Tina Turner has opened up about her son’s suicide earlier this year.
Craig Turner was 59 when he was found dead in July at his Los Angeles home from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Speaking to BBC News, Tina Turner said he had seemed fulfilled in both his professional and personal life after finding a new girlfriend.
“I still don’t know what took him to the edge,” Turner said, “because at that stage he had said to me that he had never met a woman that he felt that way about.”
“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.
“I have no idea what pulled him down, except something that followed him with loneliness. I think it was something with being alone.
“But when I think that, why didn’t he call the new girlfriend that gave him the lift?
She added: “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.”
Turner also discussed how her life had changed since her marriage to her long-term partner Erwin Bach in 2013.
She has written about her life in her new autobiography entitled My Love Story.
Not long after her honeymoon she suffered a mild stroke, she then had cancer, and kidney failure and doctors told her she would die if she didn’t take treatment for her kidney.
“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.”
Since moving to Switzerland she found out about the Exit way of assisted suicide and is signed up to it.
“Death is not a problem for me, I really don’t mind leaving.”
But last year Bach donated a kidney to her and she said she is now feeling better than ever.
“I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life. I’m happier than I ever thought that life would become for me,” said Turner.
“So that means that most of my hardships came while I was young and growing up. And in the last days when normally people suffer from old age and sickness my happiness came.
“I’m really thoroughly happy.
“I did fall a couple of days ago and broke something so I was in a wheelchair and on crutches so maybe now I’m going through my sick period and I think that will take me through to my 90s.
“I’ll be around for a while.”
Source: BBC
