Jock Zonfrillo‘s wife Lauren Zonfrillo has opened up about his death for the first time.
In an excerpt from her new book, Till Death Do Us Part: Life Without Jock and Learning to Live with Intention, the late MasterChef judge’s widow shared how hard it was to get through memorable occasions without her husband by her side.
Sharing the excerpt with The Australian Women’s Weekly, the mother-of-two revealed what it was like in the direct aftermath of her husband’s death.
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“I needed to get to Sunday, the day after Jock’s funeral,” she said.
“I had naively thought it would mean that no more decisions needed to be made and that the phone would stop, but that wasn’t to be.”
But what she hadn’t realised that it would also be her first Mother’s Day without Jock. Her husband had always made sure to go all out to celebrate his wife, presenting gifts that would go on to become heirlooms, especially in the wake of his death.
Now that he was gone, Lauren said, ”It felt like a cruel irony that I would have to have one of the many unrelenting ‘firsts’ soon.”
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But she thankfully didn’t have to go through it alone.
Jock’s fellow MasterChef judge Andy Allen and his wife Alex dropped by, their arms heaving with shopping bags, to cook her a warm meal after weeks spent living off coffee and the occasional boiled egg.
Many other occasions have passed since then – like her birthday, when she took a sleeping tablet to stop crying but woke up in tears again, and her son Alfie’s first Easter Hat parade which Jock would’ve enjoyed making fun of immensely.
“I feel Jock’s absence more on these occasions: He was an energy force in my life and within our family, and I feel it in those moments when he’s not there creating that specialness,” she wrote.
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“But now that he’s not here, now it’s just me and the little ones, that effort and energy doesn’t exist, I don’t want others to do it for me… I want Jock back for those moments.”
Lauren doesn’t claim to have the solution to moving on cleanly.
In fact, over the two years since Jock’s passing, her policy has been that “good enough was good enough” – and it’s not a mantra unique to her.
”I am not alone in needing to remind myself that good enough is good enough – it’s where the parent guilt can creep in, when comparisons with the effort and time of other parents are made. I just keep telling myself that I am doing the best I can in this moment in time.”
Lauren has since gone back to work to support her two young children, Alfie, seven and Isla, four, who she shares with Jock.
The founder of Pulse Collective, a marketing and communications agency, she was also a regular panelist on Gruen on ABC, to which she has since returned.
Lauren and Jock first met in 2014 on Twitter and wed in 2017. Jock also has two other children – Ava and Sophia – from previous marriages.
The MasterChef judge was found dead in his Melbourne hotel room in May 2023 after police had been called to conduct a welfare check.
He was 46 years old at the time of his death, and his family has never shared his cause of death.
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