3-29-2021
Sadly, Tina Turner Is Very Ill. And She Has Come Back To America For The Last Time...To Say Goodbye.
For the first time in years, Tina and her husband Erwin Bach, returned to America, the country whose citizenship she willingly gave up, for the Broadway premiere of her stage show, Tina - The Tina Turner Musical.
It is also the last time they plan to return here.
It is with this opportunity, that she has decided to say goodbye and thank you to her fans.
Tina was born Anna Mae Bullock, and her childhood was filled with misery and poverty and abuse, picking cotton in the fields at a young age in and around Nutbush, Tennessee.
Her parents abandoned her as a child.
Said Tina, “Mom was not kind. When I became a star, of course back then she was happy because I bought her a house. I did all kinds of things for her, she was my mother.
I was trying to make her comfortable because she didn’t have a husband, she was alone, but she still didn’t like me.”
It was this abuse as a child that may have contributed to her marriage to Ike Turner in 1962, after meeting at a St. Louis nightclub, Ike’s Rhythm and Blues Band became the Ike & Tina Turner Revue.
We know what happened when she met and married Ike Turner.
Fame, fortune….and daily mental, emotional and physical beatings.
After one bloody beat-down in 1976, that was enough.
She decided, along with the divorce proceedings….to take her power back.
For all the hell she endured with Ike, she found the polar opposite with German- born music producer Erwin.
He was gentle.
He was kind.
And he loved her.
“He was just so different. So laid back. So comfortable. So unpretentious,” Turner said of first meeting current husband, German music producer Erwin Bach, 27 years ago at an airport. “I really needed love. I just needed to love a person.”
Their attraction is more than a simple spark, Bach, 65, added.
“It’s love — it’s something we both have for each other. I always refer to it as an electrical charge,” said Bach in the doc. “I still have it … That feeling is still with me. It’s in my heart.”
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Though side-by-side since 1985, they married in 2013, and after having lived in Switzerland for over two decades….it was then that she renounced her U.S. citizenship.
And not three weeks after their marriage….she had a stroke, which rendered her unable to walk or talk.
Erwin was there every second of every day, to aid in her recovery....until she could not just talk, but sing again.
In 2016, she was diagnosed with intestinal cancer.
The doctors removed a cancerous section of her colon.
Erwin was there everyday.
In 2017, after years of taking homeopathic remedies for her high blood pressure, it led to complete kidney failure.
What did Erwin do for the woman he loved?
He donated one of his kidneys, which, like their love, was a perfect match.
“I know that my medical adventure is far from over,” she said in her 2017 memoir Turner Turner: My Love Story. “There’s always another test, another doctor’s appointment or biopsy to get through,” adding, “we’re both still here, closer than we ever imagined and that’s cause for celebration.”
She joined a Swiss right-to-die, physician aid in dying organization, Exit.
“It wasn’t my idea of life but the toxins in my body had started taking over. I couldn’t eat," she recalled in her book three years ago. “I was surviving, but not living. I began to think about death. If my kidneys were going, and it was time for me to die, I could accept that, it was OK. When it’s time, it’s really time.”
And she is grateful that she is able to have the choice, on her time table, and at her discretion.
It gives her peace of mind to have such an organization to turn to.
( Three years ago, i traveled to Switzerland, to be with my dear friend with progressive MS, when she decided to die with dignity. She used Dignitas, and was relieved to have the option. )
In 2019, still recovering, her 59 year-old son Craig, committed suicide.
She believes that loneliness killed him.
In a conversation with Oprah Winfrey just weeks after Craig's death last year, Turner spoke about the initial disbelief she had felt upon hearing the news. "At first I didn't believe it, because not long ago, Craig told me, 'Mother, I'm really happy now.' He had a new woman in his life, and he'd just redecorated his apartment," Turner recalled. "But during our last talk, he said, 'I just want to hear your voice and that laugh.' He had never said something like that. I think that was his goodbye to me, but I didn't realize it at the time.
According to Buddhism, you come back to earth and do life again until you get it right. I believe his next life will be easier," she explained. "I think he's in a good place.""
And she credits Buddhism with saving her life.
Tina Turner is shedding light on her path to peace in her new book, Happiness Becomes You: A Guide to Changing Your Life for Good, in which she details how her Buddhist practices helped her out of the darkest times of her life.
"I really do believe that age is just a number, and I have never let age stand in my way," Turner writes in an excerpt shared by People. "Not at 42, when people said that I was too old to be a rock star. And not now, in my eighties, when the book I dreamed of writing for decades is finally in your hands.
I've passed 80, but I have not 'arrived,' because I still challenge myself to grow, to step out of my comfort zone, to improve my life, and to be of service to others."
Thankfully, she was taken to the hospital, where she recovered. "Not long after that, a number of people suggested I try chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo and studying Buddhist principles," she continued. "The more I learned about it, the more I found the philosophy helpful, and it made perfect sense to me. Buddhism literally saved my life, and I’ve been happily chanting every day for about 50 years now."
So now for the next couple of weeks, Tina and Erwin are in New York.
She is now 81 (Erwin is 65), and is plagued with multiple health issues.
Said Erwin, “She said, ‘I’m going to America to say goodbye to my American fans and I’ll wrap it up. ’And I think this documentary and the play, this is it — it’s a closure."
Said Tina, “It wasn’t a good life. The good did not balance the bad,” she said. “I had an abusive life, there’s no other way to tell the story. It’s a reality. It’s a truth. That’s what you’ve got, so you have to accept it.
I believe we all have the potential for indestructible happiness, and we already have within us everything we need to be joyful. We must simply tap into it.
To me, a truly happy life means feeling optimistic and confident, no matter what circumstances we may face, because we know that our inner wisdom can guide us to make positive choices. We always have a choice, even if it is as seemingly small as choosing to think a more positive thought or being grateful for a cherished moment we’ve experienced.”
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