May 21, 2024 • 54 mins
Imagine yourself married to the person you love when they’re diagnosed with terminal cancer. You’ve been their carer and support during such an emotionally difficult time. But, then you find out that they have been cheating on you since your wedding day.
Do you continue to care for them?
Today’s guest didn’t have to imagine this scenario. She lived it.
Kerstin Pilz grew up in Germany and was working as an academic at Macquarie University here in Australia. She was married to her job when Gianni, a charming Italian, turned her life into a champagne-coloured fairy tale.
Soon after their runaway wedding, her new husband was diagnosed with cancer. Kerstin became his dedicated carer. But when she discovered that he had been cheating on her throughout their relationship, she was faced with a difficult choice: walk away, or continue to care for the man who betrayed her.
In this chat we speak about:
- Being faced with this emotionally charged conundrum
- The complexities of loving a narcissist
- Whether it’s better to find out about infidelity or not
- How to heal after cheating
- Whether infidelity poisons your memories and if they were ‘real’ moments
- Forgiveness being radical self care
- Kerstin’s choice to not have children and whether she regrets that
Kerstin has written a book titled Loving My Lying, Dying, Cheating Husband and you can get a copy of it here
Kerstin’s instagram is here
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Life on Cut acknowledges the traditional custodians of country whose
lands were never seated. We pay our respects to their
elders past and present.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Always was, always will be Aboriginal Land. This episode was
recorded on Gadigal Land.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
Hi guys, and welcome back to another episode of Life
on Cut. I'm Laura, I'm Brittany.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Now I have a question for you, and this I
think will have a few of you having some conflicting
answers to this. Imagine meeting the love of your life,
the man who you have been waiting for your whole
life to come along and sweep you off your feet.
We don't wait for men, remember no, we don't. But
like you know, you don't pin yourself up to it.
You're ready for it, and he really does. You just
(00:47):
think that there is no one more incredible than this man.
You have a well wind romance, you get engaged, you
get married, and then very shortly afterwards, you find out
that your husband has terminal cancer.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
You become his carer.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
You pour your love and your adoration into this man,
only to find out whilst they are terminal and suffering
with that diagnosis, that they've also been cheating on you
throughout your entire relationship.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
I genuinely couldn't imagine being in this situation. It's one thing,
and I feel like most people sitting at home right
now have been in this situation.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
It's one thing to be cheated on, right.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
And to feel that ultimate betrayal, to have to work
through that trust because some people do work through it,
some people absolutely don't. But then to add the layer
of do I have to then look after this person
and care for them until they die because there might
not be anyone else to look after them?
Speaker 4 (01:38):
Like?
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Do I put that betrayal to the side? I cannot
fathom that question.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Yeah, I mean this is the big one, right, Like,
what would you do if this was your situation? And
it's not even just put it to the side because
they don't have anyone to care for them. This is
would you willingly still be that person's palliative care? Would
you still willingly take care of that person until their
end of life knowing that they have betrayed you throughout
your entire relationship? And the reason why I asked this
(02:02):
question is because this is exactly the situation that Kirsten
Pills found herself in. She's written an incredible book. It
is called Loving My Lying, dying, Cheating Husband.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Really drove that home in the title, didn't she.
Speaker 4 (02:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
I mean, there's definitely there's no ambiguity in this one.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
But Kirsten talks about the reasons why she made the
decisions to stay, the reasons why she made the decisions
to forgive, and this conversation so deeply centers around the
idea of forgiveness, but not just forgiveness for her ex husband,
but also for her own healing journey as well.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Yeah, and it's also about the complex relationship surrounding cheating.
We've often spoken about the fact that it's not straightforward
and there's not one black and white answer. We also
delve into the fact that she loved a narcissist. And
one thing that I found so surprising that we do
get into at the end is not only how she
handled the entire situation, but how she handled the end
when he passed away. And I won't get too much
(02:54):
into that, but for me, there were some really incredible
pivotal moments that I don't know if I would have
done the same thing.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah, And I think that that's what a lot of
people are going to be left when they leave. This
conversation today is going to be wondering what would you
do if you found yourself in this situation? Let's get
into the chat with Kirsten. I came across Kirsten via
social media and when I saw the title of her book,
Loving My Lying, dying, Cheating Husband, I was so intrigued
(03:19):
by what this entails. And I think your story is
one that it will pull on so many people's heart strings.
But like I said, it will really make your question
what would you do in this situation? Kirsten, Welcome to
the podcast.
Speaker 4 (03:31):
Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
It's our absolute pleasure and I cannot wait to dive
into this conversation. But before we do, everybody that comes
on the podcast gives us their accident, unfiltered, their embarrassing story,
and I know the conversation is about to get pretty heavy,
but before we get into that, please embarrass yourself oh
and humbling.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
Yeah, exactly. So when you told me to prepare embarrassing
the story, I thought there's so many but I couldn't
think of what because I'm a walking embarrass very often.
But I did. I don't believe it, but I did
think about the time that I volunteered to give up
TED talk, and it was the pandemic and I was
stranded in Australia. I was living in Vietnam at the time,
and my wardrobe was very reduced. So what to wear?
(04:15):
So I found a dress in the op shop and
I spent the entire month rehearsing my talk, not really
thinking about the dress. I had it dry cleaned because
I looked in every shop, so in the end it
came from the op shop, and so I went to
the venue put it on, and I realized I hadn't
really checked whether the brass straps would be showing or not.
This is like half an hour before going on stage.
(04:36):
I finally checked and it looked like an op shop
dress with brass straps showing. So I thought, what do
you do? You know, I'm a woman of a certain age,
so I can't really go on there looking like this.
So I thought, okay, I went backstage. I went to
the room where the workers have the props, and I
found a roll of duct tape and took the braw
(04:57):
and I taped my nipples down.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
You've all been there, I reckon, I've been.
Speaker 4 (05:01):
So that I was thinking in this context is probably
not really embarrassing, but for me it was highly embarrassing
because then I had to go into the room and
the guy had to mic me up, and I was like, ah, well,
I can't really open my dress because I'm not wearing
a bra, but I couldn't tell him either, so I
sort of.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
He's like trying to find somebody to clip a microphone onto,
and you can, like, you can stick it in my
duct tape.
Speaker 4 (05:20):
I said, I'm very private, I'll do it myself.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
So can I say if you put the roll duct
tape or you put duct tape, if you put the
wrong tape on your nipples, you will know about it
because they've they've got special nipple tape, right, But if
you're putting it down with some like hardcore hardware, when
you've ripped that off, you know about.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Duct tape can rip paint off the walls alone. What
it can do to you when you try and take
that stuff off.
Speaker 4 (05:40):
Well, that was the next part of the embarrassment, because
I was so hyped up after the talk because it
was a TED talk, so it was like one of
this once in a lifetime opportunities I forget to take
it off. So the next morning, the pain and the embarrassment.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
What have I done?
Speaker 4 (05:53):
I had forgotten Casin.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
I would love to know before we get into your story,
who you were before you met your husband. How does
a German who is an expert in Italian end up
in Australia.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
Yeah, well, good question. I grew up in Germany in
the seventies. It was a very grim place. It was
post war. It was very cold. I mean it's still cold.
And I just had this feeling I was born in
the wrong country. So I had this strong calling. As
soon as I finished school, I needed to get out
of there. And for some reason I was brave enough
to just book a typic on my own. This is
(06:26):
before we had phones, you know, mobile phones, early eighties.
To Jakarta, of all places, and I ended up there
by myself. I spent a year in Bali in eighty seven.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
Wow, what a different place then.
Speaker 4 (06:38):
I don't think there was any yoga in or what
then I can't remember. And then I thought, Okay, Australia
is the next destination. So yeah, and so then I
came to Sydney and I saw the blue sky and
that was it. I needed to live in Australia.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
In your description about yourself, and it was one of
the things that I thought, it really jumped out of me.
And it's kind of a sidestep from what we're going
to be talking about. But you described yoursel as childless
by choice. Yeah, what does that mean to you? And
I guess like of a time and of an age
when there was almost the expectation that women just have children.
When you say it was your choice, was it something
that you always knew that you were like, kids are
(07:13):
not for me.
Speaker 4 (07:14):
I think it was my mother who put that idea
into my head very early on, because she, I think,
got frustrated that she got stuck in a marriage at
you know, twenty three. I mean it was a different
generation when, and that meant she had to then look
after these unmanageable kids.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Who just ran off and left her once they reached
a certain age exactly.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
But it was also once I lived in Australia, I realized,
you know, I was doing all of this on my own.
So I was putting myself through university on my own
because I'd sort of basically run away from home. I thought,
if I have kids, then everything's going to cost me
double as in going back to Germany, because in those
days it was air travel, you know, it wasn't so common,
you know, to just jump on a plane. And also
(07:55):
I think my mother's experience, she said, oh, you know, marriages,
I don't know they're trapped. I don't get trapped. And
I just thought, I haven't yet found the right man,
and I want to be that I can imagine being
with until this human being I put into the world
will be twenty or ready to be on their own. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Can I ask you very personal, but do you now,
in hindsight, have any regrets about not having children or
do you still feel wholeheartedly that you made the right decision.
Speaker 4 (08:24):
Yeah. Interesting. I have quite a lot of younger friends
who are still in their sort of thirties who asked me,
you know, should I have a kid? Maybe not, because.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
Yeah, I'm asking for me basically.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
Yeah, so my good friends, I do boot camp with them,
we go on you know, these bike rides and so on,
and I say, no, don't have kids. Just enjoy your
life that way you can. You know, you can enjoy it.
You can do whatever you want. You're not beholden. But
now that I'm at this point in my life. I
do miss the company of adult children. I have my
nephew and niece. They were very intelligent, lovely human beings,
(08:56):
and if I had kids of my own, I think
I would enjoy being around them.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
That's the thing that's so hard is because like kids
don't say kids forever, but it's a very big part
of the parenting experience.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
As having little children.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Well, it's like saying, yeah, I want to have kids
and get through the first twenty five years so that
I could have a couple of years as adults.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
It doesn't really make sense. It's like just get a friend,
you know, you're an adult friend totally.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
But I mean it's really important, and I think it's
really interesting because we've definitely had big conversations on this
podcast about being childless by choice, but it's always been
from people who have been within this age group, so
they're currently going through that process in that period of
like when all their friends have little kids. But it's
so interesting to hear about what's that like when all
of your friends and their little kids are our adults
(09:40):
and you can have a conversation with them and you
can have a relationship which goes beyond just wiping asses
and getting screened at all night exactly.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
But you know, I was lucky enough.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
I did take my niece traveling, and so I had
this girl, you know I've had I had it and
she came out from Germany and lived with me for
five months and went to school in Australia. So I
did have it. But I have to say I do
like little kids. I love them. And so I have
lots of friends who are in their thirties who needs
surrogate Grandma's.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
And You're like, yeah, I'm here, and then I'll hand
them back. When I need to hand them back.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
I'm gonna say you love them because you can hand
them exactly. So what was your life like you had
moved here and how old were you when you met
your husband Gianni.
Speaker 4 (10:20):
Yeah, so I moved here in my twenties and then
I had a career and I lived here and lots
of things, and then we met when I was forty
three and I had actually just gone through early menopause.
I was at work and suddenly I had this cruciating
pain in my abdomen and I went to the doctor
(10:40):
and she said, we need to take you over tomorrow
otherwise you'll love the comblem. Yeah, I had assist. I mean,
it happens, it's quite common. And then she said, you
have to now be prepared to enter meno. Pause. I'm like, wow,
I'm barely forty two. Maybe I was forty three, and
I was in denial. And then it throws you into
this depression because it was just came totally expected, and
(11:00):
also it meant I had to be at home. I
was living on my own and I was single. I
had just moved to Sydney. I was enjoying my single life.
I kept saying, I'm in love with the city, not
a man. I don't need a man. I'm love with
the city. Love that. But you know, Sydney is a
hard city sometimes in that it's very large, so you
can get quite lonely when you're a workaholic, and then
(11:21):
you come home and your friends live on the other
side of the city and you know it takes hours
to catch up. So yeah, then that loneliness suddenly came
and I thought, hang on a minute, I think I
got everything the wrong way. I've forgot to have children.
I forgot to have a family, even though it was
never really in my plan what life should have been
like at that moment, I thought, I have given everything
(11:44):
this career and where is it now bringing me chicken
soup while I'm on the couch.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
You know, Yeah, this is why you need that adult.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Kid exactly in that did you have a moment afterwards
where you decided to actively date or was meeting Johnny
a moment of like Sarah indipity almost.
Speaker 4 (12:01):
Yeah, I didn't go on to I guess it was
r swoop in at the Yeah, but only as a lurker,
Like I didn't actually upload my profocus. What about if
my students see me and it's like as if they
would have checked out?
