U2 frontman Bono has opened up about his father’s agonising last words to him as he lay dying.
The legendary rocker has revealed his dad Robert Hewson’s final heartbreaking moments in new book Sons+Fathers, and admitted the pair were frequently at odds since his mother died when he was a young teen.
Providing a detailed account of the harrowing night he lost his father in 2001, the musician wrote: ““I was lying on a mattress in Beaumont Hospital beside his bed, having flown home after a U2 show in London. My father woke up in the middle of the night, anxious and whispering. His Parkinson’s disease had taken some of his beautiful tenor away.”
Bono continued: “The whispers were percussive, animated. I called the nurse and we both leaned in to try and make out what he was saying.
“Through the strained rasping, loud and clear, burst ‘F**k off!’ Then, ‘I want to go home. I need to go home.’ And he did. I’m looking forward to seeing him there.”
He added that his relationship with his dad was never an easy one, especially following the death of his mother when he was just 14 years old.
Bono said the family house was no longer a home, “it was a house of three males: my brother Norman, me and my grief-stricken father who had now to our sulking teenage eyes become an unwanted figure of authority – a sergeant major, dishing out to my brother and me the tasks that my mother used to perform.”
Sons+Fathers, which will raise funds for the Irish Hospice Foundation, features a number of high-profile figures detailing their own relationship with their dads, including Paul McCartney, Cillian Murphy, Colin Farrell and Bob Geldof. It is out in shops now.
