How Hawking’s illness put his marriage in ‘ black hole’
STEPHEN Hawking’s first wife has revealed how the worldfamous physicist’s illness forced them into their own ‘black hole’ of despair.
Jane Wilde, who was married to the scientist for 25 years, says the couple were ‘engulfed and then swept away by a wave of fame and fortune’.
She added: ‘It got rather too much for me to cope with. We ceased to be happy as before.’
Speaking in a new film to coincide with the release of the award-winning cosmologist’s memoirs, Miss Wilde, the mother of his three children, describes how there were ‘two faces to Stephen’.
‘One was the public wunderkind who had overcome motor neurone and was travelling the world. The other existed in our home situation, where his illness forced us into our own black hole.’ Professor Hawking, 71, met Miss Wilde while studying at Cambridge when he was 21. Soon afterwards he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease – a condition which has left him wheelchair-bound for almost half a century and able to communicate only through a voice synthesiser operated by a muscle in his cheek.
Professor Hawking describes how he became so desperately ill with pneumonia while he wrote A Brief History of Time that doctors offered his wife the chance to end his misery and turn off his life-support machine. But Miss Wilde refused to do so and her husband went on to complete the bestselling book, which has sold 10 million copies in 40 languages.
Professor Hawking describes the neardeath experience in 1985 as the ‘darkest’ time of his life and explains how it was the treatment for this illness which left him unable to speak.
He said: ‘It was very serious and I was put into a drug-induced coma and then on a life-support machine. The doctors thought I was so far gone that they offered Jane [the option] to turn off the machine.’
But she refused and ordered doctors to fly her husband, who was in Geneva when he fell ill, back to their home in Cambridge. Professor Hawking added: ‘Slowly the drugs worked, though a small incision in my throat robbed me of my ability to talk.’
In the film, Miss Wilde describes the early days of their relationship, saying: ‘I was drawn to his very wide smile and beautiful grey eyes. He was great fun and together we were going to defy the disease and the doctors.’
A Brief History of Time was finished in 1987 and Professor Hawking became world-famous, but fame – coupled with his ill health – led to the eventual collapse of his first marriage.
Professor Hawking later married his former nurse, Elaine Mason, in 1995. They also divorced, in 2006.