Daughter told Draper: ‘If you can’t do this, we’ll be OK’
DEREK DRAPER’S daughter told him that the family would “be OK” if he could not go on anymore, Kate Garraway has revealed.
Darcey Draper told her father shortly before his death: “Dad, if you can’t do this, we’ll be OK. Don’t worry about us and don’t worry about Mum,” the 17-year-old was said to have whispered to her father in her final moments with him. “We’ll be fine because you live on through us.”
Shedding tears on ITV as she spoke about her husband’s passing, Good Morning Britain presenter Garraway also revealed that the couple’s daughter had decided herself to be one of the pallbearers at his funeral in the church of St Mary the Virgin in north London last Friday.
“That was her idea,” Garraway said, adding: “I was really conscious that the funeral should be about Derek and not about ill health… and Darcy came into the room [when she was planning the service] and said ‘please, will you let me carry the coffin?’
“I thought crikey, that’s a practical challenge, anybody who’s ever done it it’s a heavy thing - and she said I want to do it and basically insisted on doing it and I thought that was a beautiful thing, that she carried her dad to the light.”
Speaking on Good Morning Britain ahead of her return to the studio on Thursday, the mother-of-two also revealed that the King had sent her condolences after her husband died.
The presenter, who announced her husband’s death last month aged 56, said she had received “extraordinary” messages of condolence from unexpected places following the funeral.
She said: “I had the most beautiful letter from David and Victoria Beckham – handwritten. Very good handwriting, that was Darcey’s observation.
“And from the Royal family, Catherine and William sent a beautiful letter, and I know Catherine has been in hospital herself. Even the King, because there is somebody who knows about grief, that anticipatory grief where you know something has a risk of happening and how different it is when it does happen.”
Prominent political and entertainment industry figures, including Sir Tony Blair and Sir Elton John, attended Draper’s funeral last week.