Tina Turner has had her fair share of tragedies throughout her life, and the singer has now opened up about her son Craig, who committed suicide earlier this year. Fifty-nine-year-old Craig Turner was found dead at his Los Angeles home in July from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
In an interview with BBC News , the legendary musician said she had no clue he would do such a thing as he seemed to be content with both his professional and personal life, particularly after he started dating his new girlfriend.
“I still don’t know what took him to the edge, because at that stage he had said to me that he had never met a woman that he felt that way about,” Tina said.
“He was bringing her to meet me [for] his birthday in August. He had decorated his apartment, that I bought him years ago. He had gotten a new job with a prominent real estate company in California, [which] he was very happy with,” she added.
The 78-year-old also said that she had no idea what pulled him down so much, but she believed it was to do with him struggling with loneliness – despite having found someone.
“He was an introverted person, he was very shy, so I didn’t know either, except now when I listen back to our last conversations, I notice a change.”
“The last few times we talked, the conversations were different, and I didn’t know that until after the suicide,” she said.
Tina also talked about her life and how it had changed since she married her long-term partner Erwin Bach in 2013, something she has also discussed in her new autobiography My Love Story . After her honeymoon, the pop diva shocked the world when news arose that she had suffered a mild stroke. After that, she was diagnosed with cancer and had kidney failure, for which the doctors told her she absolutely needed treatment or else she wasn’t going to make it.
“So I said well, if it’s time…. I felt like I’m in my late 70s, my mother died at 84, my sister died at 74 and I thought maybe this was my time. In Buddhism you accept the life and the death. I was ready, I just thought it was my time,” she told the BBC .
She declined the dialysis as she didn’t want to be living on a machine, and she considered assisted suicide as she was living in Switzerland at the time, where the procedure is legal. However, Bach stepped in and offered her his own kidney, and she said she was now feeling “happier than I’ve ever been in my life.”
