Kerri-Anne: “Mornings Are The Hardest”

In her first sit-down interview since the passing of her beloved husband, John, in February, Kerri-Anne Kennerley reveals the incredible pain of those final days and how she’s managing to move on.

- Michael Sheather

It was late, well past the time when visitors to Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital were due to leave. But Kerri-Anne Kennerley wasn’t going anywhere. She sat in the same chair she had occupied for much of the past few weeks, caring for her husband, John, who now lay critically injured and fighting for life in the bed beside her with a catastrophic injury to his spinal column.

“It had been a long day for both of us,” recalls Kerri-Anne, who is in her mid-60s. “John had been through an operation to help him breathe properly, through an intubation tube in his throat, but at that stage we didn’t know if he would be able to breathe on his own without the tube and a machine.

“As I sat there with him, my head resting on my arm on the bed beside him, I saw him blinking and obviously trying to tell me something. I stood up and leaned over. He couldn’t speak but he could still mouth words and I could understand what he wanted to say. I watched as he slowly mouthed the words, ‘How hard do you want me to try?’”

For Kerri-Anne, it was as heart-breaking a moment as she has ever experienced, a moment that even now, three-years later, brings tears to her eyes.

“It was such a difficult thing to hear someone you love say,” she recalls. “John was always such a tower of strength – quietly spoken but with a deep intellect and a great strength of character. For him to ask that question showed that he understood just how badly injured he really was, just how hard he was going to have to fight. It was a shattering moment. I cried and cried, harder than I have ever cried in my entire life and I begged him to fight. I said: ‘You fight as long and hard as you can because I don’t want to lose you.’”