“I don’t look at the cup as half full, believe me,” Pierce Brosnan once said.
Pierce Brosnan can no longer mask the anguish of losing loved ones after a series of catastrophes that have consumed his life. “From time to time, the gloomy, mournful Irish black dog lies by me,” he told Esquire.
As a father who adored his daughter Charlotte, he had to watch helplessly as her body succumbed to ovarian cancer, the same disease that had claimed the life of his wife Cassandra 22 years before.
“To watch someone you love have his or her life eaten away bit by bit by this insidious disease, that kind of sorrow becomes an indelible part of your psyche,” the actor said at a Stand Up to Cancer event, according to Good Housekeeping. “I held the generous, strong, beautiful hand of my first wife Cassie as ovarian cancer took her life much too soon. And just last year, I held the hand of my funny, wonderful daughter Charlotte before she too died from this wretched, inherited disease.”
Cassandra’s children from a previous marriage were Charlotte and her brother, Christopher. After their father died in 1986, Brosnan was more than pleased to adopt the children and give them his surname.
“We just clicked as a family,” Brosnan said, as quoted by Mirror. “To begin with I was Pierce, then I was Daddy Pierce, and then I just became Dad. Charlotte and Chris have just been amazing in my life.”
Charlotte died in 2013 at the age of 41, only weeks after marrying the man she loved, Alex. Pierce Brosnan, according to Fabiosa, escorted her down the aisle not long before she succumbed to cancer, leaving behind her husband, children, and a heartbroken father.
“On June 28 at 2 p.m. my darling daughter Charlotte Emily passed on to eternal life, having succumbed to ovarian cancer,” Brosnan said in a statement obtained, according to E! News. “She was surrounded by her husband Alex, children Isabella and Lucas and brothers Christopher and Sean.”
He went on to say, “Charlotte fought her cancer with grace and humanity, courage and dignity. Our hearts are heavy with the loss of our beautiful dear girl.”
He unfortunately lost two of the most important individuals in his life to the same sickness in just over two decades. He went on to say, “We hope for her recovery and that a treatment for this dreadful sickness will be found soon. We appreciate everyone’s genuine sympathies.”
Brosnan remembered how she could always make his daughter giggle while he grieved over the daughter he adored. Nancy Ellison, a longtime friend of the actress, told People that Charlotte was the “custodian of laughter.”
Ellison described her as “a bubbly, almost kind of goofy, gorgeous girl” and said, “Pierce wrote to me after she died that the most intense memory that he had was of always being able to make Charlotte laugh. He wanted to be able to make her laugh again.”
In an email that Brosnan sent to Ellison, he wrote, “Just to either side sits sorrow and grief. However, my head is unbowed and my spirit is Irish strong. I have faith that from it all will come a beauty.”
Ellison has known the actor for over three decades and said, “His grief makes him a poet… I forget that about him because he doesn’t live in grief. But now and then, grief hits him again, and this rushing poetry comes out of him. This heart bursts open that feels pain but somehow looks for beauty at the same time.”
References:
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a53654/pierce-brosnan-the-son/
https://people.com/celebrity/pierce-brosnan-wife-daughter-cancer/
https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/uk/news/a568112/pierce-brosnan-discusses-losing-his-wife-and-daughter-to-cancer/
https://www.eonline.com/fr/news/435657/pierce-brosnan-s-daughter-dies-of-cancer-at-41
https://fabiosa.com/ctent-rsvlk-ausmk-pbsmk-phnkz-pierce-brosnan-walked-his-daughter-charlotte-down-the-aisle-in-secret-just-days-before-she-lost-battle-to-cancer/?