Speaker 2 (12:12):
But no, that was a time when like online dating
was still a bit taboo and people kind of poop
poo died a little bit, and so it was kind
of hard to go online dating.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
Poo pootera you can tell who has a little child?
Speaker 4 (12:23):
Yeah, yeah, yes, But really, coming back to your question,
it was certain dipity. I was actually giving a talk
in front of an audience, and afterwards there was this.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Man who was exciting and different talk to me about chemistry,
because I think sometimes chemistry, we have spoken about it
so much. Chemistry can make you feel as though you've
met your soulmate, that you and this person against the world.
What was the chemistry that you experienced when you met Johnny?
Speaker 4 (12:50):
Yeah, I think it was instant, as in he had
these green eyes, which for an Italian is unusual, and
they were really sparkling, and they were sparkling with mischief.
And I still remember we were at the buffet after
I had given this talk, in this lovely venue with
a you know, view of the harbor, so everything was
like very glamorous in the sense it was a typical
sort of Sydney moment. And he poured me a glass
(13:13):
of wine from the bottle of the buffet. But the
way he looked at me, it was like as if
he had stolen it, like a little boy.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
He had this.
Speaker 4 (13:19):
Boyishness about him, and yet he was actually thirteen years
older than me. But that boyish energy also meant he
was full of excitement and he wanted adventure, as in
we both shared a love for travel. And he told
me he had just come off a bike ride all
around Australia on a yellow Harley Davidson. I was like, oh, okay,
you're different.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
You're a bad boy.
Speaker 4 (13:40):
You're a bad boy, and I love riding motorbikes too.
I'd never written a Hali Davidson, but you know, I
grew up on bikes, something smaller bikes. But I still
I thought, oh, yeah, I'd do that with you, no worries.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
I thought you gonna say I would do that like him.
Yeah I did that. That's the same thing, the same thought. Yeah,
So how long did you date for him? Was this
a well win romance?
Speaker 4 (14:00):
Like?
Speaker 3 (14:00):
What was the initial dating period like with him?
Speaker 4 (14:03):
Yeah, it was a whirlwind. I guess I was ready
for a whirlwind because I felt like, okay, you know
that sort of experience of that early it was perimenopause,
could say, but I wasn't expecting it because it was early.
My doctor said it's ten years too early. Had sort
of made me feel like, what's happening here? Am I old?
This is it? And then suddenly I was feeling completely
(14:24):
seen and heard. And he was the kind of person
who showered me in compliments, in attention and in gifts,
and he also did all those things, you know, taking
me to beautiful dinners, to I don't know, the opera house,
all of those things, and it just made me feel
like magic, like i'd suddenly swapped this role from sitting
(14:44):
on the couch, you know, moping, and then suddenly I
am the lead in an Italian rom com.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
This is the pot of gold at the end of
the rainbow burst.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
You hear that actually so often, and we've talked about
doing a hire episode around it. But women in their
forties and fifties where they feel like they're being replaced
by the younger generation and they don't feel seen anymore
or heard, or desired or wanted, and all of a sudden,
this man swoops in. Who and I'm jumping ahead here.
Who sounds from the characteristics a bit like a narcissist
(15:14):
love bombing. Are going to give them everything they want,
going to make them feel like they're the only person
in the world. And we find out soon that you weren't,
unfortunately the only person. Can you say, now, in hindsight,
do you think.
Speaker 5 (15:25):
He was a narcissist?
Speaker 4 (15:26):
Yes, definitely.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
I mean I was trying to ease into that. Oh yeah, well,
I think.
Speaker 4 (15:32):
I could write a PhD about narcissism by not because
I have researched it thoroughly, I wasn't really aware of
the narcissistic personality profile at that time, and I just
couldn't see it. I just thought, I mean, yes, I thought, well,
he's a bit over the top, but you know, he
was Italian. He was meant to be melodramatic. It sort
of came with the territory, you know, that was part
(15:52):
of his persona. So I did not see it for
a long time. Obviously, now I know what love bombing is.
Back then, I didn't know. I just thought, wow, you know,
he feels like he's found you know, for both of us.
We were saying, oh, this is a second chance, you know,
in love, and we're both older second time around.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
You know.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
I think that this conversation, though, like your story is
so different to anything that we've spoken about. When we've
spoken about narcissism or narcissistic personality disorder or anyone who
has like traits within the scale of it, the response
is always to leave like that it's not possible to
have a relationship with someone who's a narcissist. That you
need to create as much distance as possible. But the
(16:31):
very real reality is is that there are people who
fall in love with narcissists and then spend their life
trying to make that work. Or discovering things about them
that don't necessarily meet up to the person that you
think that they were or that they are. You were
together for was it only two years?
Speaker 4 (16:49):
All up? I think it was four or five?
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Two years of being married, was it? And then he
received a diagnosis?
Speaker 1 (16:55):
Yes, yes, that's right, yes, yeah, Well so how did
we get to engagement in the wedding?
Speaker 5 (17:01):
So how many years were you together before that happened?
Speaker 4 (17:04):
Everything happened very quickly in the sense I think in
hindsight he probably talked about marriage from the minute we met,
but only in that exuberance, Oh my god, you know
you're the woman I marry you. I'm going to marry you.
You know you're the person I want to spend the
rest of what's left of my life with. Now I
got off at the dream job. I was an academic
(17:24):
at a university in Sydney, and we had entered a
study abroad program with seven other universities aboard a floating
university camp as a cruise ship. In other words, it
was actually an American study broad program. And I was
the Macquarie University representative. And I said to them, can
I bring my partner? And I said of course do.
So he came along, and so we had these four
(17:47):
months about this ship traveling around the world teaching. Wow,
just two weeks into the voyage, we were in Thailand
when he dislocated his shoulder aboard the ship. We had
to then have, you know, see the doctor in Bangkok
go to the hospital. So then he was in a
pretty bad shape from the morphin. It was very, very painful.
(18:08):
So we just took a room after the hospital and said, right,
well stay here for two nights, three nights, and then
go back to the hospital. And I had a friend
with me from the ship, and she said, well, while
he's dozing conked out on painkillers, let's go, you know,
and check out the tailors downstairs. And so there's all
these tailor shops that make you bespoke anything you want,
(18:31):
and these particular ones were specialized in wedding dresses, and
so they hit my friend, who was a forty five
year old single American up with these wedding stressfolders. She said, no,
not me, definitely not me, but maybe her. Anyway, we
found this incredible piece of fabric which incorporated all of
Johnny's favorite colors. He loved colors, especially sort of yellow orange, bright,
(18:53):
you know, pink, and we just took a fabric sample
back to the room and by then the painkillers had
worn off. Was still in pain, but the smile was
back on his face. He saw the phoebik, he said,
that's fabric for a wedding day. Let's just do it.
Let's just get married on the ship. And because he
was in this state, it sort of felt like, Okay,
it's a moment of celebration, and you know, why not.
(19:14):
And we knew we had a sea passage coming up
of two weeks at sea, and my students were getting
very antsy doing you know, cabin fever. So we all
decided it's a great party. Let's just have a great party.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
So that married with the students on the sea. Yes, shoulder, Yes.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
I can only imagine after this, after getting married, spending
this time overseas, and you know, even the relationship itself
being in a four year mark, like you're still in
this there's still this like bubble of just love and adoration.
And then you found out that Johnny was actually quite sick.
What happened there? When did you get that diagnosis? And
(19:52):
I guess like when you did find out that he
was very unwell. Was it something that they they were
trying to treat it first, or was it a termin
diagnosi this straight away?
Speaker 4 (20:01):
Yeah, no, it wasn't terminal straight away. So we actually
had signed up to go on that ship for another voyage.
So the idea was, we'll just keep, you know, traveling
around the world on this ship forever until I retire
or whatever. But then it was the global financial crisis
and the first thing that the Royal Caribbean Company took
off their schedule was, of course our not profit making
(20:24):
a study abroad program, and so that was very sad.
But I had a year of long service leave up
my sleeve. So immediately he said, right, we'll just keep
traveling anyway, Let's just hatch another plan. So we spent
many many weekends coming up with this amazing plan and
we booked everything down. I mean, I'm not normally like this,
but somehow we got into it, and we booked this
(20:45):
trip around the world. You know. It included I don't know,
two months in Buenos Aires studying Spanish and all sorts
of incredible stuff. The night before we were meant to
go to the next destination, so a week before this
incredible trip was starting. He found a pea sized lump
behind his right ear and he said, I think I
may have a problem. I said what, because he was
(21:07):
a bit of a hypochondriac, so I didn't actually take
it seriously. I had once had a little enlarged lymph
node in the Doctorum, yeah, don't worry about it.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
It's nothing.
Speaker 4 (21:16):
It's nothing. So we were then in cans, far away
from Sydney, far away from our stuff which we had
sort of put in storage, and there was no diagnosis,
and so that took a while before we got the
diagnosis and it was okay, you basically have to go
back to Sydney and have this looked at by a specialist.
We can't do it up here. And then by the
(21:37):
time we got the diagnosis, it was the cancer has
spread to the lungs and to the lymph nodes. It
wasn't yet declared terminal, was stage three. I mean, I
didn't know anything about the staging of cancer. He was
a trained medical doctor and he knew that this is
really serious.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
I can only imagine when you are in a loving
relationship and you married, the diagnosis of cancer is something
that it would bind you together in terms of like
wanting to support each other, but the diagnosis in itself
would be so much for the two of you to
work through, and the treatments and everything else that goes
with it. But the thing that makes your story so
(22:16):
interesting is what you discovered whilst your partner was so unwell.
And I mean I would love to get into how
that came about, but basically, at this point in time,
you discovered that your partner, who you're committed to, who
you're working through this cancer diagnosis, was also having affairs
outside of the relationship.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
How did you discover that?
Speaker 4 (22:35):
Yeah, So that was I think a year after this
operation to the lunk. So he did actually recover, got
his strength back, and you know, you never know. You
can't see the cancer, so you don't know. A year
later we were actually going on he had sort of
this idea because you've been you know, you had to
put your hold on life because of me. We had
(22:56):
to cancel all these travel plans because of me. Let
me take you to this beautiful eco lodge, you know,
north of cans and we'll have a lovely weekend. As
we were driving there, we stopped in the shopping center
just to run a few errands, and suddenly he dropped
the newspaper, and I thought, that's odd, and I could
see suddenly there was no strength in his hands, and
(23:17):
suddenly he could even no longer walk. His gait was funny.
But even a few days earlier, already I had noticed
that his voice started sounding like he'd swallowed a helium balloon.
And I thought, that's really odd. And food got stuck
in the corner of his mouth, but of course I
tried to ignore it, thinking I was just tired. Yeah,
And then he said he was a trained doctor. He said,
we need to go immediately to the emergency department. This
(23:39):
is an emergency. He said. Look, before we go in there,
we need to download the medical files so that we
can show them that I actually have this history of cancer,
so that they will take us seriously. But he couldn't
at that point, he couldn't really operate his own inbox,
and of course all his passwords had always been off limits,
(23:59):
which in hindsight of course red flag. In that moment,
he had not choice but to give me his passwords
so that I could download them for him, And as
I did, I noticed a strange subject line on my
way out of that inbox, and I thought, that's very odd.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
What was it was?
Speaker 4 (24:17):
What a beautiful woman? But it wasn't from me or
to me, and I thought, it's about some other beautiful woman.
Then also when he was in the hospital, it emerged
this was actually the cancer had spread to the brain.
It was now a stage four and he needed immediate
urgent brain surgery. So of course there was all this
you know, drama, as in, they didn't provide an ambulance
(24:39):
to drive all the way from Cans to the next
hospital where he could be operated, which was five hundred
kilometers further south. It was raining, tropical wet season, so
I became the untrained ambulance driver because there was no transfer,
and it was all highly dramatic and extremely stressful, I mean,
of course for both of us really. So when we
(24:59):
got there, to child's will, we had to take I
had to just take a hotel room. And I noticed
the night before the operation there were a lot of
women on his Facebook page appeared wishing him well, and
there was a lot of sort of traffic going on
by people I had never heard of, and I thought,
hang on, what's going on here? And that was the
password he wouldn't share with me. He shared that with
(25:21):
his brother and he said, look, I'll put my brother
in charge of the Facebook. And I thought, I'm in
charge of everything here.
Speaker 3 (25:27):
Were at that point you were like, there's something or.
Speaker 4 (25:29):
Something behind it. Yes, I'm your wife, and not only
you know have I been driving you in as an
ambulance driver. I have been cooking for you. I've been
doing everything for you. So it felt like I was
being left out. And that's when I realized there's something
that's not right anyway. I waited for three weeks because
I thought, who am I to do this while he
is in this very vulnerable state?
