Lisa Curry reveals last moments with dying daughter Jaimi
Swimming legend Lisa Curry has revealed when she realised her daughter Jaimi had an eating disorder and told of the traumatic events that led to her death.
Books & Magazines
Don't miss out on the headlines from Books & Magazines. Followed categories will be added to My News.
In a quiet, but dimly lit hospital room, Jaimi Kenny lay wrapped in a soft blue blanket with her toy rabbit.
Her parents, Australia’s one time golden couple, swimming champion Lisa Curry and ironman Grant Kenny, were by her side holding her hand, stroking her head and kissing her.
Curry had arrived earlier to find her daughter unconscious and her kidneys failing.
She had sobbed “No, no, no, I’m not ready!”, when a doctor told her in a matter-of-fact tone, “Jaimi will die tonight”.
The 33-year-old had battled on for eight hours after her ventilator was switched off, but now she was just moments from death.
“Then her breathing started to get short, with longer gaps between each breath,” Curry wrote in her new book.
“I looked at the nurse and she said gently, ‘She’s going now.’ It was horrible, just horrible. At ten past seven, she took a breath, then she just didn’t breathe again. It was all over.”
Curry, 59, revealed the family’s intimate last moments with Jaimi at the Sunshine Coast University Hospital in September 2020, in Lisa: A memoir – 60 years of life, love & loss.
Her eldest daughter’s death followed years of alcohol abuse and a battle with eating disorders.
The book also delved into Jaimi’s tortured past, with Curry revealing for the first time how her daughter “suffered a complete abuse of trust” by a man they knew, who offered to drive her home from a celebration event at which Jaimi had been drinking.
It wasn’t until many years later that Jaimi revealed to her parents what actually happened that night.
“She was drunk enough to be taken advantage of without being able to put up any resistance, but not so out of it that she didn’t remember what had happened,” Curry said.
She added it “was yet another hurt in Jaimi’s already deeply traumatic and painful life”.
Jaimi’s difficult relationship with food and weight began at around the age of 14.
Curry said later when they would all go out to a restaurant for dinner, Jaimi would order three meals for herself.
On a family P&O Cruise trip Jaimi binged on food at the all-you-can-eat buffet.
“Jaimi couldn’t stop herself from eating and then it all came back up,” Curry wrote.
“And then she was so disgusted with herself, she’d sit in the corner of the cabin and cry – wail, really – and she’d actually punch herself; she was so angry with herself for doing it, but she couldn’t stop. She’d be sobbing, ‘I’m so fat!’”.
Like Curry was during her swimming career, Jaimi was subjected to pre-training weigh-ins.
Curry questioned in the book why her daughter and her peers needed to be weighed before their paddling outrigger training sessions.
And, she regretted a throwaway comment from legendary swim coach Don Talbot, about Jaimi needing to lose a bit of weight if she wanted to compete in the swimming pool at an elite level.
“I know he meant no harm and it was just a matter of-fact observation from a coach who was used to looking at lean Olympic bodies but, later on, I’d look back on it and wish he hadn’t said it,” Curry wrote.
Jaimi, who was a promising swim talent once placed fourth in the nationals, but quit aged 15 when kids at school started calling her “Muscles” and saying she looked like a boy, due to her physique.
Later, her love life was also troubled. She struggled after one relationship break-up, turning to alcohol.
But she eventually found a lovely man, Lachlan Crossley, and they planned to marry before he tragically died in his sleep in 2017, plunging her into a depression and into a downward spiral she was never quite able to recover from.
Curry wrote that the pain Jaimi “was feeling from years of hurt and trauma was all-consuming, and the alcohol was a bandage”.
“She would hurt herself often or get ill: she’d fall over, or develop severe stomach pains and heart palpitations,” Curry wrote. “She’d be vomiting up blood.
“She’d fall over in the street and someone would pick her up, so she’d end up in hospital again.”
The book revealed the lengths everyone went to try and save her.
“As a family, we fought this monster – the illness, the inevitability – but the monster was greater than all of us,” she wrote.
Curry, who was awarded an MBE and a Medal of the Order of Australia for her dedication to her sport, has called for a debate to save “the other Jaimis” out there who were suffering from eating disorders and complex mental health concerns.
Other revelations in Curry’s book include how the legendary swim coach Don Talbot, who led Australia’s swim team to glory from the 1960s to the early 2000s, discreetly organised for her to have an abortion when she was 18.
She also talked about the domestic violence in her childhood home.
Lisa: A memoir – 60 years of life, love & loss by Lisa Curry with Ellen Whinnett will be published by HarperCollins on 2 May 2022.
