Liam Neeson opens up for the first time about grieving his late wife, Natasha Richardson.
It’s been almost two years since Natasha passed away after, what seemed like a minor bump during a skiing lesson, turned out to be an epidural hematoma that took her life. Liam opens up for the first time about the incident and dealing with the brutal loss.
“I walked into the emergency — it’s like seventy, eighty people, broken arms, black eyes, all that — and for the first time in years, nobody recognizes me. Not the nurses. The patients. No one. And I’ve come all this way, and they won’t let me see her. And I’m looking past them, starting to push — I’m like, F***, I know my wife’s back there someplace. I pull out a cell phone — and a security guard comes up, starts saying, ‘Sorry, sir, you can’t use that in here,’ and I’m about to ask him if he knew me, when he disappears to answer a phone call or something. So I went outside. It’s freezing cold, and I thought, What am I gonna do? How am I going to get past the security? And I see two nurses, ladies, having a cigarette. I walk up, and luckily one of them recognizes me. And I’ll tell you, I was so f****** grateful — for the first time in I don’t know how long — to be recognized. And this one, she says, ‘Go in that back door there.’ She points me to it. ‘Make a left. She’s in a room there.’ So I get there, just in time. And all these young doctors, who look all of eighteen years of age, they tell me the worst. The worst.”
Shortly after Natasha’s funeral Liam went back to work on the movie “Chloe” and shares how he coped with it:
“I think I survived by running away some. Running away to work. Listen, I know how old I am and that I’m just a shoulder injury from losing roles like the one in ‘Taken’. So I stay with the training, I stay with the work. It’s easy enough to plan jobs, to plan a lot of work. That’s effective. But that’s the weird thing about grief. You can’t prepare for it. You think you’re gonna cry and get it over with. You make those plans, but they never work. It hits you in the middle of the night — well, it hits me in the middle of the night. I’m out walking. I’m feeling quite content. And it’s like suddenly, boom. It’s like you’ve just done that in your chest.”
Liam is the father of two sons, Michael, 15, and Daniel, 14. He finds little pieces of his late wife in each of them. Liam shared a story of being interviewed at a sporting event, the interviewer starting out asking him:
‘Mr. Neeson, if Star Wars is on one channel and Schindler’s List is on the other, which one do you watch?’
“And oh, but that gets me started. I mean, I start to tell her, one represents six million people, six million lives, the other is just, just fantasy! But then my boy steps in and — he’s so smart — says, ‘Excuse me, ma’am. Why don’t you say Star Wars on one channel and Taken on the other?’ That’s what made me happy. And I looked that way, because right before I went on, my son, he can see I’m still aggravated, so he just steps up to me and says, ‘Smile, Dad, smile.’ And that’s my bonny boy. His mother just shines through him at moments like that.”
