Sam Newman casually predicted wife's death
Geelong Cats legend Sam Newman has revealed how he predicted his wife's death on his podcast You Cannot Be Serious.
He was delivering a heartfelt tribute when he made the casual comment about how he knew something was wrong when he was unable to reach his wife, Amanda, 50.
Newman, 75, told listeners that he was concerned after being unable to reach his wife.
“I’d been working on a boat, which Amanda hated incidentally, and I was working with someone on it 300m from where she was… and we’re going down to get fish and chips to eat for dinner, and I thought Amanda might want to come with us,” he said on his podcast.
“We get down to where we’re going… and I tried to ring her to ask if she wanted to come down. We’d rung her, I’d rung her six times.
“So we got down there, we’re sitting around eating the fish and chips and I said, ‘I wonder where Amanda is’ and we all… I don’t know if I should say this.”
He paused before continuing.
“We’re joking about, ‘She might be out at a venue or out at the pub or out with the girls or out doing something’ and I said, ‘She’s probably lying dead up in the flat’, just as an aside,” Newman said.
“And I said, ‘Oh, she could have been in an accident’.
“I get home and I walk in the door and the television’s on in the bedroom.
“So I look down there and lying in her underwear — she’d obviously been in bed or she got out of bed to get something to eat.
“She’s lying there on the tiles outside the laundry and as soon as I saw her I knew she was dead, I just knew it.”
Newman's heartbreaking experience wasn't over as he was asked to perform CPR on his wife for 20 minutes until emergency services arrived.
“So I rang triple-zero and the very helpful person on the end said you better try and give CPR and she talked me through that and I had the phone on speakerphone and I’m pumping this poor woman who’s lying there looking so peaceful (but) obviously to me, dead,” Newman said.
“But the operator said just keep doing it in case there’s a spark of life in her. So I did that for 20 minutes, giving CPR to what I knew was a corpse.
“Then everyone arrived and when it all ended it was futile trying to get into bed after that so I thought what else do you do. So I lay down for half an hour then I got up and I wrote this, and I’m going to read it out.”
Newman teared up while reading the letter.
“It’s been 24 hours since I arrived home and found dear Amanda lying on her side on the tiles beside the laundry. She looked so gentle and calm and innocent but somehow I knew instantly she was dead,” he said.
“So why am I writing this? Maybe it’s cathartic or maybe I want to share what a relationship means to me because at 75 years of age it has taken three-quarters of a century to discover the formula.
“I’ve married and loved a number of women, and for extended periods of time have enjoyed a harmonious existence with them all but sadly not an everlasting one, obviously.
“The reason they did not endure are complex yet so simple. Relentlessness, tension, ego, simmering angst and above all stubbornness to yield.
“In her 20s, Amanda’s mission in life was for me to be her man. She told the person she lived with, a boy, as much.
“I kept noticing her the same places I was at and enjoyed her company, I thought it was just a coincidence but it wasn’t - she wanted me.
“I knew exactly where she came from and what she did and while my friends were somewhat bemused, my friends are real friends, unconditional.
“For the last 15 years, we lived together and had not one verbal or physical confrontation. Some strong words occasionally for sure but she had the knack of not prolonging such rifts due to her innate nature of compromise.
“I have never been happier in the last decade and arriving home at the end of a day was such a genuinely pleasant thing I looked forward to as there was never any harbouring angst pent up in either of us.”
Photo credits: 7NEWS