Chapter 1

Against the odds, Ken Windes and I fell in love. In December 1992, I attended one of his seminars and at the end, as everyone said goodbye, Ken and I kissed. We were both surprised by what we felt. “Not her!” he groaned to himself as he moved away. We had come from two very different worlds. I thought he was charismatic yet very arrogant, and he thought I was the ‘Ice Queen’. I was 30 and he was 50. If there was a movie that best described our lives, mine would probably have been ‘Gidget’,  the story of a pretty happy, carefree childhood and teenage years going to the beach on weekends and holidays. Mine  however, was an Italian version which included lots of family, food and the traditional bottling of tomato sauce each year. Ken’s movie was “America Me”, a story of growing up in prison with Mexican gangs. We did not seem a likely match.


We were both staying at the home of  mutual friends, and that evening, while everyone slept, Ken and I talked through most of the night. I kept my coat on: it was my way of keeping a barrier between us, and Ken kept trying to take it off. There was too much at stake for both of us. I was married, had a beautiful two year old daughter, Allegra, and was the head of a large personal development network that was meant to model certain principles of how to live, which did not include falling in love with an ex-con. Ken was also in a good, solid marriage and had been with Jane for 14 years. But fall in love we did.


Ken left Jane immediately. He felt that even if we did not get together, it was time for him to leave regardless. Even though he loved and cared for her deeply, he felt that for the first time in his life he knew what it felt like to be in love.


For a year I tried to resist it. It was a year of hell for me and at times I thought I would go mad with the split I felt between staying in my marriage and following my heart. In the end I left my marriage.


Ken was American and left everything behind, including his business, to be with me in Australia. He was happy  to start over again. He said all he wanted to do was lie on the beach, trade Futures, make love to me and play with Allegra.


By February 1995, we had been together one year. It had been a hard year. Money was tight and my family was very angry at us; they didn’t speak to Ken for five years. I also felt very guilty for breaking up my daughter’s family and hurting her father.  But we were committed to being together, we were in love.


Ken had just come back from teaching a workshop in New Zealand and had a tooth ache. He didn’t have much of an appetite so ate a plum and took an aspirin. At lunch time he was sick. He thought the aspirin had unsettled his stomach. Ken was 52 years old and had never been sick in his life. At about 8.30pm that night he was sick again. He returned to the couch where we had been sitting watching television.


“That’s strange" he said, "I just vomited again and it was still purple. I couldn’t possibly have any plum left in my system.”


I turned to him and from out of nowhere said “You won’t die on me will you?” Ken looked at me with his pretty pale blue eyes; he had a way of looking at me that soothed.


“No, I promise I won’t leave you”.


I don’t know why I asked that question, as he had never been ill before.  At that moment, I remembered the day we were in the kitchen of his apartment. I couldn’t decide if I was going to be with him. He took hold of the belt around my jeans and pulled me close: “I will love you like no other man has ever loved you”, he said. I didn’t want to lose what I had just found. But I had no reason to think that things wouldn’t be okay.


Until 1.30am, when I woke up to hear Ken running through the house, crashing into doors. I found him sitting on the bathroom floor vomiting blood. I made him get up and sit on the side of the spa bath tub. That was a mistake, as the blood drained from his head, causing him to pass out. He was a solid man and I couldn’t hold on to him. He crashed into the bath. I’d stayed calm up until this point. I thought that hitting his head on the bath the way it did definitely would have killed him. He woke up and asked weakly “What are you screaming about?” He wanted to get up and sit on the toilet but I ordered him to stay in the tub, and went to ring for an ambulance. I got back to find him passing more blood. When the ambulance arrived, I showed them where Ken had been sick and the senior officer reacted with “Oh no, this is not good”. Now I was really shaking. I expected her to be calm, neutral and reassuring, not tell me that this was not good.


They took Ken in the ambulance. I couldn’t leave my little girl alone, even though they were insisting I go with him.  I called James, Allegra’s father, and even though he was still very hurt that our marriage had ended, he put all those feelings aside and came over to look after her.   I then went to the hospital and waited.  After a few hours they were able to stabilise Ken and move him to a ward.  He was sedated, and there was nothing I could do at the hospital. I wanted to get back to Allegra, so I went home.


Ken did not look good the next day, but he was alive.  I was sitting at his bedside when he told me that during the night his blood pressure dropped and his vital signs started crashing.  As the doctors and nurses worked on him, Ken said he left his body and watched them from above. He noticed a bright light over his shoulder, and turned and started walking towards it. It was a very seductive light and it felt good to walk forward  and just let go, but he remembered “I promised Liana I wouldn’t leave her”.  He came back, just in time to feel the full sensation of a respiratory tube being forced down his throat.


Thirty years earlier, Ken had been diagnosed with Hepatitis C. Actually, back then they didn’t know it as Hepatitis C, just non-infectious Hepatitis. Doctors told him that it would sit in his liver for thirty years and then kill him. When Ken was twenty he didn’t think he would live for thirty years, so it didn’t bother him. While many of us in our twenties can’t ever imagine being 50, for Ken it was real. The life he was leading at the time meant that there was an 80% chance that he would never make it.


This is Ken’s story.




Copyright 2009 Liana Di Stefano


Note to Reader:


The ‘personal development network’ in Chapter 1, was the Money & You network in Sydney, Australia. During the years 1987 to 1994, my then husband and business partner, James Caldwell, and I ran Business Plus, a company dedicated to bringing the best in business, learning and personal development training to Sydney. We worked with some of the greats in the industry: DC Cordova, Robert Kiyosaki, Stephanie Burns, Tony Robbins, Tom Crum, Ken Windes and many others.  It was a rich, exciting environment in which I had the good fortune to ‘grow up’ in.


Chapter 1 also referred to "our mutual friends'. They are Jane and Stan Jordan, who still promote the Money & You workshop today in Australia, USA and Asia, and have, fortunately, remained my dear friends.