Sir Michael Palin opens up on grief
Sir Michael Palin has made a candid admission about his grief, following the loss of his beloved wife Helen Gibbins.
Gibbins passed away just weeks after the couple celebrated their 57th wedding anniversary, following a long battle with kidney failure and chronic pain.
In an interview with The Sunday Times, Palin opened up about the "great emptiness" he felt in the wake of Gibbins' death.
“When someone’s gone, someone who has been so much part of your life for the past 60 years, you can’t believe they’re not there to enjoy a little joke, or an observation, or a b**** about somebody,” he said.
“A great sort of emptiness comes in.”
Palin shared that his wife relied on dialysis for "so many years" to "keep her alive" that when she, and their children, ultimately made the decision to stop the treatment, he had “never seen her happier".
“She’d accepted it, we’d accepted it, she was in a wonderful hospice,” Palin said about the days before his wife's passing.
“The children and grandchildren had all come to see her, so her death was a great deliverance for her.”
Despite everything, the comedy legend tried to look at the bright side, sharing that he experienced a full circle moment when he had to register Gibbins' death, and a couple with a baby were also at the at the registry office.
“I saw the father, I presume, holding on his chest this tiny, tiny little newborn baby,” he said. “And I thought, yes, that’s it, a new person – one in, one out.”
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