Speaker 2 (25:50):
And also there's two massive things that are going on
at this point in time. There's your partner. When you've
been given a stage four diagnosis, you know that this
is terminal now, and so you're like, okay, well, on
the scale of severity, is infidelity worth me having a
conversation with right now when right now we're fighting to
try and maintain as much longevity in life. It must
have been such a challenging thing to go, well, when's
(26:12):
the right time to bring up a conversation in that But.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
The curiosity of just trying to find out exactly what
was in that email, how many emails there were? When
was the time that you thought I've had enough, I'm
going to go investigate this more and log back into
the emails, because I would have been straight in there,
like you're a better woman than I, Because if I
had have seen that email and I had his password same,
I would have gone back in later that night.
Speaker 4 (26:34):
Yes, but it was exactly like you just said, It
was that conundrum. It's not really on his mind right now.
You know, the man is looking death into the you know,
staring at death. So who am I to bring this
up right now?
Speaker 2 (26:46):
And the conversation is never going to go down the
way it would go down if death wasn't on the doorstep.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
That's the thing.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
If you had that conversation around infidelity with anyone else,
there would be the groveling, there would be the apology,
but I would only assume that there's bigger things on his.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Mind in that moment.
Speaker 4 (27:03):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
I was thinking about this on my way to work
today and I was speaking to my partner Ben about it,
like I was running the conundrum by him and also
asked him what he would do. You know, if I
was dying and I had cheated on you. But he
raised a really good point that was He's like, well,
it's not necessarily about having the conversation with your partner,
but it's just about you understanding and knowing and deciding
(27:24):
if you want to ask those questions, because if the
time comes where he passes away and you never got
the chance to ask who, what, why, when you're the
one that needs to be able to live the rest
of your life without knowing. So when did you decide
to go back in to the emails?
Speaker 4 (27:39):
That's exactly what was going through my mind, exactly that
I just wanted to have that clarity because I knew
that he would change the password the minute he had
recovered enough to go back, you know. So I well,
it was the night before. I mean I had thought
about it for three weeks, but I had distracted myself.
I went to yogat Dorn think about it, you know,
(28:00):
be mindful or you can think about it. All I
could think about was it. So then the last night
I thought, Okay, I've just got to do it. I'm
just going to have to have a quick look just
to put my mind at ease, because, like you just said,
what if he dies and I never have this clarity.
So I bought myself a bottle of wine, of course,
to have enough courage to be reckless enough to actually
(28:21):
do this. And I remember sitting there thinking, oh my god,
I should have got two bottles because what if, and
a gin and a gin and some whiskey, because what happens.
If I'll find something that'll be devastating, I'll definitely need
some more. Anyway, when I heard the doors of the
bottle shop downstairs go down, I thought, that's it. I'm
(28:41):
just going to press interer nout and just get it
over and done with and yeah, and so then what
I found was actually a lot worse than what I
could have imagined. He had gone back to women that
he had known before we got together and resumed those
relationships physically physically, and yes, I mean they were overseas,
and he traveled overseas frequently, so a lot of it
(29:04):
was also not physically. Because he was an incredible and
that's how I felt for him. He was incredibly charming
writer of letters or emails. He was addicted to his keyboard.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
And yeah, when you found that, like when we say,
worse than you ever could imagine, do you have an
idea of how many women it was, how many other
relationship he was managing to maintain at the same time.
Speaker 5 (29:27):
I guess how serious they were too?
Speaker 4 (29:29):
Yeah, I think serious, quite serious. Some of them sort
of offered to take him in or look after him
should the cancer become I mean this is you know,
once the cancer was known or the diagnosis was known,
so quite serious. Yeah, maybe about five active.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
When you found that out and you did have a
conversation with him. How did he react?
Speaker 4 (29:53):
So I initially thought, Okay, maybe I just don't tell
him because his mind is right now, he's probably he
might not even want to see them ever again, if
he's just focused on his survival on you know, this moment.
Because I'm in a brain surgery and then having a
stage four diagnosis, it's massive, So who am I to
spoil that for him? But I just couldn't hold it in.
(30:15):
I just couldn't. So eventually I thought, okay, I'll write
him a letter, and I actually said, look, it's not
for me now to let's not have an argument about it.
It happened. Okay, I'll stay by you because this is
a different situation. Obviously, if he hadn't been ill, there
would have been only one way to go about this,
and that was to divorce, to not stay together. So
(30:38):
I told him, and the way he reacted was to say, well,
if it's all your fault, And first of all, he said, okay,
how many do you know about? Okay? And I could
see he's probably thinking, oh, my god, how much of
it does she know? What else doesn't she know?
Speaker 2 (30:51):
But also probably like, how can I minimize the damage?
Speaker 3 (30:54):
Where can I lie?
Speaker 4 (30:55):
Like?
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Where can I cover up some of it?
Speaker 5 (30:58):
It just made me flash back to my trauma.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
I was also dating a doctor for a couple of
years and we were getting married. We had the whole lot,
this whole thing, and he ended up having a double
life with multiple multiple women and he was marrying someone
else as well, not just like lighthearted cheating and word
for word. When it came out and I discovered it
and confronted him, he also blamed me and said this
(31:22):
is your fault, Like, this is your fault what you've done.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
You're ruining my life.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Like everything that you just said is classic narcissism. When
you were reading these emails for the first time, how
did you feel in that moment? Because it sounds like
that you made a really quite a quick decision to say, well,
I'm going to stand by him regardless. Was it as
quick as you're making out and as easy as you're
making out?
Speaker 4 (31:45):
No, it wasn't. The first thing, of course, is I
was frantically trying to reconstruct the timelines. When did he
actually see them? Hang on, where was I in that moment?
And then when I did reconstruct some of it, I
was devastated, thinking, so here I am prepared his you know,
green smoothie or whatever, or working on the ship, working
really hard. Because we had had this conversation before we
(32:09):
went on the ship. I said, Tim, you might get
bored because I would be having to work very hard,
as in it's very intense. You live with your students,
it's all new stuff. And they did have an opening
for a mental health or a doctor or whatever, and
he said, no, you know what, I'll just come as
a student and I'll just study. But clearly, and that's
one of the things he said, one of the reasons
(32:29):
why I had to resume some of these affairs is
because you were always focused on your work and you
weren't there for me. You were always tired, you were
always busy, a load of rubbish. It's like, yeah, well
we could have maybe had that conversation rather than just
going off. So that was one of the things. But yeah,
coming back to how did I rect Obviously I didn't
(32:50):
immediately make that decision. We actually both said okay, we
need time out. But we couldn't have time out immediately
because he needed to after that brain surgery. He needed
then to have seven weeks of radiation therapy, and I
was there. I was there to be his chauffeur again,
in his cook and we just got on with the job.
It just was like, okay, let's just get on with that.
(33:11):
Let's not talk about what I found. Let's just because
it was confronting for him. I mean, the radiation therapy
was terrible.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Yeah, there's this reaction that happens, Like your reaction when
you find out something that's awful is often anger. It's
often very like harsh and very like very visceral. And
then as time goes by, O, when it is, your
feelings often migrate into something else. When you say that
you then had so many so much time because he
needed to still be cared for, could you feel your
(33:41):
anger or your upset and you're hurt. Could you feel
that softening? Could you feel yourself forgiving him?
Speaker 3 (33:46):
In that period?
Speaker 4 (33:47):
Not so much. In that period, I kept myself very
busy as physical exercise. I like became this runner. I
just ran away from it all and I exhausted myself physically.
But then what we did is we said, okay, let's
have a month out. We need time out. And then
he went back to Italy. I'm sure he well. I
said to him, do whatever you have to do in Italy.
(34:09):
I don't care. And I went and checked myself into
a ten days silent meditation retreat in Thailand because I
thought I needed a crash cause in forgiveness. And I thought,
if I live with real monks in a real monastery,
maybe I become spiritually awakened, you know, by osmosis, and
able to keep my heart open when it's broken. But
(34:29):
what that experience did for me, I don't recommend it
for everybody. It did work for me. And you know,
I was sitting I was actually the only white Western
woman in that monastery at that time, and you know,
sitting there in my white robes at dawn in the
deserted meditation hall at Ah. I thought, gee, am I
going mad? What am I doing? But then I also thought, okay,
(34:53):
what will the future look like? And one of the
helpful things, and that is I think why I had
turned to Buddhism, because I thought maybe they have tools
to teach me about forgiveness and compassion. One of the
monks said to me, okay, he shared with me the
parable of the second arrow, and I still love this parable.
He said, the first arrow we cannot control. We all
(35:14):
experience suffering. In fact, that is the first noble truth
of Buddhism. But the second arrow is our choice. And
I took that to mean that why we can't avoid pain,
we can choose our suffering. In other words, I could
go on and just drink a bottle of wine every
night and call him the body bastard in a slurred voice.
(35:35):
Or I could maybe find another way. And I thought,
maybe there is a way I could actually grow from
this experience rather than be erased by it and so
broken by it. Exactly, I didn't want to be that broken,
And I, you know, is sitting there in that meditation
hall I had a very good idea by the end,
what my second arrow could look like.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
When you came back from that, did you ever get
to sit down and talk to Gianni and actually just
make him answer these questions tell you everything? I mean,
did you want to know the intricacies in the details
of these affairs? Or for you was easier to just
accept that it happened but not want to know anything,
because I know for me, I wanted to know everything.
(36:18):
I wanted to know how many people, how he did it,
when he did it, why.
Speaker 4 (36:21):
He did it, and did that help you?
Speaker 1 (36:24):
It actually did, because I realized he was so crazy
that I dodged a bullet, like by knowing the details,
I was like, Oh, this is so much easier for
me to walk away from now. But if I just
knew that there was an affair and I didn't know
the details, I would have I think I would have
found it harder to move on.
Speaker 4 (36:41):
I think by then I had pieced together a lot
of the details already and the timelines, and so because
of course, by the time we got back together, I think,
in hindsight, what was it? Maybe he had another six
months after that I felt like, do we really need
to go? I mean, we tried, and then it was
just too painful. You know what, it's not relevant. The
(37:01):
man is dying, what's the poor cares really and he
was no longer interested in them by that stage. He
was really just interested in well, he only had the
energy to be in the here and now, and so
it we didn't know, we didn't do what you did.
I think, of course, if the scenario had been different,
and perhaps if it had been that scenario where he
(37:22):
wasn't obviously dying and so on, I probably would have
wanted to know all the details. But in this context, no,
it didn't matter anymore.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
A lot of people when they go through cheating, when
infidelity is present in the relationship, is often this feeling
of like, well, what we had wasn't real, like that
didn't exist. Did you think that or were you able
to kind of realize that some people are able to
compartmentalize feelings and that they're able to feel real for
you in this respect, but still able to do these
(37:53):
things that are incredibly hurtful and almost live side by
side themselves.
Speaker 4 (37:58):
Yeah. I think a lot of our experiences were real
simply because also they were so unique, you know, like
this trip around the world on the ship and so on,
and also because a lot of those women were actually married,
so he could never have the things that we did
together with them, Like even I guess sleeping together overnight
would have been difficult. In fact, I know it was
(38:19):
because they had to obviously go out of you know,
work out ways to do that. So that was real.
But what I found really hard to tolerate is or
to get my head around or to find peace with,
was the fact that he would lie in bed next
to me, and had done so before I found out
texting these women yeah all the time, And I was like,
but you know, here I am helping you with your
(38:42):
especially once he had relied on me already on the ship.
He was relying on me to help him dress him
after he had the operation in Cape Town for the shoulder.
So there I was, you know, pulling up his pants,
going to work on the ship, and the next thing
he would spend all morning just chatting with his women,
and perhaps at night when I was lying in bed,
(39:02):
I mean not so much on the ship because the
internet was terrible.
Speaker 3 (39:05):
That didn't worry. That might have been the only thing
stopping at the time.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
But there's this idea, and like people used to say
to me exactly that, But was it real?
Speaker 4 (39:13):
Then?
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Do you feel like those years weren't real or that
he didn't love you? And I still to this day
say the same thing. I say, Oh he loved me,
he just loved other people too, and his love wasn't normal,
And like, you have to believe that because otherwise you think, well,
I've just wasted all these years of my life.
Speaker 3 (39:29):
I have to.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
And I know a lot of people are going to
be in their cars or whatever right now saying bullshit,
that's not love.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
And I get it.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
I understand that, but I know what those years were like.
And whilst I think he is a fuck with for
what he did, you have to hold onto this fact
of well, he did the wrong thing, but he still
loved you in whatever way. You need to understand that.
