by Jimi Hunt
Six hours later Lachy turned up. Dave had done his job so he left. With Lachy I had that feeling you get with old friends—you feel so comfortable it doesn’t matter how long it’s been since you last saw them. We just picked up where we had left off. I needed to talk about Jo with someone who knew me well, so we sat down and talked. It was great.
We went and played some pool, went to a couple of bars and just continued to talk. I needed this and I needed to be out of the flat. Eventually we went home, went to bed, and in the morning Lachy left to drive back to Whakatane. Thank you, Lachy! You did the best thing a friend could ever do for a mate in those circumstances.
I decided that I couldn’t put it off any longer and I had to go and tell my parents. They loved Jo and I knew that telling them would be more difficult than telling other people. I got to the front door and it was locked. I rang the bell. My English springer spaniel, Paddy, was first down the stairs with his usual super-excited glee. Dad came down next and opened the door. I stood in the doorway and cried. I told him that Jo had left me.
My father is the calmest, most rational and lovely man I know, but he’s a man from a previous generation. I had never seen him cry in my entire life . . . until then. He hugged me and told me it was going to be alright. We stood together and cried.
I hung out at my parents’ house for most of Sunday. I got the standard words of advice. What can you say to a man whose wife has just left him? ‘It’ll be okay . . . She’ll come back, mate . . . Don’t worry, you’ll find another one.’ There isn’t all that much you can say, and that’s the interesting part.
As word travelled that Jo had left me, some people got in contact and some didn’t. Some people made super-awkward comments and others said nothing. I was upset if I knew that friends had found out but said nothing, even though I know it was because they didn’t know what to say. For the record, I think the best thing you can say to someone who has had a major bad life event, like their wife has just announced she’s leaving, is, ‘Hey, I’m here if you need to talk.’ No bullshit niceties, no fakeness—just human kindness.
When it was time to go home I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t want to stay at my parents’ place or anyone else’s for that matter. So I went home. It was cold. It was quiet. It was empty. Jo had been and taken more of her things. I was tired, but my mind wouldn’t shut up.
I couldn’t go to sleep, so I went out. No one wanted to come out with me on a Sunday night, which wasn’t that surprising. I don’t really have alcoholic or unemployed friends. So I went out to a bar alone and was very happy to find out that there are people who go out on a Sunday. I knew no one but had decided that I wasn’t going to sit by myself all night. I made myself approach a table of strangers and tried out my new pick-up line.
‘Hi, I’m Jimi. My wife just left me and none of my friends can hang out with me tonight. Can I sit with you guys?’ They laughed. When they realised from my face that I wasn’t joking they welcomed me to their table. Yahoo! I now had Sunday-night bar friends.
Over the previous couple of years I had developed an intense fear of being alone. Before that I could hang by myself, no problem. Now, I couldn’t be left alone with my thoughts because they wouldn’t stop. Since Friday, when I was alone there was just one word running on a loop tape: ‘Jo Jo Jo . . . Jo Jo Jo . . . Jo Jo Jo . . .’
Could I get her back? Did I want her back? I didn’t want to be alone to ask these questions. After all, she had left me and I knew I wanted her back. It would have been torture to be alone dwelling on these things. I had a simple solution—I would not stop. I got up in the morning, made my breakfast, went to work, worked all day, went home, got changed and went out to a bar. I would try to get my friends to come out with me, but that was not always possible. Most of them had normal lives, girlfriends, jobs, families, etc. So I would go out by myself and use my pick-up line. People thought it was hilarious that someone would be so open about it.
It’s hard to make new friends, especially in Auckland, but my new line was so absurd people had to respond to it. Whether they took pity on me because I was a broken man or admired me for my candour didn’t matter to me. I was always glad that they let me hang out with them. I would do that every night, getting home at 1 or 2 am. I’d fall asleep straightaway, get up at 7 and do it all over again. I did it for over 30 days straight. I am so glad I don’t drink or do drugs, because after 30 days I’m sure I would have ended up making a complete mess of myself. This was my coping mechanism—my way of getting through the day.
I didn’t understand why Jo had left me. That was what hurt so much. I was getting better and I was about to make everything better. I understood that things hadn’t been great and that I hadn’t been great, but it seemed to me that was all in the past. We were married and it was all going to be okay. So, yeah, I still wanted her back, but I didn’t know what to do.
DR JOHN REVISITED
I called Dr John McEwan and went for another session.
‘Hey, Jimi, how are things?’ he asked.
‘I’m the best I’ve ever been and the worst I’ve ever been, all rolled up into a little ball.’
‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘I was hoping we would have more time.’
‘More time for what?’ This man was strange, he sounded like Doc from Back to the Future. What did he mean?
‘It’s your wife,’ he said. ‘Has she left you?’ What the hell!
I’m paying a doctor not a psychic! How the hell did he know that? He explained that this was not unusual. Jo, like other people who have partners that suffer from depression, loved me and didn’t want to leave me while I was sick. She wanted to help me get better, and she had. Once the depression cloud had been lifted, the years of suffering left partners with feelings of anger, resentment and even hate. Jo was allowed to be angry with me because I was better. Me being cured couldn’t fix the damage that had already been done over the five years we had spent together.
