and so I have made a conscious choice to celebrate that for Linda. She no longer has any pain, any cancer but rather, if this God stuff is true, then she is more alive now than she was before.

The kids have been amazing. We had done a lot of work beforehand, with the help of Vine House, to prepare them for mum's death. When it came, I picked them up from school, took them home and told them.

We cried together. Then they simply got on with life. The scary thing is just how quickly kids do that. Sure, they have their moments – we all do, and I've decided that's allowed!

But the questions they ask, the things they say, are both heart-wrenching and very funny. "Does God cook the party food in heaven?...

If there's no floor, mum will fall out!... Dad, when mum was here we couldn't have pets – now she's gone can we get guinea pigs?" And this was just in the first three days after she died.

Many things change when your wife dies. The paperwork that goes with death is huge – all our family benefits stopped the day she died (tax credits, child benefit etc). Wading through all of this, as well as planning family life, is daunting.

Yet in a sad way that only people who have nursed a loved one through a terminal illness can truly know, you learn to function without your loved one before they die. Many of the emotions of grief have to be faced before they die – feelings of rejection, loneliness, fear.

I was already doing most of the washing, cooking, school runs, lunch boxes etc, so in many ways family life for us practically has just carried on. But then, when the kids have gone to bed and I'm sitting on my own in what would have been our time, that's when I feel the pain of separation.

Christianity is not an easy way out, nor does being a minister protect you from life. But what is faith really worth if it's just for when the sun's shining? It is possible to know real peace through the pain, real assurance through the angst, because for the Christian, death is the beginning, something it is possible to be sure of.

A longer version of this article is published in the current edition of Heart, Fulwood Free Methodist Church's magazine.