Speaker 4 (39:53):
That's right. And I agree with that. I think that
was exactly the case for us too. I do believe,
and I also believe that he really wanted to, you know,
break his patterns perhaps and not go back to these women.
I do believe that when he said to me, you know,
this is a fresh start, he really believed it. But
he just couldn't pull it off. And I think, as
you would know, the problem with narcissists is they can't
(40:15):
love themselves, so therefore they can't really love others in
the way that we expect them to. And they need
this constant validation from the outside. And so that's yeah,
And it almost makes you feel like you have to
have empathy or compassion for somebody who is that incapable
of having that love fully?
Speaker 3 (40:36):
Yeah, what have you learned about forgiveness?
Speaker 4 (40:40):
Oh so just where do I start? Yeah? Look, I
really realized, as I was saying before, when I was
sitting there, you know, as that woman who was looking
towards a broken woman working too hard, drinking too much,
to forget that she had left the man she had
loved when he was dying, I thought, okay, forgiveness could
(41:03):
be the opposite to that. I didn't want to be
that broken, you know, woman Haggard. You know, I thought
forgiveness could perhaps be that antidote. And what I've realized
it's really a form of radical self care. It's a
form of self healing because it gives you agency by
letting go and by setting them free, and you're setting
(41:25):
yourself free. And I think that's what it really It's empowering.
That's what I learned about it. Yeah, did he ever
apologize to you? No, you know, narcissists can't say sorry really,
but he did say he acknowledged that he had hurt
me and that he made me suffer, and that was
good enough. That was his way of apologizing. And again
(41:45):
we're talking about a man who was dying and a
few months after that he did die, So from that perspective,
that was good enough for me, and that was his
form of apologizing.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
Yeah, it's really beautiful to hear you speak about this
because your empathy for someone who we are taught to
have no empathy for because they lack empathy themselves. I
think the thing that is such a standout is the
fact that the reason why the person who's like the
victim of a narcissist gets hurt so bad is because
we still have empathy for them. We have empathy for
(42:18):
the fact that, as you said, they're not able to
love themselves, or they are that broken bird, or they
do the things that are incomprehensible to people who don't
have or don't live within this spectrum of narcissism or
behavioral sort of narcissistic personality disorder. Because we would never
treat people like that, but yet you still manage to
not only forgive, but have the empathy for the why
(42:40):
in how he does it. And I think that that's
just such a testament to what a kind hearted person
you are.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (42:45):
I mean, the empathy is lacking in the narcissist, and
in the hypersensitive person it's in abundance, sometimes too much.
Speaker 3 (42:53):
Also often why they're attracted to you as well.
Speaker 4 (42:55):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (42:56):
Yes, you've wrote in.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
Your book about as Jarnie was dying, finding a different
kind of intimacy.
Speaker 5 (43:03):
What did you mean by that?
Speaker 4 (43:04):
Yeah, So it occurred to me when it was only
the two of us at the end, like literally there
we were, you know, in finals Queensland. The weather was
doing its thing as in dramatic tropical weather. We did
actually have a category five cyclone.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
He heah, and then we had it followed by a
real one.
Speaker 4 (43:23):
It felt very precious and it felt like that was
such a unique intimacy that obviously he could only I mean,
that wasn't replicable, like you can you know, share your
in your sexual intimacy with multiple partners as he did,
but there was only me that he shared that intimacy with.
So it felt like a privilege, and it really felt
(43:44):
like a gift. And there's this wonderful quote by ram
das the American Guru, who says, we're all just walking
each other home. And it felt like my role then
was to walk him home to his final destination and
to be there to hold his and and to make
peace with him, because I think he also it was
(44:05):
a beautiful Yeah, it was a beautiful time being there
with him in this that was real intimacy in his
most vulnerable state, in his most vulnerable state, when he
you know, I could have I mean I could have
just I don't know, kicked him out of the bed
or whatever, like he was completely vulnerable, and to be
there and to honor that that was a real privilege. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
How do you feel like your thoughts around relationships and
love and intimacy now have changed?
Speaker 4 (44:28):
Has it affected you.
Speaker 3 (44:29):
I don't know, are you? Are you dating again?
Speaker 5 (44:31):
Has it affected what you want from your relationships?
Speaker 4 (44:34):
Yeah? I think I remain a trusting person and that
I always say jokingly, and now I work more on
the relationship I have with myself that is actually much
more important. I mean it sounds maybe selfish, but really
you have to work on the self love and especially
the EmPATH amongst us need to also foreground that a
(44:55):
little bit, And it's another sort of survival strategy. You know,
you can't really others if you're not having a nurturing
relationship with yourself, which also means knowing what your boundaries
are and honoring them. So I think I'm getting better
at the head sort of honoring my boundaries and just saying, Okay,
this is what I need.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
And Yeah, this might be a really hard question to
answer because the alternate you can't really compare to because
you didn't experience it. But do you think finding out
and like living through this time away from him, this forgiveness,
this acceptance, do you think that ultimately it made dealing
with his death easier or do you think it was
(45:36):
still as hard. Did you still feel as in love
with him at the end, or was it almost as
though there was a sense of not obligation because you
wanted to be there as well, but just a sense
that you could make closure with it easier than had
you had this blissful relationship right until the end.
Speaker 4 (45:53):
Yeah, I mean, obviously we can't know these things, but
I definitely think yes, in the sense that already, when
on the ship, I had to look after him, and
it was that was really hard too, because the ship
was swaying, we got into you know, storms and so on.
I had somehow taken on that maternal love, or rather
I was forced to also this well of maternal love
(46:16):
sort of sprang forth, which sort of mixed with the
romantic love. And so that maternal love, the caring, the
looking after him, the day to day business of cooking
the meals for him, making sure he ate that anti
cancer that helped. Yes, shifted, Yes, it shifted, It definitely shifted.
But I also thought about, you know, what would it
have been like had I not known before he died?
(46:37):
What would it have been like find out after he
had died? And I think that would have been so hard.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
Oh worse, yes, worse, But there's no resolution, that's right,
And at least this way that you had, I guess
a level of closure.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
I agree, because you would literally be like the man
I loved I didn't know. You wouldn't have a chance
to even have those grounding conversations around the why.
Speaker 4 (46:59):
Yes, I know.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
A lot of people would be asking or thinking to
themselves right now, did he have another option for someone
to look after him?
Speaker 3 (47:07):
Did he have other.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
Family or friends or like, could you have made the
decision to walk away knowing he would have been cared for.
Speaker 4 (47:13):
Yes, yes, and you still chose to stay. Yeah. I
mean his brother was overseas, so technically it would have.
But yes, it could have. Yes, definitely.
Speaker 3 (47:21):
I just there's a part of me.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
I mean when I put myself in this position and
I had this conversation with Laura, and I had it
with my partner Ben straight away. Ben was like, I'd
give you to someone else to look after, and he
was like, if you've been doing the dirty on me?
And I thought about it, and I thought, there's a
part of you that can't. There's no closure if you
walk away, and if there's no forgiveness, And this forgiveness
(47:43):
is the most powerful thing.
Speaker 3 (47:45):
And you often don't forgive someone for them.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
You forgive someone for yourself so that you can move
on with your life and not have this hatred cloud
hanging over your head constantly. And I think people get
mixed up with that the reason for forgiveness, and people
would judge you for forgiving someone, like how could that
person stay and look after someone when he did that
to her.
Speaker 3 (48:04):
But it's not necessarily for him.
Speaker 4 (48:06):
That's right, You do it also for yourself, because I
wanted to be able to live with the echoes of
my deeds, as in, I wanted to be able to
know that I've done. I wanted to be able to
live with it. And also when I was eighteen, I
dropped out of high school and I ended up working
in an old people's home, actually looking after the dying,
(48:28):
completely untrained. They didn't have any hi, you know, measures then,
and I knew it was very sacred to be able
to hold space. These were often people who didn't have family,
so I was the person holding their hands, and I
was eighteen, but I just felt it was such a
privilege and it was so sacred, and so I knew
(48:49):
that if I stayed with him until the end, we
would have this wonderful closure, or we could, and we did.
And also a friend had said to me, narcissists very
rarely changed, but it is possible sometimes at the end
of their lives, like when they're staring death in the face,
they can sometimes change. And I believe that there was
(49:10):
and the Buddhas saying, you know, can clean up a
lot of karma in those last moments. I do believe
that he did change that none of that was any
more important. And the other thing he did, which was
he kept saying thank you a lot, and I had
the feeling that he was healing himself with gratitude.
Speaker 3 (49:27):
And I couldn't heal it with apologies.
Speaker 4 (49:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (49:29):
Do you think the other women knew that you existed,
that he was married?
Speaker 4 (49:34):
Yes? They did, Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1 (49:36):
Did you ever feel like you wanted to reach out
to any of them in contact?
Speaker 4 (49:40):
I did?
Speaker 3 (49:40):
Oh, please do tell So the night before.
Speaker 4 (49:43):
The funeral, I had to write the eulogy, and I put,
you know, we put this lovely flyer together with all
these collash of photos and there was us, you know,
all over the world and all these photos and him
as a younger man and so on and off his
family of course, and then I was so angry. I
don't know. The anger came up in a way because
perhaps it was the reason for that, maybe because I
(50:05):
could never really yell at him, say you fucking bastard,
because you can't yell at a dying person with those words.
So I had to swallow that, and it came up
that night. I just thought Jesus. And that was the
other night I drank an entire bottle of red wine.
I didn't make a habit of.
Speaker 1 (50:23):
It, but I always send bad emails on a few
where a few ones don't we.
Speaker 4 (50:26):
And I was looking at this frog perched on the
rand on a chair. Thing that's him, Oh my god.
And I was yelling at the frog, you know, in
his slurred voice, and you know. Then I made a
pot of tea, soaped up. And then I thought, okay,
there's only one thing I can do to get over this,
and I rang his lovers. I had the numbers in
his diary. And the first one answered, and she knew
(50:49):
immediately who I was, and she already knew that he.
Speaker 3 (50:53):
Yeah, it's not him calling, is it. He's underground now?
Speaker 4 (50:57):
And it was from his phone. I guess, I guess
I can't remember now. And I said to her, look,
I knew he meant a lot to you, because this
woman had been in his life for longer than I
had been, because he had known her for much longer.
I wanted to let you know that the film is tomorrow,
and I wanted you to somehow be able to be
part of that, even though that you're over there, and
she just said, You've just taken this huge weight off me.
(51:19):
I feel so relieved. I felt so terrible. And then
I rang another one and she said the same.
Speaker 5 (51:24):
Sorry, Robbie is she was doing.
Speaker 1 (51:28):
She was married and she knew that you existed. She's
sorry and has the weight on her shoulder because you've
called her out on it. But you did that so nicely,
Like were you ever did you ever call any of
these women and not be such a beautiful person, Like
did you ever call them and say no? Yeah, but
like like you really hurt me, like you should be ashamed?
Speaker 3 (51:49):
Did you ever ever take that tactic?
Speaker 4 (51:51):
No? I didn't. There was one I really actually had
empathy for her because her husband had just also died
very terrible circumstances, and she I really believe that she
genuinely felt terrible for me, and we were basically in
the same boat. Suddenly here we are widows. So we
actually kept writing to each other for a while back
and forth. But then she just kept telling me about
(52:12):
her problems with her husband. I thought, yeah, that's enough.
Now that's what I'm not you know, I'm not podcast Yeah,
that's right. But it was sort of like, well, we're
all in this together, so we all loved the same man. Yeah,
And I think the first one I rang, I think
she would just really embarrassed me. Could hear the embarrassment,
and that was enough. She was really embarrassed, Yeah, and
(52:32):
annoying that you cousin. Thank you so much for coming
and for sharing your story. I mean, I think everyone
who listens to this is going to go home and
if they're in a relationship, is going to have that
conversation with their partner.
Speaker 3 (52:42):
What would you do?
Speaker 2 (52:43):
It was the first thing I thought when I saw
your book and I saw the title, and your generosity,
your empathy, your kindness absolutely exudes out of you, Like
it is such a beautiful thing. And I don't think
that everybody would respond in the way that you have,
that's for sure, you know. I think there is a
lot of people out there who would hold onto that
anger and hold on to that fury.
Speaker 4 (53:05):
Yeah, but that's actually thank you for saying that. But
I think of it as I say, I had to
save my own life, and if I had stayed that
angry woman, that wouldn't have served me, you know. And
I was getting old. I was looking in the mirror
going Do I want to look like? Do I want
all these lines? These anger lines?
Speaker 1 (53:20):
Know?
Speaker 4 (53:20):
What can I do? So well?
Speaker 2 (53:22):
It is called Loving My Lying, dying, cheating Husband, and
it is available at Awkward bookstores. We'll put a link
in the show notes as well. For you, Thank you
so much for coming and being part of the pod.
