Matt Golinski opens up about finding love again after house fire took his family
Matt Golinski has given his first in-depth interview since a house fire claimed the lives of his wife and three daughters on Christmas Day in 2011.
Speaking on Australian Story, which will air tonight on ABC, the celebrity chef opened up about his road to recovery, both physically and mentally, and how he came to terms with the death of his entire family.
“I probably spent four months crying and screaming and asking myself why and fighting it,” he said.
Matt, who suffered burns to more than 40 per cent of his body and spent eight weeks in a coma, said he questioned why he was kept alive, despite not being a suicidal person.
“God really? You spent eight weeks keeping me alive? Why would you bother?” he said.
Australia grieved with celebrity chef Matt Golinski when he lost his entire family in a house fire. Now he’s sharing for the first time his ‘second go at life’. #AustralianStory pic.twitter.com/xeWelC4kDD
— ABC TV Australia (@ABCTV) August 6, 2018
His father, Keith Golinski, said the first thing Matt asked for when he woke from his coma was his wife Rachael.
“I remember the first thing I said was (well) … I couldn’t speak, I actually had to sort of use the board and I said, ‘Can you get me a mobile phone so I can call Rachael?’” Matt said.
“(Dad) had to straight out just tell me, ‘Sorry mate, they’re all gone’.”
Matt had a gruelling road to recovery, with ongoing operations and skin-grafting procedures, but he said the emotional pain was the hardest to deal with. He was still in hospital the day of his family’s funeral.
“I didn’t even get to go to my girls’ funeral,” he said.
“[But] all my family and all my friends were just incredible with the way they pulled together for me.
“My sister and my Dad were bringing sackloads of cards and letters from people all over Australia. And some of them had money in them. Some of them were people that had held events at their house to raise money for me.
“That’s the point where I changed. I went ‘Oh wow, people really want to see me survive this and get through it’. So I better bloody well do it.”
It was during Matt’s physical rehabilitation he met his now-fiancee Erin Yarwood, a personal trainer.
“We had lots of common interests,” Erin said.
“I’d invite him and friends from work to see bands play and just try to get him out to get back to normal a bit.
“We ended up hanging out a lot. We’d go for jogs together.”
In 2017, Matt revealed he had proposed to Erin and that she was pregnant with their child.
“I never thought ‘I’m ready for another relationship now’. It wasn’t something that crossed my mind,” Matt said.
“But I could see with [Erin] this sort of genuine compassion for all these people that were in a really vulnerable situation.
“For me, I was kind of like ‘I quite like this girl’. Eventually I sort of went ‘I better snap her up before somebody else realises what a good catch she is’.”
But it wasn’t easy for the couple to fall pregnant as they weren't able to conceive naturally.
"Out of the millions or billions of sperm that guys normally have, the surgeon found 14 [in Matt]," recalled Erin. "So then we had a chance to try IVF, and we were successful the first go. She's a very special little one. And she's got Matt's dimples. She's definitely meant to be here."
Their daughter, Aluna, was born on August 16, 2017.
Even though Matt has managed to start his life again, he will never forget his wife, Rachael, and their three daughters: twins Sage and Willow, who were 13 at the time, and Starlia, who was 10.
He has a permanent reminder of his girls on his body in the form of tattoos: a sage plant for Sage, a willow tree for Willow and a star for Starlia.
"I'll miss my girls forever," he said, "but there's nothing I can do about that, so all I can do is accept it."
Watch Matt Golinski’s journey on Australian Story, on ABC and ABC iview at 8pm tonight, August 6.