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Robin Gibb’s son discusses his father’s death

By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 28 May 2012

Robin Gibb’s son has spoken to the Sunday Express about his father’s recent death, clarifying that the Bee Gee star died of kidney and liver failure, rather than succumbing to the cancer he had been fighting for some time, which had actually gone into remission.

Says Robin-John Gibb: “The end was peaceful and dignified, there were no theatrics. It was only later that I cried and cried. It wasn’t the cancer that killed my father; those reports are wrong. Dad had actually gone into remission and the cancer was completely unrecognisable, it was too small to detect. No scan could see it. He actually died of kidney failure”.

Explaining the seeming ups and down in his father’s health in the months before he died, during which time Gibb and those around him frequently seemed optimistic he was past the worst, Robin-John says that his father had fought off both his cancer and survived the bout of pneumonia that left him in a coma for over a week, but then had a seizure that led to a sharp worsening of his condition.

He continued: “Three days before [he died], he was sitting up and watching DVDs and then suddenly he had a seizure. He was then dosed with sedatives to deal with the side effects of his chemotherapy and his liver just couldn’t process them. He deteriorated to the point where it started to affect his kidneys as well. Basically my father died of kidney and liver failure. It was a really sudden downturn”.

Robin-John concluded: “I was sitting next to his bed with my mother and we saw that his heart had started to give out. We knew it was the end. We called my brother and sister and they came in. I was cradling his head and holding his right hand, and my mother was holding his left. I gave him a kiss… We watched him go and told him we loved him”.

The late Bee Gee will be remembered at a private funeral next month with a public memorial service planned for September.