Speaker 4 (53:32):
Thank you so much for having me.
Life on Cut acknowledges the traditional custodians of country whose
lands were never seated. We pay our respects to their
elders past and present.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Always was, always will be Aboriginal Land. This episode was
recorded on Gadigal Land.
Speaker 3 (00:22):
Hi guys, and welcome back to another episode of Life
on Cut. I'm Laura, I'm Brittany.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Now I have a question for you, and this I
think will have a few of you having some conflicting
answers to this. Imagine meeting the love of your life,
the man who you have been waiting for your whole
life to come along and sweep you off your feet.
We don't wait for men, remember no, we don't. But
like you know, you don't pin yourself up to it.
You're ready for it, and he really does. You just
(00:47):
think that there is no one more incredible than this man.
You have a well wind romance, you get engaged, you
get married, and then very shortly afterwards, you find out
that your husband has terminal cancer.
Speaker 3 (00:59):
You become his carer.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
You pour your love and your adoration into this man,
only to find out whilst they are terminal and suffering
with that diagnosis, that they've also been cheating on you
throughout your entire relationship.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
I genuinely couldn't imagine being in this situation. It's one thing,
and I feel like most people sitting at home right
now have been in this situation.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
It's one thing to be cheated on, right.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
And to feel that ultimate betrayal, to have to work
through that trust because some people do work through it,
some people absolutely don't. But then to add the layer
of do I have to then look after this person
and care for them until they die because there might
not be anyone else to look after them?
Speaker 4 (01:38):
Like?
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Do I put that betrayal to the side? I cannot
fathom that question.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Yeah, I mean this is the big one, right, Like,
what would you do if this was your situation? And
it's not even just put it to the side because
they don't have anyone to care for them. This is
would you willingly still be that person's palliative care? Would
you still willingly take care of that person until their
end of life knowing that they have betrayed you throughout
your entire relationship? And the reason why I asked this
(02:02):
question is because this is exactly the situation that Kirsten
Pills found herself in. She's written an incredible book. It
is called Loving My Lying, dying, Cheating Husband.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Really drove that home in the title, didn't she.
Speaker 4 (02:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
I mean, there's definitely there's no ambiguity in this one.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
But Kirsten talks about the reasons why she made the
decisions to stay, the reasons why she made the decisions
to forgive, and this conversation so deeply centers around the
idea of forgiveness, but not just forgiveness for her ex husband,
but also for her own healing journey as well.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
Yeah, and it's also about the complex relationship surrounding cheating.
We've often spoken about the fact that it's not straightforward
and there's not one black and white answer. We also
delve into the fact that she loved a narcissist. And
one thing that I found so surprising that we do
get into at the end is not only how she
handled the entire situation, but how she handled the end
when he passed away. And I won't get too much
(02:54):
into that, but for me, there were some really incredible
pivotal moments that I don't know if I would have
done the same thing.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah, And I think that that's what a lot of
people are going to be left when they leave. This
conversation today is going to be wondering what would you
do if you found yourself in this situation? Let's get
into the chat with Kirsten. I came across Kirsten via
social media and when I saw the title of her book,
Loving My Lying, dying, Cheating Husband, I was so intrigued
(03:19):
by what this entails. And I think your story is
one that it will pull on so many people's heart strings.
But like I said, it will really make your question
what would you do in this situation? Kirsten, Welcome to
the podcast.
Speaker 4 (03:31):
Thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
It's our absolute pleasure and I cannot wait to dive
into this conversation. But before we do, everybody that comes
on the podcast gives us their accident, unfiltered, their embarrassing story,
and I know the conversation is about to get pretty heavy,
but before we get into that, please embarrass yourself oh
and humbling.
Speaker 4 (03:53):
Yeah, exactly. So when you told me to prepare embarrassing
the story, I thought there's so many but I couldn't
think of what because I'm a walking embarrass very often.
But I did. I don't believe it, but I did
think about the time that I volunteered to give up
TED talk, and it was the pandemic and I was
stranded in Australia. I was living in Vietnam at the time,
and my wardrobe was very reduced. So what to wear?
(04:15):
So I found a dress in the op shop and
I spent the entire month rehearsing my talk, not really
thinking about the dress. I had it dry cleaned because
I looked in every shop, so in the end it
came from the op shop, and so I went to
the venue put it on, and I realized I hadn't
really checked whether the brass straps would be showing or not.
This is like half an hour before going on stage.
(04:36):
I finally checked and it looked like an op shop
dress with brass straps showing. So I thought, what do
you do? You know, I'm a woman of a certain age,
so I can't really go on there looking like this.
So I thought, okay, I went backstage. I went to
the room where the workers have the props, and I
found a roll of duct tape and took the braw
(04:57):
and I taped my nipples down.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
You've all been there, I reckon, I've been.
Speaker 4 (05:01):
So that I was thinking in this context is probably
not really embarrassing, but for me it was highly embarrassing
because then I had to go into the room and
the guy had to mic me up, and I was like, ah, well,
I can't really open my dress because I'm not wearing
a bra, but I couldn't tell him either, so I
sort of.
Speaker 2 (05:15):
He's like trying to find somebody to clip a microphone onto,
and you can, like, you can stick it in my
duct tape.
Speaker 4 (05:20):
I said, I'm very private, I'll do it myself.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
So can I say if you put the roll duct
tape or you put duct tape, if you put the
wrong tape on your nipples, you will know about it
because they've they've got special nipple tape, right, But if
you're putting it down with some like hardcore hardware, when
you've ripped that off, you know about.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Duct tape can rip paint off the walls alone. What
it can do to you when you try and take
that stuff off.
Speaker 4 (05:40):
Well, that was the next part of the embarrassment, because
I was so hyped up after the talk because it
was a TED talk, so it was like one of
this once in a lifetime opportunities I forget to take
it off. So the next morning, the pain and the embarrassment.
Speaker 3 (05:52):
What have I done?
Speaker 4 (05:53):
I had forgotten Casin.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
I would love to know before we get into your story,
who you were before you met your husband. How does
a German who is an expert in Italian end up
in Australia.
Speaker 4 (06:05):
Yeah, well, good question. I grew up in Germany in
the seventies. It was a very grim place. It was
post war. It was very cold. I mean it's still cold.
And I just had this feeling I was born in
the wrong country. So I had this strong calling. As
soon as I finished school, I needed to get out
of there. And for some reason I was brave enough
to just book a typic on my own. This is
(06:26):
before we had phones, you know, mobile phones, early eighties.
To Jakarta, of all places, and I ended up there
by myself. I spent a year in Bali in eighty seven.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
Wow, what a different place then.
Speaker 4 (06:38):
I don't think there was any yoga in or what
then I can't remember. And then I thought, Okay, Australia
is the next destination. So yeah, and so then I
came to Sydney and I saw the blue sky and
that was it. I needed to live in Australia.
Speaker 2 (06:52):
In your description about yourself, and it was one of
the things that I thought, it really jumped out of me.
And it's kind of a sidestep from what we're going
to be talking about. But you described yoursel as childless
by choice. Yeah, what does that mean to you? And
I guess like of a time and of an age
when there was almost the expectation that women just have children.
When you say it was your choice, was it something
that you always knew that you were like, kids are
(07:13):
not for me.
Speaker 4 (07:14):
I think it was my mother who put that idea
into my head very early on, because she, I think,
got frustrated that she got stuck in a marriage at
you know, twenty three. I mean it was a different
generation when, and that meant she had to then look
after these unmanageable kids.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Who just ran off and left her once they reached
a certain age exactly.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
But it was also once I lived in Australia, I realized,
you know, I was doing all of this on my own.
So I was putting myself through university on my own
because I'd sort of basically run away from home. I thought,
if I have kids, then everything's going to cost me
double as in going back to Germany, because in those
days it was air travel, you know, it wasn't so common,
you know, to just jump on a plane. And also
(07:55):
I think my mother's experience, she said, oh, you know, marriages,
I don't know they're trapped. I don't get trapped. And
I just thought, I haven't yet found the right man,
and I want to be that I can imagine being
with until this human being I put into the world
will be twenty or ready to be on their own. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (08:13):
Can I ask you very personal, but do you now,
in hindsight, have any regrets about not having children or
do you still feel wholeheartedly that you made the right decision.
Speaker 4 (08:24):
Yeah. Interesting. I have quite a lot of younger friends
who are still in their sort of thirties who asked me,
you know, should I have a kid? Maybe not, because.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
Yeah, I'm asking for me basically.
Speaker 4 (08:34):
Yeah, so my good friends, I do boot camp with them,
we go on you know, these bike rides and so on,
and I say, no, don't have kids. Just enjoy your
life that way you can. You know, you can enjoy it.
You can do whatever you want. You're not beholden. But
now that I'm at this point in my life. I
do miss the company of adult children. I have my
nephew and niece. They were very intelligent, lovely human beings,
(08:56):
and if I had kids of my own, I think
I would enjoy being around them.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
That's the thing that's so hard is because like kids
don't say kids forever, but it's a very big part
of the parenting experience.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
As having little children.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
Well, it's like saying, yeah, I want to have kids
and get through the first twenty five years so that
I could have a couple of years as adults.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
It doesn't really make sense. It's like just get a friend,
you know, you're an adult friend totally.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
But I mean it's really important, and I think it's
really interesting because we've definitely had big conversations on this
podcast about being childless by choice, but it's always been
from people who have been within this age group, so
they're currently going through that process in that period of
like when all their friends have little kids. But it's
so interesting to hear about what's that like when all
of your friends and their little kids are our adults
(09:40):
and you can have a conversation with them and you
can have a relationship which goes beyond just wiping asses
and getting screened at all night exactly.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
But you know, I was lucky enough.
Speaker 4 (09:48):
I did take my niece traveling, and so I had
this girl, you know I've had I had it and
she came out from Germany and lived with me for
five months and went to school in Australia. So I
did have it. But I have to say I do
like little kids. I love them. And so I have
lots of friends who are in their thirties who needs
surrogate Grandma's.
Speaker 2 (10:06):
And You're like, yeah, I'm here, and then I'll hand
them back. When I need to hand them back.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
I'm gonna say you love them because you can hand
them exactly. So what was your life like you had
moved here and how old were you when you met
your husband Gianni.
Speaker 4 (10:20):
Yeah, so I moved here in my twenties and then
I had a career and I lived here and lots
of things, and then we met when I was forty
three and I had actually just gone through early menopause.
I was at work and suddenly I had this cruciating
pain in my abdomen and I went to the doctor
(10:40):
and she said, we need to take you over tomorrow
otherwise you'll love the comblem. Yeah, I had assist. I mean,
it happens, it's quite common. And then she said, you
have to now be prepared to enter meno. Pause. I'm like, wow,
I'm barely forty two. Maybe I was forty three, and
I was in denial. And then it throws you into
this depression because it was just came totally expected, and
(11:00):
also it meant I had to be at home. I
was living on my own and I was single. I
had just moved to Sydney. I was enjoying my single life.
I kept saying, I'm in love with the city, not
a man. I don't need a man. I'm love with
the city. Love that. But you know, Sydney is a
hard city sometimes in that it's very large, so you
can get quite lonely when you're a workaholic, and then
(11:21):
you come home and your friends live on the other
side of the city and you know it takes hours
to catch up. So yeah, then that loneliness suddenly came
and I thought, hang on a minute, I think I
got everything the wrong way. I've forgot to have children.
I forgot to have a family, even though it was
never really in my plan what life should have been
like at that moment, I thought, I have given everything
(11:44):
this career and where is it now bringing me chicken
soup while I'm on the couch.
Speaker 3 (11:48):
You know, Yeah, this is why you need that adult.
Speaker 2 (11:51):
Kid exactly in that did you have a moment afterwards
where you decided to actively date or was meeting Johnny
a moment of like Sarah indipity almost.
Speaker 4 (12:01):
Yeah, I didn't go on to I guess it was
r swoop in at the Yeah, but only as a lurker,
Like I didn't actually upload my profocus. What about if
my students see me and it's like as if they
would have checked out?
Speaker 2 (12:12):
But no, that was a time when like online dating
was still a bit taboo and people kind of poop
poo died a little bit, and so it was kind
of hard to go online dating.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
Poo pootera you can tell who has a little child?
Speaker 4 (12:23):
Yeah, yeah, yes, But really, coming back to your question,
it was certain dipity. I was actually giving a talk
in front of an audience, and afterwards there was this.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Man who was exciting and different talk to me about chemistry,
because I think sometimes chemistry, we have spoken about it
so much. Chemistry can make you feel as though you've
met your soulmate, that you and this person against the world.
What was the chemistry that you experienced when you met Johnny?
