Tina Turner Opens Up About Her Son's Suicide: 'I Still Don't Know What Took Him to the Edge'
Tina Turner has spoken movingly about the tragic suicide of her son, Craig Turner, in July.
Speaking to BBC News, the music icon — who previously described Craig’s death at the age of 59 as “My saddest moment as a mother” — revealed his passing was doubly shocking because he’d just fallen in love with a new girlfriend and started a new job.
“I still don’t know what took him to the edge,” Turner told the BBC, “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?”
Turner added to the BBC: “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.”
On July 3, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner confirmed to PEOPLE that Craig was found dead at his Studio City, California, home from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Turner was just 18 when she gave birth to Craig after a romance with saxophonist Raymond Hill, who performed with Ike Turner’s band Kings of Rhythm. He was adopted by Ike after he and Turner married in 1962.
“Death is not a problem for me, I really don’t mind leaving,” Turner added to the BBC about her own mortality, which was severely tested by a mild stroke in 2013. This was later followed by a cancer diagnosis and subsequent kidney failure.
In her upcoming memoir My Love Story, the diva details how her finding love with second husband Erwin Bach literally saved her life, with Bach donating his own kidney for a life-saving kidney transplant procedure.
RELATED: Tina Turner Reveals She Tried to Kill Herself to Escape Ex-Husband Ike’s Violence
“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 to the BBC. “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.”
