Annabel Croft said she doesn’t want to be a ‘professional widow’ as she recalled how her Strictly Come Dancing stint ‘saved her from sinking’ after her husband’s death.  

The former professional tennis player’s husband of 36 years passed away in 2023, aged 60 just eight weeks after he was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer.

She signed up to the BBC dance show shortly after, a move which she admits helped her deal with the grief. 

Speaking in an interview with The Telegraph on Saturday, Annabel explained: ‘Literally within a few weeks [of losing him] I was on the phone to my agent. I don’t know what I would have done without being busy. I would have sunk.

‘I didn’t know I had an incredible marriage, but I did. The grief comes in rain showers but they are getting less and then it’s gone.’

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Annabel Croft said she doesn’t want to be a ‘professional widow’ as she recalled how her Strictly Come Dancing stint ‘saved her from sinking’ after her husband’s death

The former professional tennis player’s husband of 36 years passed away in 2023, aged 60 just eight weeks after he was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer 

Annabel continued: ‘There is so much to be positive about. I don’t want to be a professional widow. I understand that a lot of people can identify with what I’ve been through, but I don’t want grief to define me.’

Annabel recently said she believed Mel would have survived his cancer for longer if they’d been warned sooner that sugar and carbohydrates spread the disease. 

She told how before going in to see a doctor and receiving the bombshell news, she had told worried Mel everything would be fine. 

But after being told he didn’t have much longer to live, Annabel said they were not advised immediately about nutrition – and she fears chocolate and other sugary foods hastened Mel’s demise until he eventually died from sepsis. 

She explained: ‘People don’t realise this. He had stage four cancer. It started with colon cancer, but it could have been across everywhere at the same time. But it spread into the liver, it was spread into the kidneys, even possibly into the brain as well. 

‘But what he actually died of was sepsis and there was a perforation from one of the tumours. 

‘We’d gone on this flight to Portugal thinking he was going to get some sunshine and some respite from all of his treatment.

‘I think maybe on that flight it may have just swollen something and perforated one of the tumours.’ 

She signed up to the BBC dance show shortly after, a move which she admits helped her deal with the grief

Speaking in an interview with The Telegraph on Saturday, Annabel explained: ‘I don’t know what I would have done without being busy. I would have sunk’

Annabel, speaking on The Mid.Point podcast, went on to describe when symptoms began showing. 

She said: ‘We were making the bed one day and he just turned to me and he said ‘I haven’t told you this Annabel, but I’ve got these funny pains in my side and they’re just not going away, they’re getting worse’. 

‘It never dawned on me that it could be something so absolutely catastrophic. 

‘He went off to have some scans done. And then a couple of weeks later the scans came through and clearly the medical profession were absolutely horrified by what they’d seen because they knew that he wouldn’t have much time left. 

‘Outside before we went in, Mel had said to me in the car park ‘I’m really worried about this meeting’, and I said ‘Oh, don’t worry about it – of course it’s going to be fine. You know, maybe you just have a cyst that’s going to have to be removed’. 

‘But the very first thing out of the surgeon’s mouth was ‘I’m afraid your life expectancy’s not very good’. 

‘I didn’t know I had an incredible marriage, but I did. The grief comes in rain showers but they are getting less and then it’s gone,’ she said 

The pair married in 1993 and share three adult children, Charlie, Amber and Lilly (pictured in 1988) 

‘We both were spinning. The surgeon said ‘Well, I’ve drawn the short straw, and I’m the one who’s had to deliver this news’. 

‘Worse than that – I will just say this because I think it’s important to pass on this information from what I’ve learned from the cancer specialist Dr Isabelle Cooper who treated him – I’ve since learned that if you have cancer you absolutely must not put any sugar in your body at all, and that includes carbohydrates. 

‘But when he had just had this news delivered he said to the surgeon ‘If I’m going to have to have lots of operations, what should I eat?’ 

‘And he said ‘Oh, I have no idea about nutrition, I’ve never studied it – if you feel like some chocolate why don’t you have some chocolate’. ‘And of course in hindsight, now knowing what I know about cancer treatment and through a specialist who deals with it and studies it all day long, that any sugar, glucose that goes into the body will divide that cell and spread it. 

‘He went on ketogenic metabolic therapy and that is basically fuelling your body on fat and meat. 

‘On the last scans just before Mel died, it was showing a massive retraction of the cancer cells. 

‘So the work that they were doing was working and it’s just so tragic that he died of sepsis. 

‘The only thing I would say is he died with complete hope as to what he was doing.

‘They’d already told him he had very little time left and that he had to get his papers in order. And that was the very first meeting we had.’