While Kerstin Pilz’s husband lay dying she discovered he had been cheating
She discovered her beloved husband’s many infidelities while he lay terminally ill in hospital. What did Kerstin Pilz do next?
It was quite the scene: Kerstin Pilz’s husband, Gianni, had been diagnosed with cancer and he was experiencing frightening symptoms. His hands were shaking, his legs collapsing, and when he went to speak it was like he’d swallowed a helium balloon.
Kerstin wanted to rush him to hospital, but first they needed to download his most recent scans so they could give them to the doctor.
Gianni couldn’t do it. He had too little control over his motor function. Kerstin didn’t have the password for his laptop, or the PIN code for his phone. He had always been protective of his devices, but honestly, this was ridiculous. He simply had to hand them over.
Finally, he spat it out. His password for the laptop was Tamarama, after the beach near where they lived in Sydney. Kerstin breathed a sigh of relief and logged in. She was scanning through Gianni’s emails for the relevant PDF when she saw the words “bella donna” in the subject line of one of his messages.
Bella donna. Beautiful woman.
A question mark lodged in her brain, “like a tiny splinter of wood in a finger … not a serious injury, just a gentle throbbing”.
She logged out of the computer and grabbed her keys. She took Gianni to hospital. There had been no time to waste. The tumour inside her husband’s skull had started to bleed. He was going to need surgery. The next time she saw him he was under an aluminium blanket, with a turban of gauze.
For three weeks, she visited every day.
She didn’t touch the laptop.
But that little splinter in her brain? It didn’t go away. It nagged. And so the night before Gianni was due to be discharged, Kerstin entered “Tamarama” into his laptop and, yep, you guessed it, up came the lovers.
There was the Slut from Sardinia.
The Tramp from Tuscany.
The woman he’d rolled around with in a hotel room in Rome.
The email chains ran to pages. Gianni had been cheating with these women all through their marriage. He’d emailed one of them from Kerstin’s teenage bedroom while they were visiting her parents in Germany; he’d emailed another from Kerstin’s computer while his was being fixed.
Kerstin wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. She wanted to kick her lying cheating husband to the kerb. But Gianni was at that moment in a hospital bed with staples in his skull. His condition was terminal. So, the real question was: could she find a way to go on loving her lying, cheating, dying husband?
I’ve arranged to meet Kerstin at the Salt House seafood restaurant, on the harbour in Cairns. It is autumn, and the frangipanis are about done flowering for the year, but it is still 31 degrees. Kerstin arrives in a moonboot, having managed to break a bone getting tangled in a doona cover in her own bedroom.
At a certain age, it happens.
Kerstin is now 60, still lithe, and lovely to look at.
The events she describes in her book, which bears the marvellous title Loving My Lying, Dying, Cheating Husband, occurred more than ten years ago. Gianni Cocco died on 1.1.11. It took at least a decade for Kerstin to process the loss, and three more years to write and publish her memoir.
She adored him. Truly.
She’s pretty sure that he adored her, too.
“Gianni was a typical Italian, in many ways larger than life,” she says. “He was charming and charismatic. I know now that he wasn’t ever able to resist other women, but I think when we first met he really wanted to change.”
I must have raised an eyebrow over our barramundi and chips because she’s moved to insist: “No, I really believe that. I think, when we met, we both fell in love. But then he got bored. Because he was the kind of man who needed a lot of attention. My career was taking off, and he was retired and didn’t have enough to do. And as I got busier, old habits die hard – he started texting some of his old lovers …”
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
How did the couple meet? Kerstin takes a sip of mineral water and plunges into the story. She was 43 years old, single, and living in Sydney. She’d just had an ovary removed, and the surgeon had told her she wouldn’t be able to have children. She was grieving that loss but she was also celebrating the publication of her PhD when she locked eyes with Gianni at a party in her honour. The attraction was immediate.
“He made me feel sexy,” she says. “I don’t think I’d ever felt sexy before. He told me he wanted to take me riding over the Harbour Bridge on his yellow Harley-Davidson. I was a serious-minded academic. I’d grown up in Germany with a German mother whose ambition had been thwarted, in part because she’d had children. She always told me: ‘Don’t have children, it just ties you down’. Which made me, as her child, feel like I wasn’t particularly loved or wanted. My self-esteem was always a bit low.”
