Lili Myers, the wife of the late Hairy Bikers star Dave Myers, has opened up about his cancer diagnosis and the final months of his life for the first time.
Myers, who was one part of the Hairy Bikers duo with Si King, died of cancer aged 66 last year after first being diagnosed in 2022.
Together, Myers and King made countless BBC shows together that merged their shared love of cooking and motorbikes.
Myers met Lili in Romania in 2005, when the Hairy Bikers were in the country to film their debut series, The Hairy Bikers’ Cookbook.
In an excerpt from her new book, Dave and Me, published in the Daily Mail, Lili writes about the last months of Myers’ life in 2024.
“We’d hold hands and cry, sometimes unable to move or talk, just despairing at the unfairness of it all,” she recalls. “I knew so well the depth of Dave’s pain: the desperation, the helplessness, the anger.”
Of her continuing grief, she writes: “Every time I feel the pain ease a little and my balance doesn’t seem quite so off-kilter, something comes out of nowhere to obliterate the stillness.
“A smell, a picture, something he touched, a song he loved, a feather landing at my feet. I guess I need to give it time. A lot of time. An eternity, maybe.”
Writing about the moment doctors told the couple that Myers had cancer, she says: “We didn’t eat and barely slept, both disorientated and drifting like ships without a compass.
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“After a couple of days we called Si, Dave’s beloved fellow Hairy Biker, to tell him the awful news.
“And we told Dave’s oldest friend from his hometown of Barrow-in-Furness, Dr Dave. Those were very hard, distressing conversations to have.”
She also recalls how “difficult” Dave found it to love himself when undergoing chemotherapy.
“As his treatment went on, Dave told me how difficult he found it to love himself when he looked in the mirror,” she writes.
“He felt reduced to being only a cancer patient, stripped of his image, identity and personality, and with a face he didn’t recognise.”
Dave and Me by Lili Myers will be published by Ebury Spotlight on 19 June.
