Ten years ago today New Zealand lost one of its greatest sportspeople, former All Black and rugby’s first global superstar Jonah Lomu. For the public, Lomu’s death at 40 was shocking and sad. For his wife Nadene and their two young children, it was life shattering.
As the significant anniversary drew closer, Nadene, with her now teenage sons Brayley and Dhyreille, joined John Campbell for a frank and often emotional interview about life with Jonah, living in the shadow of a legend, and the loss of a huge irreplaceable love.
The Lomu whānau, a decade after Jonah: Watch this story on TVNZ+
The terrible morning of November 18, 2015 is forever lodged in Nadene Lomu’s memory.
The family – Jonah, Nadene and their young sons, then five and six – had returned from England to Auckland to pack up and prepare for the new life they planned to make in the UK.
“We were actually coming home to pack and leave as a family for a brighter future,” Nadene tells John Campbell. “We were going to take the boys back to the UK. Because there was just so much love over there for us. And he wanted the boys brought up around love.”
Not, she says, that there was any lack of love within their family. But the world outside their home had become complicated. It was a world where “everybody wants a piece of Jonah Lomu, and we [Nadene and the boys] are part of those pieces”.
Jonah initially planned to make the Auckland trip by himself. “But I said, ‘No, we need to come home and say goodbye to people.’ Well, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that the goodbye was to Jonah.”
Although Jonah had been dealing with kidney disease for 20 years at that point, he was feeling well. “There was no indication of what was about to happen,” says Nadene. “We were managing his sickness as well as we ever had.”
Her mind zeroes in on that November morning when Jonah experienced a heart attack, connected to his kidney disease, and her frenzied exchanges with the ambulance people who came to their home. “I’ve never given CPR to anyone except him. And when you’re begging for something, and when they’re telling you nothing’s going to change.”
Eventually those paramedics had to deal Nadene the worst news imaginable, and they followed that with a gentle, persistent question. “Who do you want to call?”
She had no idea. “He was my everything. He was the one I called, even if we were driving behind each other, he’s who I called. And I remember saying that to ambulance people, ‘he’s who I call. I don’t want to talk to anyone else.’”
One son, Brayley, was at school. The other, Dhyreille, was due to start school. “My mind started to panic, because how do we get Brayley home? And we went to the kitchen and all we could see out of our windows was just a swarm of media.”
It was not the small gaggle of nosey reporters Nadene was used to. “There were big satellite trucks all outside our property. From that moment on, our lives changed forever, and we just never got a chance to grieve the way most families could grieve.”
In the painful days, weeks and years that followed, Nadene found much of the scrutiny from the media and the public to be not just invasive but cruel, with her actions – from the make of car she drove to her legal battles over the trademark of Jonah’s famous name – viewed through a damning lens.
“The light that I’ve been portrayed in has been so unfair,” she says, adding that her goal has always been to protect Jonah’s legacy for his sons, in the way their father would have himself.
But the media, or more accurately the online commentary that clusters around it, continually portrays Nadene as mercenary. “I was typically looked at as I was just about the money, that I was only doing it for the money,” she says. “The amount of vitriolic comments that were just constantly, constantly cast my way. It still happens. I think it’s always going to be like that.”
The online spleen-venting seems to stem from a sense of public possession of Jonah. After all he was an unrivalled New Zealand rugby icon, not to mention an extremely valuable business commodity. It’s the dark flipside perhaps of the deep love for him that Nadene saw expressed, again and again, at close range.
“He really did bring a joy to people. I remember meeting people at the 2015 World Cup, and the line of people lining up to meet him and have something signed by him was just horrendous. And I just thought, I don’t know how we’re going to get through this line. There were people there in tears and shaking and they just couldn’t believe they were having a chance to meet him. And each person is another person, right? And so that’s a whole new level of joy again. So even though we’d been there for hours, the next person, it was their moment of joy, and then the next person, it was their moment of joy.”
Jonah understood that an endless queue was made up of individuals, each craving their one unrepeatable moment with him and, Nadene says, he never let his exhaustion with the process show. “Even on his days where he was sick, we dealt with the consequences when we went home.”
In a way, Nadene is still dealing with the consequences of that level of public adoration. But, she clarifies, Jonah was first and foremost a husband, a father and a private person.
“Jonah wasn’t public property, despite what everybody thought. And, despite people treating me like a piece of trash, he lived for us. And so I owe him. I owe him that [protection of his legacy] and I owe that to the boys.”
Nadene is now studying law, motivated in part by her battles over the past decade, and by her need to provide a solid foundation for her sons. “It was really so that I could be so much more than a mother for Brayley and Dhyreille. And that I really was going to be as equipped as I possibly could be, to just do what they needed me to do for them as they grow up.”
Strong actions, strong words, but Nadene has yet to recover from the loss of Jonah, and predicts she never really will. “People say that time heals or things get easier. But I actually don’t think it does get easier. Well, at least it hasn’t for us.
“It was only a few days ago that I was crying at uni to my law friends. And you think, wow, should you really be crying [after] 10 years? But there’s just no way of really being able to navigate grief.
“Sometimes, as much as you don’t want to be feeling that way, you just do.”
The Lomu whānau, a decade after Jonah: Watch this story on TVNZ+