Speaker 4 (12:50):
Yeah, I think it was instant, as in he had
these green eyes, which for an Italian is unusual, and
they were really sparkling, and they were sparkling with mischief.
And I still remember we were at the buffet after
I had given this talk, in this lovely venue with
a you know, view of the harbor, so everything was
like very glamorous in the sense it was a typical
sort of Sydney moment. And he poured me a glass
(13:13):
of wine from the bottle of the buffet. But the
way he looked at me, it was like as if
he had stolen it, like a little boy.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
He had this.
Speaker 4 (13:19):
Boyishness about him, and yet he was actually thirteen years
older than me. But that boyish energy also meant he
was full of excitement and he wanted adventure, as in
we both shared a love for travel. And he told
me he had just come off a bike ride all
around Australia on a yellow Harley Davidson. I was like, oh, okay,
you're different.
Speaker 3 (13:39):
You're a bad boy.
Speaker 4 (13:40):
You're a bad boy, and I love riding motorbikes too.
I'd never written a Hali Davidson, but you know, I
grew up on bikes, something smaller bikes. But I still
I thought, oh, yeah, I'd do that with you, no worries.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
I thought you gonna say I would do that like him.
Yeah I did that. That's the same thing, the same thought. Yeah,
So how long did you date for him? Was this
a well win romance?
Speaker 4 (14:00):
Like?
Speaker 3 (14:00):
What was the initial dating period like with him?
Speaker 4 (14:03):
Yeah, it was a whirlwind. I guess I was ready
for a whirlwind because I felt like, okay, you know
that sort of experience of that early it was perimenopause,
could say, but I wasn't expecting it because it was early.
My doctor said it's ten years too early. Had sort
of made me feel like, what's happening here? Am I old?
This is it? And then suddenly I was feeling completely
(14:24):
seen and heard. And he was the kind of person
who showered me in compliments, in attention and in gifts,
and he also did all those things, you know, taking
me to beautiful dinners, to I don't know, the opera house,
all of those things, and it just made me feel
like magic, like i'd suddenly swapped this role from sitting
(14:44):
on the couch, you know, moping, and then suddenly I
am the lead in an Italian rom com.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
This is the pot of gold at the end of
the rainbow burst.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
You hear that actually so often, and we've talked about
doing a hire episode around it. But women in their
forties and fifties where they feel like they're being replaced
by the younger generation and they don't feel seen anymore
or heard, or desired or wanted, and all of a sudden,
this man swoops in. Who and I'm jumping ahead here.
Who sounds from the characteristics a bit like a narcissist
(15:14):
love bombing. Are going to give them everything they want,
going to make them feel like they're the only person
in the world. And we find out soon that you weren't,
unfortunately the only person. Can you say, now, in hindsight,
do you think.
Speaker 5 (15:25):
He was a narcissist?
Speaker 4 (15:26):
Yes, definitely.
Speaker 3 (15:27):
I mean I was trying to ease into that. Oh yeah, well,
I think.
Speaker 4 (15:32):
I could write a PhD about narcissism by not because
I have researched it thoroughly, I wasn't really aware of
the narcissistic personality profile at that time, and I just
couldn't see it. I just thought, I mean, yes, I thought, well,
he's a bit over the top, but you know, he
was Italian. He was meant to be melodramatic. It sort
of came with the territory, you know, that was part
(15:52):
of his persona. So I did not see it for
a long time. Obviously, now I know what love bombing is.
Back then, I didn't know. I just thought, wow, you know,
he feels like he's found you know, for both of us.
We were saying, oh, this is a second chance, you know,
in love, and we're both older second time around.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
You know.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
I think that this conversation, though, like your story is
so different to anything that we've spoken about. When we've
spoken about narcissism or narcissistic personality disorder or anyone who
has like traits within the scale of it, the response
is always to leave like that it's not possible to
have a relationship with someone who's a narcissist. That you
need to create as much distance as possible. But the
(16:31):
very real reality is is that there are people who
fall in love with narcissists and then spend their life
trying to make that work. Or discovering things about them
that don't necessarily meet up to the person that you
think that they were or that they are. You were
together for was it only two years?
Speaker 4 (16:49):
All up? I think it was four or five?
Speaker 2 (16:51):
Two years of being married, was it? And then he
received a diagnosis?
Speaker 1 (16:55):
Yes, yes, that's right, yes, yeah, Well so how did
we get to engagement in the wedding?
Speaker 5 (17:01):
So how many years were you together before that happened?
Speaker 4 (17:04):
Everything happened very quickly in the sense I think in
hindsight he probably talked about marriage from the minute we met,
but only in that exuberance, Oh my god, you know
you're the woman I marry you. I'm going to marry you.
You know you're the person I want to spend the
rest of what's left of my life with. Now I
got off at the dream job. I was an academic
(17:24):
at a university in Sydney, and we had entered a
study abroad program with seven other universities aboard a floating
university camp as a cruise ship. In other words, it
was actually an American study broad program. And I was
the Macquarie University representative. And I said to them, can
I bring my partner? And I said of course do.
So he came along, and so we had these four
(17:47):
months about this ship traveling around the world teaching. Wow,
just two weeks into the voyage, we were in Thailand
when he dislocated his shoulder aboard the ship. We had
to then have, you know, see the doctor in Bangkok
go to the hospital. So then he was in a
pretty bad shape from the morphin. It was very, very painful.
(18:08):
So we just took a room after the hospital and said, right,
well stay here for two nights, three nights, and then
go back to the hospital. And I had a friend
with me from the ship, and she said, well, while
he's dozing conked out on painkillers, let's go, you know,
and check out the tailors downstairs. And so there's all
these tailor shops that make you bespoke anything you want,
(18:31):
and these particular ones were specialized in wedding dresses, and
so they hit my friend, who was a forty five
year old single American up with these wedding stressfolders. She said, no,
not me, definitely not me, but maybe her. Anyway, we
found this incredible piece of fabric which incorporated all of
Johnny's favorite colors. He loved colors, especially sort of yellow orange, bright,
(18:53):
you know, pink, and we just took a fabric sample
back to the room and by then the painkillers had
worn off. Was still in pain, but the smile was
back on his face. He saw the phoebik, he said,
that's fabric for a wedding day. Let's just do it.
Let's just get married on the ship. And because he
was in this state, it sort of felt like, Okay,
it's a moment of celebration, and you know, why not.
(19:14):
And we knew we had a sea passage coming up
of two weeks at sea, and my students were getting
very antsy doing you know, cabin fever. So we all
decided it's a great party. Let's just have a great party.
Speaker 3 (19:25):
So that married with the students on the sea. Yes, shoulder, Yes.
Speaker 2 (19:32):
I can only imagine after this, after getting married, spending
this time overseas, and you know, even the relationship itself
being in a four year mark, like you're still in
this there's still this like bubble of just love and adoration.
And then you found out that Johnny was actually quite sick.
What happened there? When did you get that diagnosis? And
(19:52):
I guess like when you did find out that he
was very unwell. Was it something that they they were
trying to treat it first, or was it a termin
diagnosi this straight away?
Speaker 4 (20:01):
Yeah, no, it wasn't terminal straight away. So we actually
had signed up to go on that ship for another voyage.
So the idea was, we'll just keep, you know, traveling
around the world on this ship forever until I retire
or whatever. But then it was the global financial crisis
and the first thing that the Royal Caribbean Company took
off their schedule was, of course our not profit making
(20:24):
a study abroad program, and so that was very sad.
But I had a year of long service leave up
my sleeve. So immediately he said, right, we'll just keep
traveling anyway, Let's just hatch another plan. So we spent
many many weekends coming up with this amazing plan and
we booked everything down. I mean, I'm not normally like this,
but somehow we got into it, and we booked this
(20:45):
trip around the world. You know. It included I don't know,
two months in Buenos Aires studying Spanish and all sorts
of incredible stuff. The night before we were meant to
go to the next destination, so a week before this
incredible trip was starting. He found a pea sized lump
behind his right ear and he said, I think I
may have a problem. I said what, because he was
(21:07):
a bit of a hypochondriac, so I didn't actually take
it seriously. I had once had a little enlarged lymph
node in the Doctorum, yeah, don't worry about it.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
It's nothing.
Speaker 4 (21:16):
It's nothing. So we were then in cans, far away
from Sydney, far away from our stuff which we had
sort of put in storage, and there was no diagnosis,
and so that took a while before we got the
diagnosis and it was okay, you basically have to go
back to Sydney and have this looked at by a specialist.
We can't do it up here. And then by the
(21:37):
time we got the diagnosis, it was the cancer has
spread to the lungs and to the lymph nodes. It
wasn't yet declared terminal, was stage three. I mean, I
didn't know anything about the staging of cancer. He was
a trained medical doctor and he knew that this is
really serious.
Speaker 2 (21:55):
I can only imagine when you are in a loving
relationship and you married, the diagnosis of cancer is something
that it would bind you together in terms of like
wanting to support each other, but the diagnosis in itself
would be so much for the two of you to
work through, and the treatments and everything else that goes
with it. But the thing that makes your story so
(22:16):
interesting is what you discovered whilst your partner was so unwell.
And I mean I would love to get into how
that came about, but basically, at this point in time,
you discovered that your partner, who you're committed to, who
you're working through this cancer diagnosis, was also having affairs
outside of the relationship.
Speaker 3 (22:34):
How did you discover that?
Speaker 4 (22:35):
Yeah, So that was I think a year after this
operation to the lunk. So he did actually recover, got
his strength back, and you know, you never know. You
can't see the cancer, so you don't know. A year
later we were actually going on he had sort of
this idea because you've been you know, you had to
put your hold on life because of me. We had
(22:56):
to cancel all these travel plans because of me. Let
me take you to this beautiful eco lodge, you know,
north of cans and we'll have a lovely weekend. As
we were driving there, we stopped in the shopping center
just to run a few errands, and suddenly he dropped
the newspaper, and I thought, that's odd, and I could
see suddenly there was no strength in his hands, and
(23:17):
suddenly he could even no longer walk. His gait was funny.
But even a few days earlier, already I had noticed
that his voice started sounding like he'd swallowed a helium balloon.
And I thought, that's really odd. And food got stuck
in the corner of his mouth, but of course I
tried to ignore it, thinking I was just tired. Yeah,
And then he said he was a trained doctor. He said,
we need to go immediately to the emergency department. This
(23:39):
is an emergency. He said. Look, before we go in there,
we need to download the medical files so that we
can show them that I actually have this history of cancer,
so that they will take us seriously. But he couldn't
at that point, he couldn't really operate his own inbox,
and of course all his passwords had always been off limits,
(23:59):
which in hindsight of course red flag. In that moment,
he had not choice but to give me his passwords
so that I could download them for him, And as
I did, I noticed a strange subject line on my
way out of that inbox, and I thought, that's very odd.
Speaker 3 (24:15):
What was it was?
Speaker 4 (24:17):
What a beautiful woman? But it wasn't from me or
to me, and I thought, it's about some other beautiful woman.
Then also when he was in the hospital, it emerged
this was actually the cancer had spread to the brain.
It was now a stage four and he needed immediate
urgent brain surgery. So of course there was all this
you know, drama, as in, they didn't provide an ambulance
(24:39):
to drive all the way from Cans to the next
hospital where he could be operated, which was five hundred
kilometers further south. It was raining, tropical wet season, so
I became the untrained ambulance driver because there was no transfer,
and it was all highly dramatic and extremely stressful, I mean,
of course for both of us really. So when we
(24:59):
got there, to child's will, we had to take I
had to just take a hotel room. And I noticed
the night before the operation there were a lot of
women on his Facebook page appeared wishing him well, and
there was a lot of sort of traffic going on
by people I had never heard of, and I thought,
hang on, what's going on here? And that was the
password he wouldn't share with me. He shared that with
(25:21):
his brother and he said, look, I'll put my brother
in charge of the Facebook. And I thought, I'm in
charge of everything here.
Speaker 3 (25:27):
Were at that point you were like, there's something or.
Speaker 4 (25:29):
Something behind it. Yes, I'm your wife, and not only
you know have I been driving you in as an
ambulance driver. I have been cooking for you. I've been
doing everything for you. So it felt like I was
being left out. And that's when I realized there's something
that's not right anyway. I waited for three weeks because
I thought, who am I to do this while he
is in this very vulnerable state?
Speaker 2 (25:50):
And also there's two massive things that are going on
at this point in time. There's your partner. When you've
been given a stage four diagnosis, you know that this
is terminal now, and so you're like, okay, well, on
the scale of severity, is infidelity worth me having a
conversation with right now when right now we're fighting to
try and maintain as much longevity in life. It must
have been such a challenging thing to go, well, when's
(26:12):
the right time to bring up a conversation in that But.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
The curiosity of just trying to find out exactly what
was in that email, how many emails there were? When
was the time that you thought I've had enough, I'm
going to go investigate this more and log back into
the emails, because I would have been straight in there,
like you're a better woman than I, Because if I
had have seen that email and I had his password same,
I would have gone back in later that night.
