Jess Irwin has dispensed with comforting platitudes. There is no sugar-coating her grief. Her adored husband, TV presenter Jonnie Irwin, did not drift away quietly. It was not a gentle goodnight.
‘You hear people say, ‘He passed away peacefully. It was lovely’, but it wasn’t for Jonnie. It was a f****** awful process. I wish I hadn’t seen it but I had to be with him,’ she says. ‘I kept saying to the nurses who were there with us, ‘What do I do? What do I do?’ and they said, ‘You can’t do anything. Just stay with him.’
‘It is just heart-breaking to see someone you love so much in that state, but he was surrounded by love and in our home, as he wanted, not in a hospice.
‘But it is not peaceful. People are upset and I had our three little boys to manage. Even at the end, Jonnie didn’t want to go. He was fighting to the last.
‘I hated every second lying next to my dying husband. I cuddled him but he was in a lot of pain. I was constantly moving him, administering drugs.
Jess Irwin, 41, with her sons, from left, Cormac, Rex and Rafa, who she has vowed to dedicate her life to
Jess with her TV presenter husband Jonnie Irwin, who died in February after being told he had terminal cancer and six months left to live
‘I kept saying, ‘Can I do anything?’ and he said, ‘No, I’m fine’. How could he be fine? He was constantly needing oxygen. He had a morphine driver.
‘I still struggle with what he went through. I can’t imagine what it is to know your time is up and you’re hearing the noise of your three sons kicking a football in the drive; you can smell food cooking downstairs.
‘All these friends came and went. He had about 30 visitors in the last few days, having cups of tea, saying their goodbyes.
‘My brothers came to distract the boys and obviously there were times when Jonnie was fully aware of what was going on. He never complained. He’d just get upset and say, ‘I’m just so sorry I’m leaving you all’.’
Jonnie, host of BBC One’s Escape To The Country and long-time presenter of Channel 4’s A Place In The Sun, was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2020 when he and Jess, who’d met through mutual friends, had been married just four years.
Only two months earlier Jess had given birth to their twins, Rafa and Cormac. Their oldest son Rex was still a toddler.
Jonnie had not the slightest intimation he was ill until the awful prognosis came: he had six months to live. The cancer, which began in his lungs, had spread to his brain and liver. But more tenacious than the disease was his will to live.
Miraculously, he survived for nearly three years. He died on February 2 this year, at the family’s home in Newcastle, aged just 50.
‘For the first two years or so after his diagnosis, he seemed the same Jonnie but I can only describe what was going on in his mind as a total head-f***,’ says Jess. ‘Torture. He changed his diet. He stopped eating all the food he liked, food that was bad for him. He stopped drinking alcohol.
‘There was this constant internal battle. If we went to a restaurant he was thinking, ‘Should I be at home focusing on getting better?’ The cancer became his life. It completely consumed him. It was how Jonnie was. He did everything to extremes He was so strong-willed and determined. He couldn’t just read a book. It had to be a book about cancer.’
Jess, 41, talks quietly, with a light Newcastle lilt, through a stream of silent tears. Her sorrow and loss is still lacerating. She is by turns angry, funny, inconsolable. Her thick, dark hair is pulled back into a ponytail; her face — striking and clear-eyed — is free of make-up.
‘I’d never had trauma like this before. I’d lived a very simple, naive life. I just thought, ‘Why could I not grow old with him?’ I’ve never loved anyone like I loved Jonnie.
‘He was not just my best friend, he was my lover, protector, the person I wanted to share my life with — and it was such a mad, adventurous, fun life with him.
Following the death of her husband, Jess is now raising their three children as a single-parent at their family home in Newcastle
Jonnie, who was host of BBC One’s Escape To The Country and long-time presenter of Channel 4’s A Place In The Sun, was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2020
‘I feel like I’m still living in Jonnie’s world. His friends are my friends now. He renovated this house.’ She gestures around the room — airy, light-filled, wood-floored — where we sit on velour sofas, the scent of summer garden drifting through open doors.
‘He provided everything. He brought so much to my life — excitement, opportunities. He never sat still. He’d be, ‘Oh, we’ve been invited on a cricket tour’ or, ‘I have some friends in Mauritius’. What? How? Who? He’d meet someone once and we’d have an invitation for life to visit them.’