Jo couldn’t leave a sick husband, but when I was better she could leave me. And she did. This made plenty of sense to me. She had probably wanted to leave months before. Still, I thought that I could make it all better if she would let me. ‘There must be some hope, Dr John? Something?’
He said there was, because the first stage of the grieving period for something like this is about three months. The end of that three-month period coincided perfectly with New Year’s Eve. That was good because the new year is a time for reflection and new beginnings.
‘So what’s the plan?’ I asked.
‘Is there anyone else in the picture?’
‘Not for me,’ and he asked about Jo. I said, ‘No, Jo just left me because of me.’
‘Good, that makes it a lot easier. Give her the three months, then you can both re-evaluate your relationship in January.’
I understood and I felt a little bit of relief. I also finally understood why she had left me. It made perfect sense. She had to come to terms with the way I had treated her when I wasn’t well, and if she could do that maybe we could start again in January. I was optimistic and that was a real change for me.
Time ticked along. I continued to go out every night. I missed Jo. It hurt bad, but I held on to my hope for the new year.
I also kept up my training and it was tough. Jo was still working at CrossFitNZ and I couldn’t always avoid seeing her at training. I did try to make sure that I didn’t go while she was working. It challenged me, either way—I wanted to see her, but I also didn’t, because it killed me to know that I could see her but not be with her. We kept in contact anyway because we had things to sort out. She wanted some of her things from the house, so she came by occasionally to collect them. She needed to borrow the car because she didn’t have one and I was happy to lend it to her. She needed some money to help get into a new flat. Cool, I’d help out. I wasn’t getting the feeling that any of this was getting any better though.
I put my head down and ploughed on, working in my spare time on getting Lilo The Waikato g
oing as well as I could. But it was slow going. It hadn’t been picked up by the media quite like I had wanted. The Waikato Times article was good, but people kept asking, ‘What charity are you doing it for?’ I told everyone that I was doing it for myself.
To try to get more people following it on Facebook I had sent an email out to a few people who were quite good in the social media space. One man responded with a series of questions about the adventure so he could figure out how best to help. I was keen to answer his questions.
The first one was: What is your social footprint? I had to turn to Google to find out what exactly a social footprint is.
Thelastoriginalidea.com defined it as ‘the social impact of an individual on their family, peers and society’. Shit. I didn’t know what my social footprint was. I didn’t have one for Lilo—it was one man going down a river. Then I had my epiphany. I had hidden my depression from everyone in the world except the two people closest to me. Now I was feeling better I realised that at last I was prepared to tell my friends that I had been unwell. If I could tell my friends, what was stopping me from telling the whole world? There and then I had answered the biggest question of all.
John Kirwan has done, and continues to do, an amazing job raising awareness about depression in New Zealand. Just maybe, I could add to that. Maybe I, too, could get some people to open up, talk about it and ask for help. That was it, I had been doing it for me, with a tagline of ‘Just ’cos’. Now I would do it to raise awareness about depression, and my new tagline would be ‘Ask for help’.
A month or so later, Jo and I were both invited to our friends’ wedding. I didn’t want to see Jo. I knew it was going to be too hard so I made up my mind I wasn’t going to go. However, the couple had asked me to drive the bride to the service in my recently acquired Kermit-green 1974 Cortina station wagon. (With only 48,000 kilometres on the clock it had been irresistible.) Of course I agreed. On the day, I drove the bride to the church, followed her in and went and sat way over on the left-hand side by myself.
I had plenty of friends at the wedding but I didn’t want to bother anyone. I could see Jo out of the corner of my eye but I tried not to make eye contact with anyone, especially her. As the ceremony was starting she was sitting with a guy from the gym that we both knew. She got up and came and sat next to me. I couldn’t look at her. She held my hand as I cried quietly to myself. She told me I looked so sad she felt she had to sit with me. What she didn’t realise was that I couldn’t think, right then, of a worse thing to happen.
Sitting in a church, a place I didn’t feel comfortable in anyway, listening to vows being spoken by people I love about how much they loved each other and promising to be with each other forever and to love each other forever . . . The words cut me like a knife, especially when they said ‘in sickness and in health’.
I was sitting next to the person I loved. She had left me after telling me she never wanted to be with me again. And she was holding my hand and telling me everything was going to be alright. No wonder I was crying. It was heartbreaking.
I spent the entire ceremony looking out the window to the left. I can’t tell you much about what happened in the church that day. I can, however, tell you everything about the real-estate agency’s window across the road. The words on the sign, the letters in the words, the font they used, how the corners of the sign were peeling and the colours fading from long-term exposure to the sun. And I can tell you how the grass on the lawn hadn’t been cut recently enough to be perfect for a wedding. I can tell you everything about nothing. I just couldn’t deal with what was going on inside the church that day.
After the service it took about 30 minutes for everyone to leave the church and I spent that time talking to the guy from the gym who had been sitting next to Jo. I drove the bride and groom to the reception venue ahead of the crowd so they had time for the obligatory photos. I ended up wandering through the dining area reading the names around each table. Jo’s name was close to mine, which didn’t thrill me. So I switched with someone else and moved my nametag to the end of another table and waited for the other guests to arrive.