Kerstin had achieved great things since hitting the road in the 1980s, backpacking around the world before settling in Melbourne with just a few hundred dollars in her money belt. She’d had a serious, 10-year relationship before moving to Sydney, and she’d become an expert in the study of the Italian language and culture (besides English, German and Italian, she speaks a little French, some Spanish, and some Indonesian.)
She thinks it was the loss of her ovary that made her wonder: Is this all there is? I won’t have my own children, but what about one great love?
Then Gianni came along. Within days, she was sending her first sext messages.
It felt so naughty.
She felt alive.
Gianni called her bellissima and cucciola (my pet). Nobody had ever made her feel so pretty or been as generous. Gianni was divorced, with grown-up children, and used to living large. He encouraged her to do the same, buying an expensive French crockpot for her kitchen just because she’d mentioned that she had always wanted one; splurging on champagne and artisan cheeses, and making love with gusto.
“We’d take a bottle of wine to bed in the afternoon, and stay there until the next day,” Kerstin says. He wanted to celebrate everything: their first month together, their Christmas, their first New Year’s Eve. She was completely smitten. After just three months, she gave up her apartment. It was meant to be a “trial” to see how they’d go living together, but since he was 55 she also felt like they had no time to waste.
A short time later, Kerstin was offered what may be the best job imaginable: seven international universities had banded together to create a study program on a cruise ship, to be called The Scholar Ship. How would she feel about becoming an academic aboard this university-at-sea? Gianni would be allowed to go with her. They would travel full-time, and she’d be paid, and they would get to see the world.
Of course, she said yes, and they excitedly made their plans.
Shortly before they were due to leave, though, Gianni went to have a skin check and was diagnosed with a melanoma. He had it removed, and they were comforted when told he’d caught it early and was likely to recover.
And so, all aboard, everyone!
The Scholar Ship was in fact the refitted Oceanic II, an old ocean liner with polished floorboards, a pool and a basketball court. Kerstin and Gianni were given a nice cabin, and she got to work preparing and delivering lectures. “But I soon began to detect an undercurrent of bitterness in Gianni,” she says. “He didn’t like not having an official role when everyone around him was busy. I was soaring, really, and I think that’s why he decided, on a whim, that we should get married on the ship, in front of everyone. Thinking about it now, he always had that need to be the centre of attention.”
She accepted his proposal, and had a silk dress made in traditional Chinese cheongsam style while the ship was docked in Pattaya. Gianni got fitted for a suit, and some Chinese international students came to paint Kerstin’s toenails red. And then, two degrees south of the equator, five hundred nautical miles off the coast of West Africa, they exchanged vows, with the ship’s captain officiating.
Every student on board was invited. They drank champagne and celebrated, and afterwards the newlyweds visited Kerstin’s parents in Germany and Gianni’s family in Italy, which is where Kerstin’s antennae first began to vibrate. “Gianni always spent hours a day on the computer,” she says, “and it never occurred to me to question his behaviour. But he was very secretive about his screen. I was never allowed to look at what he was doing.”
When she cracked open the laptop all those years later, she would discover that he had made plans to romp with one of his mistresses while he was onshore, supposedly visiting his mother. It’s sometimes hard for people to believe that a wife in such a situation doesn’t on some level know that something is up.
“You might have a suspicion, but you don’t know if that makes sense,” says Kerstin. “There’s no evidence, just this nagging feeling and you don’t want to be the awful, jealous one, by accusing your husband of things just after you’ve gotten married, when he’s saying how much he loves you.”
Gianni’s boredom at sea was solved when The Scholar Ship became a victim of the 2007-2008 Global Financial Crisis, just two semesters into its run. Kerstin was disappointed, but another adventure awaited. Gianni owned a house on Mission Beach in Far North Queensland; they could retreat there while planning the next stage of their lives. That’s where they were living when a German-speaking friend, Anke, came up to visit.
“Your husband’s quite the flirt, isn’t he?”
Kerstin was about to jump out of a plane – Gianni had urged the two of them to try skydiving – when Anke said those words.
“My husband is what?”
Anke shrugged. “Maybe it’s just the Italian way,” she said. “But he says things I wouldn’t want my husband to say to my girlfriends.”
Kerstin felt affronted. Yes, Gianni was playful. He was a charming Italian! Life of the party. Such a gas.
He’d also recently found a pea-sized lump behind his ear…
In the weeks that followed, surgeons would remove lymph nodes, and find cancer. They opened a lung and found more cancer, and they had just operated on Gianni’s brain when Kerstin did her raid on his inbox.
