Brendan Grace’s wife Eileen has shared details of the late comedian’s final days, and why they were so special to his family.
The Dubliner sadly passed away just weeks after being diagnosed with lung cancer, and was laid to rest in his hometown last month.
Now, Eileen has opened up about how the well loved funny man spent his final hours.
“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.” Eileen told Independent.ie.
“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.”
“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.”
Was he able to enjoy it? “Oh, are you joking me, 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” she revealed.
“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,” Eileen added.
“It was beautiful, it was graceful. Everyone should get that [end of life] and unfortunately they don’t.”
Brendn’s funeral procession passed through the streets of the Liberties last month, with hundreds of mourners stepping out to pay their respects.