Brendan Grace’s wife Eileen has revealed how she and the funnyman turned their“epic” final weeks together into the best of times, rather than the worst.
And opening up on the toll his death last month has taken, she said she feels “sick” every day without him.
She revealed: “I feel like I’m sick every day I wake up. It’s as if I should be going to hospital. I don’t feel like myself. I know it’s early days yet but, my God, the loss is huge.”
After his death, Eileen found Brendan’s last little gift to her.
“He wrote me a beautiful card and I found it in his bag. He was very romantic, right up to the very end, let me tell you.
“He was a pure gentleman. It didn’t have to be Valentine’s for me to get cards. I got cards out of the blue.
"Brendan had a heart bigger than anybody I’ve ever met, not just for me and our four kids, but for anybody that came his way. He would have done anything to help anybody along the way, and put himself out to do it.”
Comedian and singer Brendan received the devastating news that he had terminal cancer while he was being treated for pneumonia.
While Eileen revealed that for that first awful day, her husband of 47 years was stunned and in shock, from that day on the entire family made his last days count.
“The time that we all had in the hospital was nothing short of epic. We partied, he ate everything he wanted.
“We had a last supper one of the nights. We took over the restaurant upstairs in the Galway Clinic and we did it up with balloons and the whole works.
"There were 12 or 14 of us and we sat around a table eating food from a local Chinese.
“Brendan sat like the king at the top of the table and we had a lovely meal that night. He had everything he wanted right up to the end.”
She told the Sunday World: “He’d say to me, ‘this is lovely, this is great.’ He enjoyed it. He gained weight in the hospital. As the oncologist said, he’s the only cancer patient he ever dealt with that gained weight.
“We were all feeding him all the [food] longings he had. Whoever stayed over with him would have the list the next morning. It was epic, you just couldn’t write the script for it.
“It was beautiful, it was graceful. Everyone should get that [end of life] and unfortunately they don’t.”
Eileen said that Brendan kept up his ability to make everyone around him happy right to the end, determined to stay positive for his children and grandchildren.
