‘Tanya’s the one. I’ll never be with anyone else...’
DEVOTED Vinnie Jones wept yesterday as he revealed the tragic but tender moment his beloved wife Tanya slipped away.
The footballer-turned-film star told in heartbreaking detail how he gently kissed his soulmate and told her “I love you, I love you”.
Tanya, 53, in her favourite navy Ralph Lauren pyjamas, was surrounded by Vinnie and five relatives including her adopted daughter Kaley, 32.
She had succumbed after a brave and dignified six-year battle with three forms of cancer.
The couple both had treatment for melanoma, but the former Wimbledon player was cleared.
He shed tears but was also able to smile as he spoke of Tanya’s courage and told of their precious final days at home in Los Angeles.
And ruling out ever falling in love again, he declared: “She was the light of my life. I will never be with anyone else.”
Vinnie, 54, also revealed he felt Tanya’s soul leave the room after she passed away in July. Later that night he felt her presence in the form of a white light in the sky. Speaking at Tanya’s childhood home near Watford, Vinnie said: “In that last week of her life when the doctors said there were no more treatments, I never told her she was dying.
“We never spoke of that, I didn’t want her to know. But she kept saying, ‘Take me home. Can I go home now?’ She desperately wanted to go home. So did she know? Probably. In the hospital I slept there every night and Kaley would come every morning.
“She has never ever slept one night in hospital without me there. I have always been by her side. On the week of her death, the doctors said very nicely, ‘These are your options, we don’t know if it is going to be months or weeks’.
“Through my grief I said, ‘I don’t want her to be in any pain’. So we took her home. Straightaway she was on the oxygen. Then she was on fentanyl.
“We got some beautiful innocent moments in those last days. She would try and get out of the patio windows or she would wake up and look and me and go, ‘You... you know’.
“Some of the moments would make you laugh.”
Tanya, married to Vinnie for 25 years, was first diagnosed with cancer in 2013.
She was treated at Cedarssinai Hospital in Los Angeles before living out her final days in the couple’s Hollywood home.
They had moved there after Vinnie’s breakthrough acting role in Guy Ritchie’s Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels in 1998.
He added: “I’m a shell. She is the only one... whenever I let myself down, or her down, she was always the strongest, the person who I answered to.”