I’d down 10 bottles of wine after my husband vanished at sea

ROSIE Moss looked like every other middle class mum pushing her baby daughter along in her pram, ready to collect her older children from school.

But the 42-year-old was hiding a secret – in the base of her buggy, purposely covered by her 10-month-old’s muslins and toys, were three empty wine bottles.

She’d stashed them there to dispose of in the school recycling bins because she didn’t want her local bin men – or neighbours – to see them piled up outside her house in Faversham, Kent.

Rosie’s already rocky relationship with drink had nosedived after her husband, Ben, 42, vanished off the Dover coast in 2018 while hunting a shipwreck.

“I’d always loved booze,” she confesses. “I was a party girl and Ben would express concern about it.

“I would go out after work and get so drunk I would regularly pass out on the train and end up at the last stop, so someone would have to come and get me.

“The night I first took a pregnancy test I wrongly thought it was negative and was so disappointed I went on a massive bender drinking margaritas. The next day I realised there were actually two lines: I was pregnant.”

But it was the traumatic ordeal of telling her three children, Monty, now 13, Hector, now 11, and Tabby, now eight, that “Daddy’s gone” which led to Rosie going from “party girl” to “alcoholic”.

Rosie and Ben had been together since 2005 after meeting when she was at university in London and he worked at a flooring company. Despite them both being in relationships, it was “love at first sight.”

The couple married in 2008 and life was “chaotic but perfect”. However, in one instant on March 12, 2018, it all came crashing down.

Podcaster Rosie explains: “Ben planned to go on a scuba diving trip. It was one of his passions. He left that morning and I still remember our last words. I said, ‘Be safe’ and he responded, ‘I love you’.”

She didn’t hear from him again. At 7.30pm that evening two police officers knocked on her door and said to her: “Are you Rosie Moss? Ben Moss is missing.”

Six hours earlier, while seasick, he’d gone into the water off Dover and not come up.

Bubbles had been seen before he disappeared, leading Rosie to believe he had been sick in his diving equipment, instinctively pulled it off and subsequently been dragged to the seabed by the weight of his drysuit.

Rosie says: “Telling the children, ‘Daddy isn’t coming home’ was horrific. Monty’s screams still echo in my ears. They were gut-wrenching.”

While Rosie held it together for their sakes, even holding a memorial for him in May 2018, she started drinking more. She says: “First, I had one glass at night. Then two. Soon I was drinking three glasses.”

By the end of 2018 she would drink two bottles of red wine every night – buying them surreptitiously from various off-licences and petrol stations.

“I knew what I was doing was wrong,” she says. “I would forget things. My parents were staying with me and it got to the point I couldn’t even remember if I had put the children to bed the night before. Everything was an alcoholic haze.

“I was so overwhelmed by grief. Kindly people would leave me gifts on my doorstep, including alcohol, and I would grab the bottles and stash them upstairs.

“I wanted anything to take away the pain. My entire life, my future, had been wiped out in an instant. I was slurring my words and people realised, they wanted to help, but I wouldn’t listen.”

Rosie’s grief was compounded because she needed to legally declare Ben dead via a Presumption of Death certificate, which she got via the High Court in February 2019.

These are only issued if someone has been missing for seven years or vanished in a situation such as a natural disaster or like Ben’s – where all the evidence suggests they are dead, but there is no body. It enables people to settle financial affairs and manage assets.

“It was so hard,” admits Rosie. “I felt like I was giving up on him but I needed to do it from a practical point of view or the children and I would have been homeless. I couldn’t access his life insurance and his bank accounts were locked.

I was defeated, unwell, exhausted and suddenly felt so very, very, aware I was an alcoholic in denial

Rosie Moss

“In the day I would go through the emotions but at night when I was alone with my thoughts I couldn’t bear it so I would drink. I probably drank around 10 bottles of wine a week.”

In January 2022 she held her 40th birthday party – a year late because her actual 40th was in lockdown.

Taking place at The Dorchester Hotel in London it was a fancy affair with five-star food and free-flowing champagne.

But Rosie can’t remember a thing about it.

“I woke up at the hotel still in my gorgeous dress and shoes,” she says. “I hadn’t eaten any of the food.

“I was defeated, unwell, exhausted and suddenly felt so very, very, aware I was an alcoholic in denial. I was walking and talking but I had forgotten what sober was.”

That day Rosie took a train home, feeling awful. It was her rock bottom.

She says: “I’d become everything I hated: a caricature of a woman who was always drunk. While my children were well looked after, I was never without a drink.”

She took a photograph of herself on the train, bloated and exhausted, and vowed to sober up.

“Gradually, using Facebook support groups, yoga and sheer will I stopped drinking,” she says. “Soon one day had passed, then 10, then a month.”

Now it’s been four years since she touched alcohol.

“I look better, feel better and am more present as a parent,” she says. “I was always a drinker but Ben’s death amplified it.

“We miss him everyday but I know he’d be so, so proud of me for how far I’ve come – his party girl who sobered up.”