Although she lives close to supportive parents and three siblings, Jess is now raising her sons — Rex, five, and Cormac and Rafa, who turned four last Saturday — as a single parent.
She has a ‘wonderful’ nanny, Karen, ‘but I’m responsible for every decision, for the kids’ safety and happiness. My mum says, ‘Do what you feel is right.’ But I want Jonnie here to decide with me.’
Her face crumples with tears. It is my second visit to the family. The first time I met Jess was in December 2022, when Jonnie was depleted by cancer but irrepressible, joking bleakly and still fired by his mission to renovate the house and leave his wife financially secure.
They resolved then not to destroy their sons’ happiness by telling them their Daddy was dying. ‘If you’ve only got a short time left why spend it in mourning and confusion?’ reasoned Jonnie.
Instead they laughed a lot; played footie — as far as Jonnie was able — and made memories.
‘The boys weren’t blissfully unaware,’ says Jess now. ‘They heard me say hundreds of times, ‘Daddy’s sleeping’. They knew he’d lost his hair because he was having treatment and that no, he couldn’t go down the big slide because it might hurt him.’
But the word ‘death’ was never uttered. So it is no surprise that there were no tearful final cuddles and kisses. ‘We didn’t want to put scary thoughts in the boys’ little heads,’ says Jess.
‘They’d come home from nursery or school with some wonderful art work and I’d say, ‘Take it up to Daddy’, and one day Rex just wandered in and kissed Jonnie’s hand while he was sleeping. I think he sensed the energy had shifted a bit.
Rex doing that of his own accord would have meant more to Jonnie than forcing all the boys to cuddle him. He would have sobbed and it would have been a terrible memory.’
Breaking the news of Jonnie’s death was an impossible conundrum: how do children so young take in the enormity of such loss? ‘I told Rex first, that Daddy had gone to heaven, in the sky, and he ran out of the room and hid. He said, ‘Why can’t the spaceman bring Daddy back?’
‘Then I told the twins. They asked, ‘How did the angels carry him up to the sky?’ I said, ‘Angels have special powers.’ It was all toddler talk. The conversation will change as they get older.’
Rex, she says, has taken solace in childlike fantasy. ‘He showed me his sunglasses. He said he could see into space with them. ‘If I press this button I can see Daddy and this one lets me hear him talk. But it only works at night.’ I said, ‘Wow, can I borrow them?’
Jess says Jonnie was ‘not just my best friend, he was my lover, protector, the person I wanted to share my life with — and it was such a mad, adventurous, fun life with him’
But she has to steel herself to talk to the kids about Jonnie; she can barely confront her own raw emotion, let alone their heart-rending puzzlement and loss.
Father’s Day was the first time she tried to focus their thoughts. ‘I put a photo of us all on the table. They made cards. I said, ‘We’re going to celebrate Daddy today and the amazing times we had, and if I put this picture here maybe Daddy can watch us.’
‘We made banana muffins and stayed there with the cards and picture but it didn’t prompt any questions from them.
‘I didn’t ask how they were feeling. I bottled it. I thought, ‘It’s too close to bedtime.’ There’s always a reason not to upset them, and not to upset me.
‘I thought afterwards, ‘Should we have gone to look at the stars?’ But we have a whole lifetime to do that.
‘A psychologist might say I should ask them if they want to talk about Daddy. But if one of the twins says, ‘I want Daddy back’, I just say, ‘Me too’. I panic. I don’t ask them questions.’
I ask if Jess still talks to Jonnie. ‘It’s a funny one, isn’t it? When people say, ‘He’s with you’, obviously you want that. But at the same time it’s a bit freaky feeling he’s watching you every second.
‘So I’d like to think I can pick and choose. I kind of teleport my brain: ‘This is the bit I want Jonnie to see now’.
‘On the twins’ birthday they had a slush machine. I sang Happy Birthday. I thought, ‘I just want Jonnie next to me seeing the boys having such a lovely time.’ It just breaks me that he doesn’t get to do these things with them.
‘I consciously stood back to watch the energy and excitement and thought, ‘I want you to see this, Jonnie, what I’m seeing’.
‘It’s good for me, too, because in the chaos of raising three boys it actually makes me a bit more appreciative, because half the time I’m refereeing or shouting at them for fighting.’
Our talk is paused when she cycles off on her cargo bike to fetch the twins from nursery. They arrive in a tumble of excitement, proffering their football cards.
