Source: Radio New Zealand (world)
Broadcaster Simon Barnett reflects on life after Jodi, opening up his heart again and changing careers.
Broadcaster Simon Barnett still misses holding his late wife’s hand when driving to their “happy place” in Queenstown.
“We would set off in Christchurch – it’s a six-hour drive to Queenstown – and we would start talking, and we would still be talking when we pulled up to our place, and holding hands. And I miss that. I miss holding her hand while I drive and just talking. It definitely hits me at times.
“The first few trips going down there [after Jodi died], I literally sobbed. From Christchurch to Queenstown, I just sobbed, I couldn’t even see, I didn’t care if I drove off the road,” Barnett tells The Detail.
Simon Barnett and Jodi, his wife of 32 years.
Simon Barnett on grief, healing, and hope
“But it got better. I would cry half the way, then a quarter of the way, then to Ashburton, now I don’t cry.”
It’s now been two and a half years since Jodi died from brain cancer, with Barnett nursing her through those final years.
“I loved her with every single ounce of me.
“Jodi lost the ability to speak early on. After her first or second brain surgery, she lost the ability to move, she couldn’t shower, she couldn’t go to the toilet.
“I was her main caregiver… but I would look at her, and I would just think, ‘it’s impossible, but I love you more now than I did when you were able-bodied’. It’s just a weird thing that happened to me.
“I just loved her completely. I would say to God, ‘take everything from me… I just don’t want her to die’.”
Today, Barnett is finding his way forward without “the one-in-a-billion, absolute love of my life”, and the mother of his four daughters, and that includes leaning in to his return to breakfast radio on More FM and to reality TV.
With an older and perhaps more fragile body, the 58-year-old returned to Celebrity Treasure Island this month, only to pull out last week due to injury during a physical strength competition with fellow contestant Portia Woodman.
Barnett was forced to step away from CTI due to injury.
Barnett says he took the TV gig, which he was a favourite to win, after talking to his counsellor.
“He said something quite simple, but it was absolutely valid. He said, ‘the problem you’ve got, Simon, is you are trying to live your old life the same way, just without Jodi. And that won’t work. It will always fail’. He said, ‘you need to create a new life’.
“I was sobbing in his office, and I said, ‘I don’t want a new life’, and then he looked at me, and it was almost cold, but it was absolutely accurate, and he said, ‘you don’t have a choice’.
“Part of that was doing that show… I don’t love these sorts of things… but I did it and made some really good friendships.”
Barnett refuses to watch his television appearances – “I hate seeing myself on TV” – and that includes his stint on Dancing With The Stars, which he won in 2015.
SImon Barnett on the finale of Dancing With the Stars.
With a laugh, he recalls the poor reaction to his first dancing performance (to Rock DJ by Robbie Williams) which the judged slammed.
And it turns out, even Robbie Williams was unimpressed.
“I haven’t told anyone this before. I did an interview with Robbie Williams… without a word of a lie, he said, ‘I hear you did a dance on Dancing With The Stars, and you won it, but your first dance was to one of my songs, and you crucified it’. That’s what he said. Somebody had sent him a copy of my dance… it was a disaster.”
Barnett says he’s an open book, and he loves talking about Jodi, his wife of 32 years. One thing he’s firm on is that he is moving forward, not moving on.
“It’s a very subtle distinction, but nonetheless, it’s a paramount distinction, because I would say to move on, it sounds to me, in my head, it says that Jodi was temporal and it was just a phase in my life that I had her, and now I have moved on to my next phase. And that isn’t so.
“She is with me ever-present, in the way that she conducted herself, the way she loved me… I have said this to my kids, I doubt very much whether anybody would have the capacity to love me – or the fortitude to love me – as she did, but I am OK with that.”
Barnett admits he would love to find love again, but acknowledges his daughters “find that hard, they really do, because they feel it diminishes the love I felt for their mother”.
“And I said, ‘nothing could diminish that love, nothing ever could. That is set in bronze’.
“But that is another sidebar of early death and grief and loss. I don’t know what the answer is there. There is no rule book on this.”
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