KATE: DEREK TOLD ME ‘I JUST CAN’T GO ON’
» ITV star reveals heartache as husband reached breaking point » She vowed to him: We’ll fall in love again when you come home
To millions of viewers, it looked like just another morning with Kate Garraway presenting Good Morning Britain, chatting to guests with her typical warmth and humour.
Some may have noticed her usual smile seemed slightly forced, that some raw emotion lay just under the surface, even a hint of exhaustion.
If they did nobody could blame Kate, because behind the immaculate make-up and polished performance she was reeling from one of the worst nights of her life.
Just hours earlier, Derek Draper, her beloved husband of 16 years who had spent months in intensive care battling the effects of coronavirus, had told her he feared he could not go on.
Kate says: “Derek had been drifting in and out of consciousness and when he said that, it was absolutely devastating, but it showed me he was still in there. Even though it was terrible to think his spirits were so low.”
That evening last November, Kate had called the hospital so a nurse could set up the iPad for one of her regular FaceTime conversations with 53-year-old Derek.
She knew he could not always find the strength to speak, but this time he did. And his words were distressing.
In Finding Derek, a documentary on ITV1 tomorrow, we hear Derek saying: “Kate, there’s no way out. There’s no way out.
“I’ve got to the point where I just think f*** it. Just f*** it.”
“As in die?” she asks, before his desperate and tearful response: “Yes... I don’t know how to cope, I don’t know how to cope.”
It would have been easy to dismiss it as a momentary lapse, but not for Kate, 53, the woman the nation has watched and marvelled at as she coped with her life being shattered.
At that moment, Kate showed her mettle yet again, refusing to give up on the man she loves, the father of her two children Darcey, 15, and Billy, 11. She vowed to save him.
“You don’t know how to cope with it. OK,” she tells him. “I know you feel like you’re trapped in your head and it’s terrifying. But you’re coming home, you’re coming back to your life and you will be the person, even better than you were before. You will be.
“I will find a way to make it better. I promised you that I would save you and I’m going to save you, I will find a way, you just have to hang in there.”
Viewers will then see Kate bring Derek back from the brink.
For hours she stayed on her iPad, talking to him, staying with him through the night, reassuring him the next morning as she got her early-morning taxi to work. When she was due to go on air, Kate asked Derek’s nurses to put GMB on so he could see her face in the hours they could not speak. Speaking exclusively to the Mirror, Kate says: “After that call, it was then time to go into GMB and go on air, having been up all night. It was a tough night actually. But everyone at ITV has been so incredibly supportive. I managed to get through. During this whole time, working on GMB and Smooth Radio has helped me to keep going and keep my spirits up.”
Although the virus had left Derek’s system, his body was dealing with kidney failure, damage to his liver and pancreas, and heart failure.
Kate says: “And in the end I said to him, ‘Just stay with me, I’m going to keep talking to you’. And he was obviously exhausted. Because that’s the other thing, the tiniest thing completely exhausts him.
“Being able to get those words out, for him physically, it’s as tough as running three marathons, that’s the way the doctors described it. It takes huge amounts of energy and spirit for him to do that. It’s so huge for his body to be able to get that out. It’s a huge power of spirit actually to be able to speak out in that way.
“And then he’s sort of done and I was like, ‘Close your eyes, I’m still here, I’m not going to go anywhere, I’m going to stay on the line’.
“So I kept the iPad going all the way into Good Morning Britain. And I said, ‘Right, I’m going to go on air now, and I’m going to ask the nurses to put Good Morning Britain on, so you can still see me and then I’ll call you
straight afterwards’. It was a very strange, very strange morning.”
The couple once again pulled together, fighting on towards their ultimate goal – Derek returning home.
Kate says: “All he wants to do is to be with the children, to be with me, to be with his friends and family. He wants to come back more than ever.
“And it was him saying, ‘I’m trying, I’m trying, I’m trying. I just don’t know how I can get there’. I think he was at his wits’ end physically and mentally, but thankfully we have moved passed that, and he is fighting on.”
When she first invited a camera crew into her home in September, Kate hoped charting Derek’s coronavirus battle would help others and end with him returning home. But seven months on, the film will instead focus on Derek’s time in hospital with months of recovery ahead.
It shows the highs of Derek recently back his usual stubble and telling Kate “I love you forever and a day” in a video chat, to the moment he considered giving up completely.
He has lost eight stone and most of the muscle in his legs and arms. Due to lockdown, Kate and the children have not seen him in person in 2021.
After isolating for two weeks, they did manage a one-off hospital visit around Christmas, the first time the kids had been in the same room as their dad since March last year, when he first contracted coronavirus.
The children played a board game and Derek responded animatedly.
Kate says: “It was lovely, it was wonderful. I’m so proud of the children. Because, yes, they’ve been talking to him on FaceTime. Yes, nothgrowing
Kate Garraway: Finding Derek is on ITV tomorrow at 9pm
ing’s a secret from them. But it is still a physical shock to the system to see him in the flesh. Because he has changed. Derek is physically very affected. His legs are like sticks, he has no muscle left. In terms of his movement, he’s physically affected.
“And of course, they’ve been longing for so long, so long, to be able to have their dad and be with their dad. He can’t respond exactly the way he did before, but he was looking directly at them and his expression showed so much love. They coped brilliantly.”
Kate converted the ground floor of their London home for Derek’s return. She made it wheelchair accessible and put a hospital bed in the lounge.
But his condition has not improved, meaning a return home is some way off. Kate’s next step will be to get back into the hospital after lockdown and for Derek to talk more.
She says: “It felt like we were moving forward at Christmas, now it feels like we’ve slipped back. And I’ve felt like I’m sort of hanging over the side of a ship, trying to hold on to him, so when he bobs up from this ocean of unconsciousness, you can see him sort of click in.
“You feel you have filled him up with as much positivity as possible, ‘You’re going to be fine. You’re going to come home. It’s going to be okay’. Even if you don’t really know if that’s true.
“But I just want him to know that, so that when he disappears back down, he’s got some hope there.
“You don’t know how much is emotional, how much is physical, how much is neurological. The long-term effects of coronavirus are still so unknown so there isn’t enough data to accurately predict his recovery.”
Kate is also realistic that their relationship has possibly changed forever.
They wed in 2005 and 15 months ago I watched at the Versace Hotel in Australia as Derek, a psychologist and psychotherapist, welcomed his wife as she left the I’m A Celebrity jungle.
Despite everything, Kate’s love for Derek remains as strong as ever.
She tells the cameras: “We started filming this when I didn’t know if he would live the day.. so I’ve got so much to be grateful for and so much to hope for. But God, there is a long way to go.
“He is still that person that you love, but he will behave differently, and he will be physically different.
“It will be very tough for us both. But he is Derek, for better or for worse.
“It may be a rather beautiful thing, I’m trying to look at as a rather beautiful thing. I feel as though we might have to sort of fall in love again.”
■ Kate Garraway The Power of Hope, (£20, Bantam Press) is available for pre-order now.
They’ve been longing for so so long to be able to have their dad, be with their dad
KATE GARRAWAY GMB HOST ON CHILDREN’S VISIT TO DEREK