Speaker 4 (26:34):
Yes, but it was exactly like you just said, It
was that conundrum. It's not really on his mind right now.
You know, the man is looking death into the you know,
staring at death. So who am I to bring this
up right now?
Speaker 2 (26:46):
And the conversation is never going to go down the
way it would go down if death wasn't on the doorstep.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
That's the thing.
Speaker 2 (26:52):
If you had that conversation around infidelity with anyone else,
there would be the groveling, there would be the apology,
but I would only assume that there's bigger things on his.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Mind in that moment.
Speaker 4 (27:03):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
I was thinking about this on my way to work
today and I was speaking to my partner Ben about it,
like I was running the conundrum by him and also
asked him what he would do. You know, if I
was dying and I had cheated on you. But he
raised a really good point that was He's like, well,
it's not necessarily about having the conversation with your partner,
but it's just about you understanding and knowing and deciding
(27:24):
if you want to ask those questions, because if the
time comes where he passes away and you never got
the chance to ask who, what, why, when you're the
one that needs to be able to live the rest
of your life without knowing. So when did you decide
to go back in to the emails?
Speaker 4 (27:39):
That's exactly what was going through my mind, exactly that
I just wanted to have that clarity because I knew
that he would change the password the minute he had
recovered enough to go back, you know. So I well,
it was the night before. I mean I had thought
about it for three weeks, but I had distracted myself.
I went to yogat Dorn think about it, you know,
(28:00):
be mindful or you can think about it. All I
could think about was it. So then the last night
I thought, Okay, I've just got to do it. I'm
just going to have to have a quick look just
to put my mind at ease, because, like you just said,
what if he dies and I never have this clarity.
So I bought myself a bottle of wine, of course,
to have enough courage to be reckless enough to actually
(28:21):
do this. And I remember sitting there thinking, oh my god,
I should have got two bottles because what if, and
a gin and a gin and some whiskey, because what happens.
If I'll find something that'll be devastating, I'll definitely need
some more. Anyway, when I heard the doors of the
bottle shop downstairs go down, I thought, that's it. I'm
(28:41):
just going to press interer nout and just get it
over and done with and yeah, and so then what
I found was actually a lot worse than what I
could have imagined. He had gone back to women that
he had known before we got together and resumed those
relationships physically physically, and yes, I mean they were overseas,
and he traveled overseas frequently, so a lot of it
(29:04):
was also not physically. Because he was an incredible and
that's how I felt for him. He was incredibly charming
writer of letters or emails. He was addicted to his keyboard.
Speaker 2 (29:15):
And yeah, when you found that, like when we say,
worse than you ever could imagine, do you have an
idea of how many women it was, how many other
relationship he was managing to maintain at the same time.
Speaker 5 (29:27):
I guess how serious they were too?
Speaker 4 (29:29):
Yeah, I think serious, quite serious. Some of them sort
of offered to take him in or look after him
should the cancer become I mean this is you know,
once the cancer was known or the diagnosis was known,
so quite serious. Yeah, maybe about five active.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
When you found that out and you did have a
conversation with him. How did he react?
Speaker 4 (29:53):
So I initially thought, Okay, maybe I just don't tell
him because his mind is right now, he's probably he
might not even want to see them ever again, if
he's just focused on his survival on you know, this moment.
Because I'm in a brain surgery and then having a
stage four diagnosis, it's massive, So who am I to
spoil that for him? But I just couldn't hold it in.
(30:15):
I just couldn't. So eventually I thought, okay, I'll write
him a letter, and I actually said, look, it's not
for me now to let's not have an argument about it.
It happened. Okay, I'll stay by you because this is
a different situation. Obviously, if he hadn't been ill, there
would have been only one way to go about this,
and that was to divorce, to not stay together. So
(30:38):
I told him, and the way he reacted was to say, well,
if it's all your fault, And first of all, he said, okay,
how many do you know about? Okay? And I could
see he's probably thinking, oh, my god, how much of
it does she know? What else doesn't she know?
Speaker 2 (30:51):
But also probably like, how can I minimize the damage?
Speaker 3 (30:54):
Where can I lie?
Speaker 4 (30:55):
Like?
Speaker 3 (30:56):
Where can I cover up some of it?
Speaker 5 (30:58):
It just made me flash back to my trauma.
Speaker 1 (31:01):
I was also dating a doctor for a couple of
years and we were getting married. We had the whole lot,
this whole thing, and he ended up having a double
life with multiple multiple women and he was marrying someone
else as well, not just like lighthearted cheating and word
for word. When it came out and I discovered it
and confronted him, he also blamed me and said this
(31:22):
is your fault, Like, this is your fault what you've done.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
You're ruining my life.
Speaker 1 (31:26):
Like everything that you just said is classic narcissism. When
you were reading these emails for the first time, how
did you feel in that moment? Because it sounds like
that you made a really quite a quick decision to say, well,
I'm going to stand by him regardless. Was it as
quick as you're making out and as easy as you're
making out?
Speaker 4 (31:45):
No, it wasn't. The first thing, of course, is I
was frantically trying to reconstruct the timelines. When did he
actually see them? Hang on, where was I in that moment?
And then when I did reconstruct some of it, I
was devastated, thinking, so here I am prepared his you know,
green smoothie or whatever, or working on the ship, working
really hard. Because we had had this conversation before we
(32:09):
went on the ship. I said, Tim, you might get
bored because I would be having to work very hard,
as in it's very intense. You live with your students,
it's all new stuff. And they did have an opening
for a mental health or a doctor or whatever, and
he said, no, you know what, I'll just come as
a student and I'll just study. But clearly, and that's
one of the things he said, one of the reasons
(32:29):
why I had to resume some of these affairs is
because you were always focused on your work and you
weren't there for me. You were always tired, you were
always busy, a load of rubbish. It's like, yeah, well
we could have maybe had that conversation rather than just
going off. So that was one of the things. But yeah,
coming back to how did I rect Obviously I didn't
(32:50):
immediately make that decision. We actually both said okay, we
need time out. But we couldn't have time out immediately
because he needed to after that brain surgery. He needed
then to have seven weeks of radiation therapy, and I
was there. I was there to be his chauffeur again,
in his cook and we just got on with the job.
It just was like, okay, let's just get on with that.
(33:11):
Let's not talk about what I found. Let's just because
it was confronting for him. I mean, the radiation therapy
was terrible.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Yeah, there's this reaction that happens, Like your reaction when
you find out something that's awful is often anger. It's
often very like harsh and very like very visceral. And
then as time goes by, O, when it is, your
feelings often migrate into something else. When you say that
you then had so many so much time because he
needed to still be cared for, could you feel your
(33:41):
anger or your upset and you're hurt. Could you feel
that softening? Could you feel yourself forgiving him?
Speaker 3 (33:46):
In that period?
Speaker 4 (33:47):
Not so much. In that period, I kept myself very
busy as physical exercise. I like became this runner. I
just ran away from it all and I exhausted myself physically.
But then what we did is we said, okay, let's
have a month out. We need time out. And then
he went back to Italy. I'm sure he well. I
said to him, do whatever you have to do in Italy.
(34:09):
I don't care. And I went and checked myself into
a ten days silent meditation retreat in Thailand because I
thought I needed a crash cause in forgiveness. And I thought,
if I live with real monks in a real monastery,
maybe I become spiritually awakened, you know, by osmosis, and
able to keep my heart open when it's broken. But
(34:29):
what that experience did for me, I don't recommend it
for everybody. It did work for me. And you know,
I was sitting I was actually the only white Western
woman in that monastery at that time, and you know,
sitting there in my white robes at dawn in the
deserted meditation hall at Ah. I thought, gee, am I
going mad? What am I doing? But then I also thought, okay,
(34:53):
what will the future look like? And one of the
helpful things, and that is I think why I had
turned to Buddhism, because I thought maybe they have tools
to teach me about forgiveness and compassion. One of the
monks said to me, okay, he shared with me the
parable of the second arrow, and I still love this parable.
He said, the first arrow we cannot control. We all
(35:14):
experience suffering. In fact, that is the first noble truth
of Buddhism. But the second arrow is our choice. And
I took that to mean that why we can't avoid pain,
we can choose our suffering. In other words, I could
go on and just drink a bottle of wine every
night and call him the body bastard in a slurred voice.
(35:35):
Or I could maybe find another way. And I thought,
maybe there is a way I could actually grow from
this experience rather than be erased by it and so
broken by it. Exactly, I didn't want to be that broken,
And I, you know, is sitting there in that meditation
hall I had a very good idea by the end,
what my second arrow could look like.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
When you came back from that, did you ever get
to sit down and talk to Gianni and actually just
make him answer these questions tell you everything? I mean,
did you want to know the intricacies in the details
of these affairs? Or for you was easier to just
accept that it happened but not want to know anything,
because I know for me, I wanted to know everything.
(36:18):
I wanted to know how many people, how he did it,
when he did it, why.
Speaker 4 (36:21):
He did it, and did that help you?
Speaker 1 (36:24):
It actually did, because I realized he was so crazy
that I dodged a bullet, like by knowing the details,
I was like, Oh, this is so much easier for
me to walk away from now. But if I just
knew that there was an affair and I didn't know
the details, I would have I think I would have
found it harder to move on.
Speaker 4 (36:41):
I think by then I had pieced together a lot
of the details already and the timelines, and so because
of course, by the time we got back together, I think,
in hindsight, what was it? Maybe he had another six
months after that I felt like, do we really need
to go? I mean, we tried, and then it was
just too painful. You know what, it's not relevant. The
(37:01):
man is dying, what's the poor cares really and he
was no longer interested in them by that stage. He
was really just interested in well, he only had the
energy to be in the here and now, and so
it we didn't know, we didn't do what you did.
I think, of course, if the scenario had been different,
and perhaps if it had been that scenario where he
(37:22):
wasn't obviously dying and so on, I probably would have
wanted to know all the details. But in this context, no,
it didn't matter anymore.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
A lot of people when they go through cheating, when
infidelity is present in the relationship, is often this feeling
of like, well, what we had wasn't real, like that
didn't exist. Did you think that or were you able
to kind of realize that some people are able to
compartmentalize feelings and that they're able to feel real for
you in this respect, but still able to do these
(37:53):
things that are incredibly hurtful and almost live side by
side themselves.
Speaker 4 (37:58):
Yeah. I think a lot of our experiences were real
simply because also they were so unique, you know, like
this trip around the world on the ship and so on,
and also because a lot of those women were actually married,
so he could never have the things that we did
together with them, Like even I guess sleeping together overnight
would have been difficult. In fact, I know it was
(38:19):
because they had to obviously go out of you know,
work out ways to do that. So that was real.
But what I found really hard to tolerate is or
to get my head around or to find peace with,
was the fact that he would lie in bed next
to me, and had done so before I found out
texting these women yeah all the time, And I was like,
but you know, here I am helping you with your
(38:42):
especially once he had relied on me already on the ship.
He was relying on me to help him dress him
after he had the operation in Cape Town for the shoulder.
So there I was, you know, pulling up his pants,
going to work on the ship, and the next thing
he would spend all morning just chatting with his women,
and perhaps at night when I was lying in bed,
(39:02):
I mean not so much on the ship because the
internet was terrible.
Speaker 3 (39:05):
That didn't worry. That might have been the only thing
stopping at the time.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
But there's this idea, and like people used to say
to me exactly that, But was it real?
Speaker 4 (39:13):
Then?
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Do you feel like those years weren't real or that
he didn't love you? And I still to this day
say the same thing. I say, Oh he loved me,
he just loved other people too, and his love wasn't normal,
And like, you have to believe that because otherwise you think, well,
I've just wasted all these years of my life.
Speaker 3 (39:29):
I have to.
Speaker 1 (39:30):
And I know a lot of people are going to
be in their cars or whatever right now saying bullshit,
that's not love.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
And I get it.
Speaker 1 (39:36):
I understand that, but I know what those years were like.
And whilst I think he is a fuck with for
what he did, you have to hold onto this fact
of well, he did the wrong thing, but he still
loved you in whatever way. You need to understand that.
Speaker 4 (39:53):
That's right. And I agree with that. I think that
was exactly the case for us too. I do believe,
and I also believe that he really wanted to, you know,
break his patterns perhaps and not go back to these women.
