Still grieving. It's been nearly five years since his wife, Natasha Richardson, passed away suddenly, but Liam Neeson says her death still doesn't feel real. In a new interview with Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes, airing Sunday, Feb. 23, the 61-year-old actor opens up about the tragic loss, and how he made the difficult decision to take his wife off life support.
"[Her death] was never real. It still kind of isn't," the Non-Stop star tells Cooper. "There's periods now in our New York residence when I hear the door opening, especially the first couple of years . . . anytime I hear that door opening, I still think I'm going to hear her."
Richardson died on March 19, 2009 after suffering a head injury from a skiing accident in Montreal, Canada. "She was on life support . . . I went in to her and I told her I loved her, said 'Sweetie, you're not coming back from this, you've banged your head,'" he recalls telling his wife of 15 years. "She and I had made a pact, if any of us got into a vegetative state that we'd pull the plug . . . that was my immediate thought . . . 'Okay, these tubes have to go. She's gone.'"
The Love Actually star made the decision to have three of his wife's organs donated after her death. "She's keeping three people alive at the moment . . . her heart, her kidneys and her liver," he shares. "It's terrific . . . and I think she would be very thrilled and pleased by that."
Though that gives him comfort, the widower and dad to sons Micheal, 19, and Daniel, 18, said he's still grieving to this day. "It hits you. It's like a wave," he explains. "You just get this profound feeling of instability . . . the Earth isn't stable anymore and then it passes and it becomes more infrequent, but I still get it sometimes."
