In a soon to be aired BBC documentary, Rio Ferdinand: Being
Mum And Dad, the former England footballer and ex-Manchester United
defender revealed that he turned to alcohol following the death of his
wife Rebecca in March 2015, after experiencing guilt that she died and
not him.
Breaking down while filming, Ferdinand said he
started drinking in the middle of the night to get through the grief of
losing her to breast cancer.
The 38-year-old
who is now a single-parent to their three children Lorenz, 10, Tate,
eight, and Tia, five, met Rebecca when he was just 21 and they got
married in 2009 on Peter Island, after he proposed during a trip to Las
Vegas in 2007, a year after their eldest Lorenz’s birth.
‘At
the beginning I was drinking a lot at night time. We have a lady lucky
enough who lives with us, she would go to bed and I’d come back down in
the middle of the night and probably drink a lot for the first three or
four months. But I would get up and do the school run and stuff.’
Ferdinand
said he can now sympathise with people who go to ‘dark places’
following trauma and grief. He insisted that it was the people who he
surrounded himself with that gave him the drive to succeed for his
children.
‘That’s
why a network of people around you is so important. And I was fortunate
to have that and also having my kids as inspiration to make sure I get
up and do things and try and make things work. Some people aren’t
afforded that, some people haven’t got that, and that’s when I started
to become a bit more sympathetic when people do go to places that are
dark places.’
He added: ‘I used to look at people or read
stories and think, how can you be so selfish and commit suicide or
attempt to commit suicide or whatever. But I can actually sympathise now
because I understand that you get to places where you think, if I
didn’t have that network of people or my kids who I use as an
inspiration to be able to get up and think straight, I can understand
that.’
360L
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