For our colleagues from Gala, Stéphane Tapie returned to the last moments of his father’s life. A moving testimony.
On October 3, 2021, Bernard Tapie disappeared at the age of 78, as a result of his stomach cancer. Behind him, he leaves a widow in deepest mourning and four children: Stéphane, Nathalie, Sophie and Laurent. The eldest of the siblings has decided to return to the last moments of his father’s life, in a book entitled how to say goodbye to you, published on January 12. On this occasion, he gave an interview to our colleagues from Gala in which he fondly recalls the last moments shared with his father. “I knew Tapie much better than my father. so every day with Tapie.”
A situation that was not easy for the two men : “At the start, I had to do violence to myself. The first month, there was a lot of embarrassment, Tapie was very embarrassed to be diminished. (…) During all these weeks, we shared a complicity unknown until -the”. If his son manages to make him smile, at the beginning of October 2021, the situation degenerates and those close to Bernard Tapie quickly understand that his days are now numbered. “We all saw that he was waking up less and less, that he was slipping. My father was in a coma. He died on October 3, 2021, in the morning, surrounded by all his family. That’s what he wanted, he didn’t want to die on a hospital bed and I think he had the most beautiful death.”
A moving testimony
If the disappearance of his father is a terrible ordealStéphane Tapie observes a kind of deliverance on the face of his father who has suffered terribly since 2017, the year of his cancer diagnosis. “I saw that life was gone in his breath which stopped, in his face which calmed down. For my father, death was a relief, a liberation. He was a prisoner of his body, of pain”, he wrote. He then remembers a sentence that he said to him when he was leaving: “It’s okay, don’t worry, I’ll take care of the rest. I’ll take over.”