Gerry Turner has incurable cancer.
I’ve been haunted over the past few days, since inaugural Golden Bachelor Gerry Turner announced that he has incurable cancer and that his diagnosis is what led to his divorce from Theresa Nist. I was pretty hard on Gerry throughout his season of the show, and annoyed with his and Theresa’s televised wedding. When he and Theresa announced their divorce a few months later, I took issue with their labeling it a divorce—it was more like a breakup, and it happened because they allegedly couldn’t decide where to live (they were both settled in different states). I’ll also admit: The hasty crumbling of his reality-show love story gave me some schadenfreude. He appeared to expect to ride off into the sunset with Theresa, someone he barely knew, and to not have to work too hard at it. Life just doesn’t work that way!
But now I feel bad, because, well, life doesn’t work that way, and there was more to the story. It sounds as if Gerry made the kind of smart, mature decision that a grown person should make facing his reality: focusing on quality time with those closest to him in the face of a terminal diagnosis, Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia. He told People: “I wanted my life to continue on as normal as possible, and that led me to believing that as normal as possible more meant spending time with my family, my two daughters, my two son-in-laws, my granddaughters. … And the importance of finding the way with Theresa was still there, but it became less of a priority.”
Among the things I love most about the Golden franchise so far is that we get to see what the search for a partner looks like when you already have a big, lived, fulfilling life. Contestants aren’t looking for a love match to do a bunch of firsts with—getting married, buying a house, having children, building a retirement account—as is the case on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. For the golden-aged editions, finding a partner is a bonus, a “nice to have” but not a necessity. (I am absolutely not saying that a partner is a necessity for a person to have a house, children, etc.—but those sorts of ambitions are the raison d’être of the traditional Bachelor franchise.) There is a level of lightheartedness and joy that comes with looking for love simply because love is a wonderful thing.
But this fact, it is clear now, can also lead to a different kind of heartbreak from what we typically expect of these reality shows. Theresa’s marriage to Gerry had to end not because he didn’t love her or want to be with her, but because he has a full life with kids and grandkids and could not prioritize her in the face of his diagnosis. Theresa and Gerry were struggling with deciding on a place to live, given both of their close ties to their respective families, and the diagnosis seems to have put an end to those conversations, and their entire relationship. Who knows if Gerry gave Theresa an ultimatum about moving to Indiana, where he is from, or if he put the total kibosh on their relationship. Either way, their fantasy of enjoying their later years together exploded due to conditions far out of their control. Yes, illness and needing to be close to family can also be factors for younger couples, but they’re less likely to become unsolvable issues. (My colleague Scott Nover pointed out early in the Golden Bachelorette season that the challenge of relocation for senior citizens with deep roots may be the show’s fatal flaw.)
I may not have been the biggest Gerry fan during his season, but I always appreciated the space he created for the women vying for his heart to open up about themselves, their challenges, their joys. His season was novel in revealing how older people actually live now (and we needed that, because a lot of younger people have it all wrong). But one of the things older people also live with is the need to face one’s mortality sooner than one would like. I have a newfound respect for Gerry in revealing his illness, and how he came about it—a delayed trip to a doctor over a shoulder injury led to tests that revealed a blood disorder, which led to more tests and eventually a diagnosis—but even more in publicly explaining that, in his later years, his family had to be more important than his love life. Not only has this revelation exploded my shallow understanding of his and Theresa’s divorce, but it has reminded me to be a little more gentle in my assessments of other people’s intimate relationships—even those created by and for reality television. Because, really, what do we know? Only what we’re shown. It’s never the whole story.