I do believe that when he said to me, you know,
this is a fresh start, he really believed it. But
he just couldn't pull it off. And I think, as
you would know, the problem with narcissists is they can't
(40:15):
love themselves, so therefore they can't really love others in
the way that we expect them to. And they need
this constant validation from the outside. And so that's yeah,
And it almost makes you feel like you have to
have empathy or compassion for somebody who is that incapable
of having that love fully?
Speaker 3 (40:36):
Yeah, what have you learned about forgiveness?
Speaker 4 (40:40):
Oh so just where do I start? Yeah? Look, I
really realized, as I was saying before, when I was
sitting there, you know, as that woman who was looking
towards a broken woman working too hard, drinking too much,
to forget that she had left the man she had
loved when he was dying, I thought, okay, forgiveness could
(41:03):
be the opposite to that. I didn't want to be
that broken, you know, woman Haggard. You know, I thought
forgiveness could perhaps be that antidote. And what I've realized
it's really a form of radical self care. It's a
form of self healing because it gives you agency by
letting go and by setting them free, and you're setting
(41:25):
yourself free. And I think that's what it really It's empowering.
That's what I learned about it. Yeah, did he ever
apologize to you? No, you know, narcissists can't say sorry really,
but he did say he acknowledged that he had hurt
me and that he made me suffer, and that was
good enough. That was his way of apologizing. And again
(41:45):
we're talking about a man who was dying and a
few months after that he did die, So from that perspective,
that was good enough for me, and that was his
form of apologizing.
Speaker 2 (41:56):
Yeah, it's really beautiful to hear you speak about this
because your empathy for someone who we are taught to
have no empathy for because they lack empathy themselves. I
think the thing that is such a standout is the
fact that the reason why the person who's like the
victim of a narcissist gets hurt so bad is because
we still have empathy for them. We have empathy for
(42:18):
the fact that, as you said, they're not able to
love themselves, or they are that broken bird, or they
do the things that are incomprehensible to people who don't
have or don't live within this spectrum of narcissism or
behavioral sort of narcissistic personality disorder. Because we would never
treat people like that, but yet you still manage to
not only forgive, but have the empathy for the why
(42:40):
in how he does it. And I think that that's
just such a testament to what a kind hearted person
you are.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
That's right.
Speaker 4 (42:45):
I mean, the empathy is lacking in the narcissist, and
in the hypersensitive person it's in abundance, sometimes too much.
Speaker 3 (42:53):
Also often why they're attracted to you as well.
Speaker 4 (42:55):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (42:56):
Yes, you've wrote in.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
Your book about as Jarnie was dying, finding a different
kind of intimacy.
Speaker 5 (43:03):
What did you mean by that?
Speaker 4 (43:04):
Yeah, So it occurred to me when it was only
the two of us at the end, like literally there
we were, you know, in finals Queensland. The weather was
doing its thing as in dramatic tropical weather. We did
actually have a category five cyclone.
Speaker 1 (43:18):
He heah, and then we had it followed by a
real one.
Speaker 4 (43:23):
It felt very precious and it felt like that was
such a unique intimacy that obviously he could only I mean,
that wasn't replicable, like you can you know, share your
in your sexual intimacy with multiple partners as he did,
but there was only me that he shared that intimacy with.
So it felt like a privilege, and it really felt
(43:44):
like a gift. And there's this wonderful quote by ram
das the American Guru, who says, we're all just walking
each other home. And it felt like my role then
was to walk him home to his final destination and
to be there to hold his and and to make
peace with him, because I think he also it was
(44:05):
a beautiful Yeah, it was a beautiful time being there
with him in this that was real intimacy in his
most vulnerable state, in his most vulnerable state, when he
you know, I could have I mean I could have
just I don't know, kicked him out of the bed
or whatever, like he was completely vulnerable, and to be
there and to honor that that was a real privilege. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
How do you feel like your thoughts around relationships and
love and intimacy now have changed?
Speaker 4 (44:28):
Has it affected you.
Speaker 3 (44:29):
I don't know, are you? Are you dating again?
Speaker 5 (44:31):
Has it affected what you want from your relationships?
Speaker 4 (44:34):
Yeah? I think I remain a trusting person and that
I always say jokingly, and now I work more on
the relationship I have with myself that is actually much
more important. I mean it sounds maybe selfish, but really
you have to work on the self love and especially
the EmPATH amongst us need to also foreground that a
(44:55):
little bit, And it's another sort of survival strategy. You know,
you can't really others if you're not having a nurturing
relationship with yourself, which also means knowing what your boundaries
are and honoring them. So I think I'm getting better
at the head sort of honoring my boundaries and just saying, Okay,
this is what I need.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
And Yeah, this might be a really hard question to
answer because the alternate you can't really compare to because
you didn't experience it. But do you think finding out
and like living through this time away from him, this forgiveness,
this acceptance, do you think that ultimately it made dealing
with his death easier or do you think it was
(45:36):
still as hard. Did you still feel as in love
with him at the end, or was it almost as
though there was a sense of not obligation because you
wanted to be there as well, but just a sense
that you could make closure with it easier than had
you had this blissful relationship right until the end.
Speaker 4 (45:53):
Yeah, I mean, obviously we can't know these things, but
I definitely think yes, in the sense that already, when
on the ship, I had to look after him, and
it was that was really hard too, because the ship
was swaying, we got into you know, storms and so on.
I had somehow taken on that maternal love, or rather
I was forced to also this well of maternal love
(46:16):
sort of sprang forth, which sort of mixed with the
romantic love. And so that maternal love, the caring, the
looking after him, the day to day business of cooking
the meals for him, making sure he ate that anti
cancer that helped. Yes, shifted, Yes, it shifted, It definitely shifted.
But I also thought about, you know, what would it
have been like had I not known before he died?
(46:37):
What would it have been like find out after he
had died? And I think that would have been so hard.
Speaker 1 (46:43):
Oh worse, yes, worse, But there's no resolution, that's right,
And at least this way that you had, I guess
a level of closure.
Speaker 2 (46:51):
I agree, because you would literally be like the man
I loved I didn't know. You wouldn't have a chance
to even have those grounding conversations around the why.
Speaker 4 (46:59):
Yes, I know.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
A lot of people would be asking or thinking to
themselves right now, did he have another option for someone
to look after him?
Speaker 3 (47:07):
Did he have other.
Speaker 1 (47:07):
Family or friends or like, could you have made the
decision to walk away knowing he would have been cared for.
Speaker 4 (47:13):
Yes, yes, and you still chose to stay. Yeah. I
mean his brother was overseas, so technically it would have.
But yes, it could have. Yes, definitely.
Speaker 3 (47:21):
I just there's a part of me.
Speaker 1 (47:23):
I mean when I put myself in this position and
I had this conversation with Laura, and I had it
with my partner Ben straight away. Ben was like, I'd
give you to someone else to look after, and he
was like, if you've been doing the dirty on me?
And I thought about it, and I thought, there's a
part of you that can't. There's no closure if you
walk away, and if there's no forgiveness, And this forgiveness
(47:43):
is the most powerful thing.
Speaker 3 (47:45):
And you often don't forgive someone for them.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
You forgive someone for yourself so that you can move
on with your life and not have this hatred cloud
hanging over your head constantly. And I think people get
mixed up with that the reason for forgiveness, and people
would judge you for forgiving someone, like how could that
person stay and look after someone when he did that
to her.
Speaker 3 (48:04):
But it's not necessarily for him.
Speaker 4 (48:06):
That's right, You do it also for yourself, because I
wanted to be able to live with the echoes of
my deeds, as in, I wanted to be able to
know that I've done. I wanted to be able to
live with it. And also when I was eighteen, I
dropped out of high school and I ended up working
in an old people's home, actually looking after the dying,
(48:28):
completely untrained. They didn't have any hi, you know, measures then,
and I knew it was very sacred to be able
to hold space. These were often people who didn't have family,
so I was the person holding their hands, and I
was eighteen, but I just felt it was such a
privilege and it was so sacred, and so I knew
(48:49):
that if I stayed with him until the end, we
would have this wonderful closure, or we could, and we did.
And also a friend had said to me, narcissists very
rarely changed, but it is possible sometimes at the end
of their lives, like when they're staring death in the face,
they can sometimes change. And I believe that there was
(49:10):
and the Buddhas saying, you know, can clean up a
lot of karma in those last moments. I do believe
that he did change that none of that was any
more important. And the other thing he did, which was
he kept saying thank you a lot, and I had
the feeling that he was healing himself with gratitude.
Speaker 3 (49:27):
And I couldn't heal it with apologies.
Speaker 4 (49:28):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (49:29):
Do you think the other women knew that you existed,
that he was married?
Speaker 4 (49:34):
Yes? They did, Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1 (49:36):
Did you ever feel like you wanted to reach out
to any of them in contact?
Speaker 4 (49:40):
I did?
Speaker 3 (49:40):
Oh, please do tell So the night before.
Speaker 4 (49:43):
The funeral, I had to write the eulogy, and I put,
you know, we put this lovely flyer together with all
these collash of photos and there was us, you know,
all over the world and all these photos and him
as a younger man and so on and off his
family of course, and then I was so angry. I
don't know. The anger came up in a way because
perhaps it was the reason for that, maybe because I
(50:05):
could never really yell at him, say you fucking bastard,
because you can't yell at a dying person with those words.
So I had to swallow that, and it came up
that night. I just thought Jesus. And that was the
other night I drank an entire bottle of red wine.
I didn't make a habit of.
Speaker 1 (50:23):
It, but I always send bad emails on a few
where a few ones don't we.
Speaker 4 (50:26):
And I was looking at this frog perched on the
rand on a chair. Thing that's him, Oh my god.
And I was yelling at the frog, you know, in
his slurred voice, and you know. Then I made a
pot of tea, soaped up. And then I thought, okay,
there's only one thing I can do to get over this,
and I rang his lovers. I had the numbers in
his diary. And the first one answered, and she knew
(50:49):
immediately who I was, and she already knew that he.
Speaker 3 (50:53):
Yeah, it's not him calling, is it. He's underground now?
Speaker 4 (50:57):
And it was from his phone. I guess, I guess
I can't remember now. And I said to her, look,
I knew he meant a lot to you, because this
woman had been in his life for longer than I
had been, because he had known her for much longer.
I wanted to let you know that the film is tomorrow,
and I wanted you to somehow be able to be
part of that, even though that you're over there, and
she just said, You've just taken this huge weight off me.
(51:19):
I feel so relieved. I felt so terrible. And then
I rang another one and she said the same.
Speaker 5 (51:24):
Sorry, Robbie is she was doing.
Speaker 1 (51:28):
She was married and she knew that you existed. She's
sorry and has the weight on her shoulder because you've
called her out on it. But you did that so nicely,
Like were you ever did you ever call any of
these women and not be such a beautiful person, Like
did you ever call them and say no? Yeah, but
like like you really hurt me, like you should be ashamed?
Speaker 3 (51:49):
Did you ever ever take that tactic?
Speaker 4 (51:51):
No? I didn't. There was one I really actually had
empathy for her because her husband had just also died
very terrible circumstances, and she I really believe that she
genuinely felt terrible for me, and we were basically in
the same boat. Suddenly here we are widows. So we
actually kept writing to each other for a while back
and forth. But then she just kept telling me about
(52:12):
her problems with her husband. I thought, yeah, that's enough.
Now that's what I'm not you know, I'm not podcast Yeah,
that's right. But it was sort of like, well, we're
all in this together, so we all loved the same man. Yeah,
And I think the first one I rang, I think
she would just really embarrassed me. Could hear the embarrassment,
and that was enough. She was really embarrassed, Yeah, and
(52:32):
annoying that you cousin. Thank you so much for coming
and for sharing your story. I mean, I think everyone
who listens to this is going to go home and
if they're in a relationship, is going to have that
conversation with their partner.
Speaker 3 (52:42):
What would you do?
Speaker 2 (52:43):
It was the first thing I thought when I saw
your book and I saw the title, and your generosity,
your empathy, your kindness absolutely exudes out of you, Like
it is such a beautiful thing. And I don't think
that everybody would respond in the way that you have,
that's for sure, you know. I think there is a
lot of people out there who would hold onto that
anger and hold on to that fury.
Speaker 4 (53:05):
Yeah, but that's actually thank you for saying that. But
I think of it as I say, I had to
save my own life, and if I had stayed that
angry woman, that wouldn't have served me, you know. And
I was getting old. I was looking in the mirror
going Do I want to look like? Do I want
all these lines? These anger lines?
Speaker 1 (53:20):
Know?
Speaker 4 (53:20):
What can I do? So well?
Speaker 2 (53:22):
It is called Loving My Lying, dying, cheating Husband, and
it is available at Awkward bookstores. We'll put a link
in the show notes as well. For you, Thank you
so much for coming and being part of the pod.
Speaker 4 (53:32):
Thank you so much for having me.
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