The reception was lovely. The speeches were funny. The food was good. It was a nice evening, but I was quiet. People around me were talking and having a good time, but I wasn’t saying much. The girl opposite me asked me what I did. As I said earlier, I don’t really like that question. So, as usual, instead of telling her what I do I told her what I was going to do, and that was easy—I was going to Lilo the entire length of the Waikato River.
I perked up. I was talking about something that excited me. In fact, it more than excited me. It was my entire reason for being at the moment. It was my everything. The only time I stopped thinking about Jo was when I was thinking about Lilo. I was training my body hard so I would be ready for it, and the rest of the time I wasn’t working at my day job I spent working on the logistics of Jimi’s Biggest Ninja River Adventure.
When I had finished telling her about all the things I was going to do, her boyfriend, who had been sitting quietly next to her, piped up, ‘My name’s Matt and I’m a reporter for Close Up. Do you think you’d like to do a story with us?’ Would I? Absolutely! He said he couldn’t promise anything, but he’d be happy to pitch it to his producer. Yahoo! I knew I had come to this wedding for a reason.
In the following days I held on to the hope that Jo and I would be able to work things out—that we would be able to find a way to be together again. I remembered Dr John’s words, but realistically it didn’t look all that promising. I still loved her. I still wanted her back.
At 9.06 am on the Tuesday after the wedding I was sitting at my desk when the phone rang. A girl I kind of knew told me that her boyfriend, the guy sitting next to Jo at the wedding, had been cheating on her . . . with Jo. Wow. That hit me hard. First, I felt sorry for her that she had been cheated on. Next, I felt gutted, my stomach in knots, that the woman I still thought of as my wife had moved on so quickly. But it was worse than that. Apparently, the two of them had started seeing each other months ago, while Jo and I were still together. Alone in the office, I felt my body go cold. I felt a piercing pain in my chest and then my body shut down. My heart was breaking. I started crying and couldn’t stop. I had never felt such pain. I thought the pain of the day she told me she was leaving was the worst I could possibly feel, and this was ten times worse.
I couldn’t work. I couldn’t think. My skin was prickly. I felt physically sick. I was crying as I hid from the other people in my office. I simply couldn’t process it. I couldn’t handle it. I had to go home. But first I had to ring Jo. I had to confront her.
‘Hey, Jimi, what’s up?’ she answered.
‘You cheated on me,’ was my curt reply. A discussion ensued. And when I say discussion, I mean argument. She told me what had happened. A few months earlier, she and this guy had gone together to a competition run by a Cross-Fit affiliate in Mount Maunganui. Things had happened, she said, but then nothing had happened again until after we had broken up. I believed her when she said they hadn’t been actively engaged in an affair for the months we were still together. She had never lied to me before and I had no reason to doubt her.
Even if it was only once, or if it was a million times, it hurt just the same. She said she should have left me back then, when it happened. She’s right, she should have. Just before she had left to go to the competition we had had an argument, a big one. It was the turning point in our marriage. It was the point at which Jo decided she didn’t love me as a husband anymore. It was the point at which she decided that she wanted to hurt me by being with someone else. When something happened on her weekend away she decided that she couldn’t tell me, because she didn’t actually want to hurt me like that—she just wanted to not be with me anymore. She also felt she couldn’t leave a sick man.
I went home. This was the worst day of my life, but it was also strangely liberating. I loved Jo. I had wanted her back until now. But now I knew for certain I didn�
�t ever want to see her again. Jo and I had an understanding about cheating. We had both been cheated on before and knew how much it hurt. Neither of us had ever cheated on our partners and neither of us ever thought we would, until Jo found out she could that weekend at the Mount. Suddenly it was really clear in my mind, we were over and that day was the first day of my new life.
When I went home that morning there was Dave, the guy who had hung out with me when I needed someone. Dave had been my flatmate for a while, since I realised I couldn’t pay the rent on my own. ‘I’m baking a cake!’ I declared.
‘Sure,’ said Dave.
I explained what had happened and announced I was going to make a celebratory cake. I’m not renowned for my baking, but undaunted, I went off to the supermarket for some supplies. I bought one packet of vanilla cake mix, a cake tin, one packet of Pineapple Lumps, a bag of Maltesers, a packet of chocolate fingers, pink food colouring and icing sugar. At home I tipped the full bag of Pineapple Lumps into the cake mix. Once it was baked and cooled I completely covered it with lemon-flavoured pink icing. I made a fence of chocolate fingers around the cake that sat above the top of the cake and I filled the space with crushed Maltesers. This cake was guaranteed to give me, and anyone else who ate a piece, diabetes in a single bite. But it represented my freedom.
I then went to the gym to ward off the diabetes, but also because it had become a new way for me to deal with my inner pain. I would go to the gym and smash myself, quietly, alone, in the corner. The anger that day actually gave me power and I achieved personal bests in my dead lift and one of my metabolic conditioning routines. I was getting better. I was determined to get better with or without Jo.
