*Bernie Mac Widow Rhonda, provides a glimpse into the comedian’s final hours as she publicly opens up about the tragic passing on OWN’s “Oprah: Where Are They Now?”
“August the 8th, he had woke up,” Rhonda McCullough recalled about Mac, who she met in in 1974 and had been with since they were 16-years-old. “They said, ‘We’re going to put a feeding tube in him,’ and just everything went wrong.” His heart stopped, and he had to be resuscitated.
“When they finally let me go into the room to see him, I was like, ‘Oh, my God,” McCullough shared about that fateful day in 2008. “He was just shaking, and his eyes was just, like, wide open and he wasn’t really looking at anybody.”
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During her appearance, McCullough burst into tears when touching on how she pleaded for Mac to pull through.
“I said, ‘Please don’t, don’t die…I said, ‘I’m here. I’m waiting for you. I’ll take care of you. Just don’t, don’t die. Don’t die,” McCullough said.
A few hours later, Mac was gone at the age of 50 from complications from pneumonia.
“It was around 2 o’clock that morning. I remember seeing the door open, and the doctor was standing in the doorway,” McCullough remembered as she fought tears. “I looked at her and I said, ‘He’s gone, isn’t he?’ She [nodded]. My whole life was him, since I was 16…I didn’t know what I was gonna do. It’s like, what is my reasoning for being here now? What is my purpose? How am I going to make it now?”
Although Mac is no longer here, McCullough works to keep her husband’s spirit alive through the Bernie Mac Foundation. The foundation, created a year before Mac passed, promotes awareness of sarcoidosis, the disease the funnyman suffered from.
“The foundation means to me everything that Bernard was and that he wanted,” McCullough said.
McCullough’s appearance on “ Oprah: Where Are They Now?” will air at 10 p.m. Saturday (Mar. 18) on OWN.
To see a preview of the episode, check out the video below:
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