Gibb’s hidden pain

Robin Gibbs of the Bee Gees has suffered through the deaths of his younger brother Andy, his father, and his twin brother, Maurice.

Robin Gibb is a haunted man, says Olga Craig in the London Telegraph. The onetime Bee Gee’s family has been rocked by a series of deaths since 1988, when his younger brother Andy died of heart failure at 30 after a long struggle with booze and drugs. Then, four years later, Gibb’s father passed away from what Gibb believes was a broken heart. “When Andy died my dad just crumbled. He gave up, lost all faith in life. He was consumed by guilt that he hadn’t been there on the day for Andy.” Gibb feels the same sort of irrational guilt over the 2003 death of his twin brother and fellow Bee Gee, Maurice, from complications from a treatable intestinal problem. Gibb hadn’t even known his twin was sick. “I got a phone call from his assistant saying he was in a coma. I was like, ‘What do you mean? When did he go into hospital?’ I was in shock.’’ The grief, he says, is ever present. “I think about Maurice at unpredictable times. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about him. One is a twin for life. I’m forever seesawing between the two realities: one that it happened and the other that it didn’t have to.”

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