Damian Lewis is mourning the loss of wife Helen McCrory, who passed away Friday at age 52 following a brief battle with cancer.
On Sunday, the “Billions” star wrote a touching tribute to McCrory in The Sunday Times.
“As I sit down to write this, I can hear Helen shouting from the bed, ‘Keep it short, Damian, it’s not about you,'” he wrote.
“I’ll try, but on a weekend when the papers, rightly, will be paying their respects to the Duke of Edinburgh, thousands of others around the world have been remembering m’Duchess, my Little One, royalty in her own right. And I’d like to throw in my tuppence worth…” he continued.
“When I say ‘royalty”, I am of course referring to the esteem in which Helen is held in our business. Her nickname to many was Dame Helen (apologies, Dame Helen), and although we’ll never know now whether that would have become a reality, I think secretly, we do know,” Lewis wrote.
“I’ve never known anyone so consciously spread happiness,” Lewis added. “I’ve never known anyone able to enjoy life as much. Her ability to be in the present and enjoy the moment was inspirational. Nor was she interested in navel-gazing. No real self-interest in self-reflection; she believed in looking out, not in. Which is why she was able to turn her light so brightly on others,” he said.
As Lewis recalled, his wife was “funny as hell,” but could also become “magnificently angry, imperious, dismissive. Gloriously.”
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She was also happy. “Always. Some people believe happiness is a right, some people find happiness difficult. It’s an elusive emotion. Helen believed you choose happiness,” he said.
“Already I miss her. She has shone more brightly in the last months than you would imagine even the brightest star could shine. In life, too, we had to rise to meet her. But her greatest and most exquisite act of bravery and generosity has been to ‘normalize’ her death,” Lewis explained. “She’s shown no fear, no bitterness, no self-pity, only armed us with the courage to go on and insisted that no one be sad, because she is happy. I’m staggered by her. She’s been a meteor in our life.”
