I told Linda I couldn’t go on without stick in my throat. She told me I had
Superstar singer reveals how his emotional album tribute to
It was the hardest conversation he ever had. And, for Sir Tom Jones, as he sat by the side of his dying wife, Linda, the most inspiring.
In 2016, he had cancelled all his engagements to be at her bedside as she fought cancer but, even though Linda knew the end was near, she refused to listen as her husband of 59 years told her he didn’t know if he could carry on.
Jones, 80, remembers: “I told her I didn’t think I’d be able to sing again. I didn’t know if I could get the songs out. They were sticking in my throat.
“I said: ‘Linda, you know that this cancer is incurable, right?’ She replied: ‘ Yes, I know.’
“I said: ‘Look, I really don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t see a life after this’. Linda knew she was dying, but she was the calmest person in the room.
“My son, Mark, and myself were like basket cases because we knew it was near the end but Linda said: ‘ You’ve got to do it. You can’t fall with me. I have to leave but you don’t have to’.
“She told me and Mark: ‘ You have got to carry on. You can still sing. You must promise me that you will’.”
Linda died on April 10, 2016, at Cedars-sinai Hospital in Los Angeles after fighting what doctors described as a “short but fierce” battle with cancer.
Before she became ill, it had been Linda’s wish to return to the UK and, shortly after her death, Jones sold their £6.5 million mansion and moved back to London.
The couple were school sweethearts who married in 1957 – both aged 16 – when she was pregnant with son, Mark. Now, Tom has paid a heartfelt tribute to his wife on his new album, Surrounded By Time.
It features the song, I Won’t Crumble With You If You Fall, written by acclaimed US social activist and Sweet Honey In The Rock founder Bernice Johnson Reagon. Her lyrics assumed a new significance for Tom as he and his wife came to terms with her illness.
He said: “When I first heard the song, I thought,’ My God, this is unbelievable’.
“It says, ‘I’ll do everything for you when I wake up in the morning if you call for as long as I can. But I won’t crumble with you, if you fall’.
“Linda didn’t actually use the word ‘crumble’, but she may as well have. Instead, she said: ‘Don’t fall with me. That’s what you’ve got to do. You’ve got to go forward and keep doing it.”