Watch: Bernie Mac’s Wife Opens up About His Death, Breaks Down in Tears

Rhonda opened up about Bernie’s death on “Oprah: Where Are They Now?”

She got emotional while going into detail on losing the comedian but his death gave birth to a new passion.

The Huffington Post writes:

“When they finally let me go into the room to see him, I was like, ‘Oh, my God,” Rhonda says. “He was just shaking, and his eyes was just, like, wide open and he wasn’t really looking at anybody.”

Rhonda made an emotional plea to her husband.

“I said, ‘Please don’t, don’t die,'” she says, breaking into tears. “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.'”

A few hours later, Mac was gone.

“It was around 2 o’clock that morning. I remember seeing the door open, and the doctor was standing in the doorway,” Rhonda says. “I looked at her and I said, ‘He’s gone, isn’t he?’ She [nodded].”

Even recalling that moment today, Rhonda becomes overwhelmed with emotion.

“My whole life was him, since I was 16,” she says through tears. “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?”

In the years since Mac’s death, Rhonda says she has found renewed purpose through the Bernie Mac Foundation, which the late comedian started a year before his death to promote awareness and research for sarcoidosis, a disease from which he suffered.

“What better way to have his legacy live on?” Rhonda says. “The foundation means to me everything that Bernard was and that he wanted.”

 

For more information on the Bernie Mac Foundation, click here. Check out the video below: