Eric Idle Said He Needed to See George Harrison on His Deathbed
Eric Idle said he needed to see George Harrison on his deathbed in 2001. Otherwise, he would’ve regretted not seeing his friend one last time. The comedian wasn’t George’s only friend who felt that way.
Eric Idle said he visited George Harrison on his death bed
Idle and George became friends in the 1970s. They met at a Monty Python and the Holy Grail screening, smoked pot in the projection room, went to dinner, then the recording studio, and proceeded to talk for the next 48 hours. They bonded over their similar roles in their respective groups.
Idle said it was love at first sight between them. Later, George helped Idle and Monty Python produce Life of Brian, allowing the friends to collaborate. The pair remained friends who were there for each other. After George’s 1999 home invasion, Idle was at his side immediately.
So, when George was dying, Idle couldn’t stay away. He had to see the man who’d taught him so much about spirituality one last time.
“I was with him on his deathbed,” Idle told Yahoo! “I would rather be with somebody when they’re dying than not be with somebody when they’re dying — especially a friend like him, who always talked about death.
“When we first met a long time ago, in 1975, he said, ‘You can have all the money in the world and all the fame in the world, but you’re still going to have to die.’ He would always take that position, and it sort of resonated with me, because a lot of my songs are about death, even ‘Keep on the Bright Side.’
“So, when he came to pass away, unlike most people, he’d been preparing for this moment for the previous 25 years. And he was prepared to go. He died in the Hindu faith, and he was very happy he wouldn’t have to be reborn! [laughs] Actually, I wouldn’t mind being reborn, but I’m just a silly old English atheist.
“It was the only thing we ever didn’t see eye-to-eye on, but we’d have long conversations about it. He was a remarkable man. He really changed my life.”
Idle wasn’t George’s only friend to visit him on his deathbed
In the last year of his life, George traveled all over the world, but he ended up in LA for the last couple of days of his life. In a rented house in Studio City, some of George’s closest friends came to visit him on his deathbed. Along with Idle, Jeff Lynne was one of them.
During those last days, George was “weak and drifting in and out of consciousness,” Rolling Stone wrote. Still, like Idle, Lynne wasn’t put off. He wanted to say goodbye.
“I was with my girlfriend, Rosie, and she brought a ukulele without telling me,” Lynne said. “So I went into the room and strummed some little George Formby tunes – all these tunes that George loved and could play fantastically well – just quietly to him. I hope he heard me – I think he did, because he did look at me.
“The one thing I was upset about was that George didn’t leap up and say, ‘That’s the wrong bloody chord!’ That’s what I was hoping for – that I would wake him up and he would go, ‘You bastard, you’re playing the wrong chord!'”
Idle’s fellow Monty Python member, Michael Palin, also visited George on his deathbed. “We ended up sitting together for three hours listening to the music of Hoagie Carmichael. He played tape after tape,” Palin told The Telegraph.
“Death held no terrors for George at all. He’d got all that worked out. He had a spirituality, he said that he was going on somewhere else. He didn’t want people to grieve and feel this was the end.”
Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr had one last moment with their fellow Beatle. Heartbreakingly, Paul sat with George and just held his hand for hours. George’s musical mentor, Ravi Shankar, and his daughter, Anoushka, visited George too. Throughout all of the visits, George’s friends from the Hare Krishna Temple chanted to God, hoping to make George’s passage to the spiritual realm as easy as possible.
George ‘lit the room’ when he died
In Martin Scorsese’s documentary, George Harrison: Living in the Material World, George’s widow, Olivia, explained George “put so much emphasis and importance on the moment of death, of leaving your body.
“That’s really what he was practicing for. It’s like the Dalai Lama said something that really made him smile. He said, ‘And what do you do in the morning?’ He said, ‘I do my practice, I do my mantras, I do my spiritual practice.’ ‘And how do you know it will work?’ ‘I don’t. I’ll find out when I die.’
“And it was so great, but it’s like, that was it. I’m practicing this so that when I die, I will know how to leave my body, and I’ll be familiar, and I won’t be frightened.”
During the last summer of George’s life, he and Olivia went on holiday and looked back on their 30 years of marriage.
“We had this whole 30 years together, and then at the end, you’re able to just decant that time,” Olivia said. “We spent that summer together, and we had so much fun. It’s amazing… At the end of your life, here’s the conversation: ‘I hope I wasn’t a bad husband.’ ‘Well, I hope I was an OK wife,’ you know? Uh, ‘How did we do? How did we do?’ And then you think, ‘Oh, I’m so glad. I’m so glad that we just kept walking this path together. And all those other things that came and went, we just swatted away and batted away in between us, you know?'”
When it finally came time for George to leave the material world, Olivia said he lit the room. “There was a profound experience that happened when he left his body,” she explained. “It was visible. Let’s just say you wouldn’t need to light the room if you were trying to film it. You know, he just lit the room.”
Shortly after George died, his family released the following statement: “He left this world as he lived in it, conscious of God, fearless of death, and at peace, surrounded by family and friends. He often said, ‘Everything else can wait but the search for God cannot wait, and love one another.'”