The house is festooned with England flags; they’ve been glued to the Euros. Rex plays keepie-uppie with his football in the hall.
Jess and I retreat to the calm of the sitting room to continue our chat. She says she and Jonnie never discussed his funeral: ‘He’d have hated that conversation.’
She recalls how, after he died, she stayed with him until the undertaker came, then stood in his wardrobe, befuddled with grief, trying to focus on which clothes he should wear in his coffin.
‘For the funeral I picked songs that I liked. I was the one there!’ she laughs. They included Paul McCartney’s Blackbird; Clair de Lune, which they’d had as their wedding tune; and Lord Of The Dance.
She chose a Maya Angelou poem about trees, which feature significantly in the memorials to Jonnie, who loved the outdoors.
Jess is inherently funny, honest and unsentimental — traits she shared with Jonnie — and she tells me a story that makes me laugh, about how one of Jonnie’s many friends invited her and the boys to a ceremony in his memory.
The friend, Anders, had planted a tree and was unveiling a plaque on a Leicestershire golf course he’d opened with Jonnie’s support.
Jonnie spending time with his children before his death. Tests revealed he had been living for years with undiagnosed lung cancer which had spread to his brain
‘The boys ruined the moment,’ she sighs. ‘We were there for this very special occasion and I was just, ‘Will you bloody shut up?’
‘One didn’t want to be in the photos; the others were fighting. All I wanted to do was say a few words about how much I loved and missed Jonnie and how grateful I am to him.
‘I was trying to steal a quiet moment and the kids were saying, ‘Have you got any sweets?’ and ‘Can we go now?’ I said, ‘I wish I’d left you lot in the car.’ ‘ She laughs through tears. ‘But they’re young. In a few years, we’ll all be at the golf club sitting round the tree, remembering Jonnie.’
There will be other living memorials, but no headstone; Jonnie didn’t want that.
Most of his ashes will nurture the roots of an evergreen, to be planted in land belonging to Jess’s family at Beadnell on the Northumberland coast.
‘It’s quite a wild spot and we spend a lot of time there. The tree will be looking over us. It’s what Jonnie wanted. I’ll go with the family and plant it in the autumn.’ She pauses and smiles. ‘I probably won’t take the boys.’
A month after Jonnie died, Jess asked some walking mates if they’d like to scatter some of his ashes at the top of a mountain he loved in the Lake District. ‘He was a massively keen hiker. I put them in a box with a note that said: ‘To my favourite. I love you and miss you. Enjoy the view up there’ and they scattered them at the top of Harrison Stickle (a fell in the Lakes).’
She recalls the jolt of utter disbelief when he was first diagnosed with cancer in 2020. He’d been filming A Place In The Sun in Italy when he started seeing gold flashing squares in front of his eyes.
Tests revealed the unthinkable: he had been living for years with undiagnosed lung cancer which had spread to his brain.
Jonnie’s first concern was for Jess. ‘He just kept saying, ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’ I said, ‘You’re fit, you’re young. You’ll be fine.’ I just didn’t want to think about the seriousness of it.’
Neither did she really acknowledge it when he was dying: ‘It all happened so quickly — in six days. Jonnie’s leg had ballooned. The doctors did a scan to see if he had a tumour on his spine.
‘The scan came back on the Thursday. No tumour. But they found fluid on one lung and an infection in the other. On Friday they drained his lung and gave him antibiotics for the infection and said, ‘Stay out of trouble until Wednesday’. But by Friday evening he was short of breath so they sent an oxygen tank.
‘On Monday the GP called and his lung had filled again and his leg had swollen. Everything was starting to shut down. The doctor knew it was end-of-life care then. They didn’t think he’d get better.’
Will you meet again? ‘Oh yes,’ she says, emphatic. ‘I look at photos and think, ‘That cannot be the last time I see you’.’
Jonnie, genuinely selfless, told me when I met him in 2022 that he’d be pleased if Jess ‘found a good bloke to look after her and the boys’. Can she envisage that? She looks stricken.
‘I can’t ever imagine myself with anyone else because I’d just be so sad it wasn’t Jonnie,’ she says. ‘It would be too much. The boys have amazing male role models: my two brothers, Jonnie’s friends, their male teachers.
‘They have lives full of fun, adventure and love. That’s enough for me — to dedicate my life to them.’