She knew at the time that it was a “very bad idea, an irreversible act of trespassing”. She also understood that if she opened the laptop and found what was extremely likely to be there, she wouldn’t be able to return to her state of “not knowing” ever again.
“But I needed to do it,” she says. In the event, she was up all night, screaming and crying as she scrolled through the evidence. She thought about dumping Gianni as he lay in that hospital bed. She considered getting on a flight to Bali instead of going to the hospital to pick him up. But she had been reading Buddhist teachings, and one phrase had stuck in her mind: “In the end, these things matter most: How well did you love? How fully did you live? How gracefully did you let go?”
And so she returned to the hospital – to find Gianni flirting with the nurse, who had clearly fallen for his charms. And she thought, OK, wow. He cannot go anywhere without having to charm everyone in the room.
“He would flirt with the plumber,” she says. “He would find out something about whoever was around, a problem they were grappling with, and he would come up with a solution, and everyone would think, ‘Oh, isn’t he amazing.’ He just had this need to do it.”
Kerstin did not immediately tell Gianni what she knew about his infidelity. He was too sick, and she did not trust herself not to berate him. She ended up writing ten drafts of a letter, which she eventually handed to him after they got home to Mission Beach.
His reaction? “Oh, he exploded,” she says. “He said things like, ‘How could you betray me like this when I’m at my most vulnerable? What kind of person did I marry?’”
She laughs, and I laugh, because it is kind of funny, how it was all her fault.
“He said he wouldn’t have needed to cheat if I had been more loving and all those kinds of things,” she says. The truth is, he’d always had affairs. And if he hadn’t gotten sick, he would have kept on having them.
Kerstin might have been furious, but they did not have the luxury of time. Gianni needed treatment, and Kerstin was his wife. She was not going to abandon him to the bed pans and morphine on his own.
And so, she stayed. And it was not easy.
By day, she cooked fish for Gianni, taking care to choose cuts that were high in Omega-3 fatty acids, for healing. At night, she found herself grinding her teeth so hard they cracked.
Gianni never once said sorry. On the contrary, he was often rude to her as she attempted to care for him, flying into a rage when he was confronted with other lies, like the time he told Kerstin his adult daughter wouldn’t be able to come to an Australian registration of their wedding when he hadn’t actually told her about it. Instead he left Kerstin to pick up the pieces when the photographs appeared online.
“But it was hard to be angry with my grief-stricken, cancer-riddled husband,” she writes. She continued to love and to care for him, extending compassion and forgiveness, “being of service, rather than being bitter and angry”.
If that sounds beatific, she absolutely wasn’t. “I was angry and sometimes I felt like I’d been trapped,” she says. “I was choosing the option that best helped me make peace with my pain. I didn’t want to be the kind of person who would leave a dying man. And I wanted to grow from the hurt, and not be broken by it.”
In her book, she says: “I’m still surprised by how easy it was to make peace … we both reached the same conclusion, that we were in this together, until the end.” She also quotes the American yoga master Ram Dass: “We are all just walking each other home.”
The end when it came was swift. Gianni expressed his desire to die at home in Mission Beach, and Kerstin promised to make it possible. The scene in the book in which he leaves the stage is tender, and infused with love. “We were able to create the conditions for a good death at home, and I am proud of that,” says Kerstin. “It was a privilege to help him. His illness generated new friendships in our small community in Mission Beach, where he was loved and respected, as everyone came together. I think by the end we had healed each other.”
On the morning of his passing, a quiet thunder rolled across the sky. The ocean outside the window was mirror-flat; the sun a golden orb. The hospital mattress on which Gianni was lying inflated, and deflated. In Italian, he whispered: I am ready to go abroad.
And then he was gone.
There is quite a bit more to Kerstin’s book – her first day as a widow; the home he left her that almost blew away in a cyclone; the contact she makes with some of Gianni’s long-term lovers after he dies; the healing journeys she undertakes in Sri Lanka and India; the business she has started, helping people write their own stories; a new romance; and the Covid lockdown which enabled her to finally finish her book.
She confesses that she thought for a while she’d lost her smile forever.
She hasn’t.
And here’s something else quite lovely: open the cover of the book and you’ll find a dedication: “In memory of Gianni. I am grateful that you seduced me when I needed to be seduced … I am grateful for those days when the world really tasted like champagne.”
Loving My Lying, Dying, Cheating Husband by Kerstin Pilz (Affirm Press) is out now