NEWLYWED Kara Barnes was thankful for the sunshine over Werribee South beach last Saturday.
It meant the bride could wear sunglasses throughout the ceremony to hide tears as she gazed into the eyes of Brendan Barnes, who has a rare type of gland cancer. Doctors say he has three months to live.
It was a bittersweet moment if ever there was one — but the Barneses know there’s a limit on their time, and they’re not about to waste any.
“Even though we know it’s bad news, and the inevitable will come, we’ve just been trying to keep being strong and keep being happy,” says Kara, 39.
Since having open-heart surgery last June, Brendan, 33, has had intense chemotherapy, spending five months in hospital. He soon found out his heart was deteriorating faster than the tumour.
What he once shrugged off as a bit of chest pain from playing footy, and then worried might have been a broken rib, turned out to be a rare thymic carcinoma, between his chest and lungs.
“It started off looking like a shadow on my X-ray,” he says, “and it sort of spread like a weed.”
Brendan says he never wanted for Kara to have to shoulder the added burden of “having to worry about getting married” but it was she who popped the question five weeks ago.
“We’ve always wanted to get married, but now I needed to say I loved him and tell everyone else I did, too,” Kara says. “Our situation was even more of a prompt.”
On Saturday, eight years after they met as co-workers at a pub in St Albans, the Werribee couple stood before close to 200 family, friends and passing fishermen for a beachside ceremony.
Their sons, Marli and Bayli, aged 4 and 6, were Brendan’s groomsmen.
The couple thanked family for helping put the wedding day together and guests for coming from as far afield as Sydney.
The ever-upbeat Brendan, the type of bloke who says he takes things as they come, hoped everyone had “happy tears, not sad tears”.
He says a honeymoon is a possibility. “I’ve never been on a plane, I’ve never been out of Victoria. If we’d get to, that’d be a bonus.”
