Seven years ago, Janelle Brunton-Rennie was celebrating her wedding anniversary to her gorgeous husband, Kurt, with their four-month-old daughter. One day later, Kurt found a lump and was diagnosed with an aggressive form of blood cancer, which would end his life just almost exactly one year later. This lead to Janelle becoming a widow at just 36, as well as becoming a solo parent and sole breadwinner.
Now, embarking on the next chapter of her life, she has finally got enough space to grieve for the younger version of herself, who lost so much, so quickly, and had to become everything to her daughter, so fast. She writes a letter to her newly widowed self, with the perspective of how to keep going when the unthinkable happens to you.
Welcome to our new column, A Letter To… In the coming months some of our most well-known Kiwis and everyday heroes will be penning letters about a topic close to their hearts. Some of their names you will know very well, while other’s will be kept anonymous to protect the privacy of the subjects. Whether it is a letter to a specific someone, or a group of people, or simply an open letter to broach a difficult subject, each will be very different, but all will share one common thread; they will all be written from the heart. You can read our other letters here.
It has been six years since my brave, beautiful, incredibly courageous late husband Kurt passed away after battling blood cancer for 12 months.
When Kurt was diagnosed out of the blue with a super aggressive type of blood cancer, we had a four-month-old baby girl. I was having a very hard time adjusting to being a new mother, while running a business at the same time, and I was only just starting to put a severe case of the baby blues behind me. I was also scheduled for major surgery, for my own health issues. Kurt had been my rock, helping me hold it all together.
And then his cancer diagnosis arrived.
When I think back to my younger self, I grieve for that woman who had to hold it together. For the new mother who was still navigating those early months of motherhood, for the loyal and devoted wife who fought so hard to save her husband’s life, and who held his hands as he took his final breath.
And then I grieve for the widow and the single mum, who lived in survival mode for the years that followed – the pain and desperate loneliness of all those nights after he had gone, the woman who felt so much guilt and anger that she had failed to save him.
As I have allowed myself to feel this grief for my younger self, I have wondered what I would tell her. I know what I wouldn’t tell her – I got told things like “you’re young, you’ll meet someone else”, “everything happens for a reason”, “he’s better off now that he’s not in pain”, or even “I know how you feel, I was completely devasted when my grandma/dog/cat died.”
Even though the sentiment behind these words may be sincere, they feel dismissive and they made the pain and the unjustness of it all even worse.
I wish I could go back and just sit with her. I would hold space for her for as long as she needed and let her just scream at the universe whilst I didn’t say a single word. Just my being there, unconditionally and witnessing the severity of her pain, with no judgement, just pure compassion.
Because that’s what my younger self needed for those first few months: permission to roar in pain, to be allowed to be seen completely raw, frayed and undone. But she didn’t, and she wasn’t. She put on a brave face as every good widow ‘should’ and got on with running her business and raising her baby.
But looking back now, I think I would tell my younger self this: ‘Slowly, very slowly you will start to see in colour again, food will one day taste good again. Believe it or not, you will even one day laugh again until your belly hurts. Until then, focus on finding momentary pleasure in the smallest of things. Sip your espresso mindfully. Watch the incense smoke dance. Be with the sun when it rises. Just keep living until you start to feel alive again.
This loss, this grief, it will never go away BUT life will build around it; you will integrate it into the life you continue to create as time goes by. One day, my darling, like a phoenix you will rise from these ashes, I promise.
At your weakest point in life, you will birth your strongest you, and with the self-belief that comes when you rise from those ashes, you will move forward and create the most wonderful life for you and your little girl. You will survive this, because the incredible fire within you burns stronger than the fire around you. But for now, take it one hour at time, then one day at a time, then one week at a time: focussing on those small joys, the tiny pleasures.’
It took about two and a half years of feeling like a shell of my former self, that I reached the end of driving at full speed through what seemed like a dark, dark tunnel, just focusing on reaching the light at the end of it. Now, I know that this is what survival mode looks like.
I sat blinking in the daylight, blinded, dazed, and confused, with no real memory of what those two and a half years really entailed. For so long, I had just one motto: keep myself alive, keep my baby alive and keep my business alive so I could provide for us, and that was it.
But once I was out in the light again, I felt completely lost. No real goals, no re-imagined future, no longer merely surviving, just idling in the space between the past and the future. I think I idled there for another couple of years, to be honest. Waiting for life to start again, so to speak, and not knowing it what direction to walk.
Then my fiancée Max came along. We have been very good friends for 16 years and have both witnessed and supported each other through some challenging times. The first year of our relationship bought with it some big challenges, but we managed to work through them together.
I needed to give myself permission to build again, to go through the initial uncertainties and challenges that a new relationship brings, and those things were very painful and triggering. They resurfaced a lot of my grief and abandonment wounds in the process which I wasn’t prepared for, and it was very confronting.
In hindsight, I would tell myself this: ‘be patient with yourself and give yourself grace: you’re doing your best and it’s brave to be trying to love again and daring to dream again after navigating such heartache. You won’t discover a great relationship, but you will build it.’
Max and I have consciously blended our families together. My daughter Sage is now 7, and Max has two beautiful little girls who are 7 and 4 and our girls are very close. Learning how to love each other has required us to both release ideas of how the future was “meant to” look, as well as what our traditional definitions of family were. Instead, we’ve allowed ourselves to create something really beautiful, supportive, and loving on our terms, and we’re both so incredibly proud of how we’ve navigated that process.
And finally, the last piece of advice I would give my younger self is this: ‘Grief is something you will sit with every single day, a testament to a beautiful man and the beautiful love that you shared. So much of life’s suffering comes from not accepting change, and death as a part of life.
But, in no way does that mean we shouldn’t love deeply. It just means we must learn to continuously ‘let go’ of our idea of how life is meant to be, and meet the one that we wake up to, every single day with an open heart.
You will love again. You will hurt again. You will have to grieve more people you love. You are human. To love, to lose, to experience life with the emotional volume turned up as loud as it will go is the gift of being human. Victim or victor – it’s your choice. Just as storm’s reshape coastlines, grief reshapes us too and we can emerge from these storms stronger yet deeper and gentler as each one passes.
You heal, but you are not the same and you wouldn’t want to be.’