Jason Byrne has opened up about the death of his dad, revealing he was with him right until he took his last breath.
His dad Paddy sadly passed away in February of this year, just days after suffering a tragic stroke.
Jason spent that time in the hospital with his dad, and remained by his bedside until he died.
“I was holding his hand with my aunties, and my mam and my sisters were in the corridor,” he said.
“I held his hand, his breathing got faster, kind of scary, and then it just stopped. I wasn’t crying or anything. The nurses keep saying, ‘Keep talking to him, he can hear you’. So I was holding him, and he just kind of went.”
Speaking to Doireann Garrihy on her podcast The Laughs of Your Life, he said, “I’d never seen death. I’d never experienced it. It’s quite a serious thing but at the same time, a beautiful thing.
“To anybody who has a parent who’s dying, definitely try and be with them. A lot of people get afraid and want to walk away, but they’d want you to be there.”
Jason’s dad sadly passed away just weeks before the first lockdown came in, which meant he couldn’t spend time with family or friends to grieve his loss.
Speaking on the Six O’Clock Show earlier this year, he said, “As you know and people who are listening in that when you go through a parent or anybody close to you who passed away, you are very busy with the funeral, you’re busy with relatives, you get busy with all that stuff.
“And then it’s not till all that goes and calms down that you kind of go and grieve. But what happened was that this Covid thing happened so we haven’t even been able to get together as a family on our own and grieve.”
Jason split from his wife in 2018, but as Brenda and the kids live close by, it helped immensely.
“I’m not too far away from my children and my ex-wife they’re only up the road so it’s not too bad. I’m obviously on the phone to my mam and my sisters all the time too,” he said.
“It’s just so sad to lose your dad as you know, but the thing is, the way the Irish deal with everything is through humour.
“I was talking to my mam on the phone and she was saying, ‘Thank god dad wasn’t around for this because the moaning would have been unbelievable!’”
Our thoughts are with Jason and his family at this time.