Last week, we reported that the Hollywood star Gary Sinise of Forrest Gump fame had broken his silence after his son Mac died back in January at the age of 33 following a five year battle with cancer. Now, Sinise is speaking out to further open up about this unimaginable loss.
Sinise Discusses Son’s Death
“He was a pure soul. He had a pure heart. He was a gentle, loving, kind, funny, talented guy,” Sinise, 68, told Entertainment Tonight. “… He loved his family. He loved his sisters. They were so close. He loved his mom. She was constantly with him throughout this cancer fight.”
After Mac’s death, Sinise revealed that his son had been diagnosed with a rare cancer known as Chordoma back in 2018, the same year his wife Moira Sinise learned that she had breast cancer.
“There was a really stormy period where my dad had a stroke, and then my wife had multiple spine surgeries, and then she got diagnosed with cancer, and then my son got diagnosed with cancer a couple of months later,” he recalled. “It was just like, ‘God, what’s going on? What’s happening? This is challenging.'”
“He was a having a lot of pain in his tail bone. At one point years ago he kind of slammed on the breaks too hard on a bike and he jammed his tailbone, and we thought it had something to do with that,” Sinise continued. “He’d say, ‘I’m having a lot of pain here.’ And then the pain got too much for him and I was like, ‘What is going on here?'”
Mac eventually went to see a spine surgeon who discovered “a massive tumor on his sacrum.”
“People can go for years just thinking they have a bruise there or something… then all of a sudden you discover you had a massive tumor growing there for years,” Sinise added. “This is the kind of slow-growing tumor that it could’ve been there since birth. We don’t know.”
Related: Gary Sinise Breaks His Silence After Son Mac Dies At 33 Following Battle With Rare Cancer
Sinise Puts Career On Hold
Sinise ended up putting his career on hold because “things were getting a little trickier” for Mac as he began having side effects from chemotherapy, radiation and medication.
“In early 2020, Mac was going to have to have another surgery on his spine, because there were more tumors growing on his spine. And then he had another surgery in June,” Sinise said. “So in 2020, I just pulled back and put all my attention, all my focus on trying to help him, while at the same time still trying to continue with the mission of the Gary Sinise Foundation.”
“I just kept going and trying to do what I could and work with the doctors and try to take that away from Mac, so he wouldn’t have to think about talking to doctors and talking about cancer all the time,” he continued. “… Because I had a solid career, I could afford to stop and to just be available to my son and my wife, who was also going through challenges. Thank God I could afford to do that and take time to focus on them, while at the same time trying to continue the foundation work.”
Mac was determined to fight for his life even as he “was getting more and more seriously ill.”
“It was not going to get better. There’s no cure,” Sinise lamented. “We tried 25 different drugs. These are just drugs that are used on other cancers and the doctors kept trying and they said, ‘As long as you want to keep trying, Mac, we’ll keep trying. We’ll come up with something.’ Mac said, ‘I want to keep trying.’ He was an incredible fighter.”
Related: Gary Sinise Sends Over 1,000 Children Of Fallen Military Heroes To Disney World
Mac Becomes Paralyzed
The pain was so bad for Mac that it was a “blessing” when he became paralyzed from the chest down.
“It was very painful and all of a sudden he couldn’t feel anything from the chest down, so that pain that he was feeling before was gone now, but he couldn’t walk,” Sinise said. “It’s just the nature of this awful cancer. He was fighting and I wasn’t going to stop fighting for him. I never wanted to think that we were going to lose the battle even though you know that you’re fighting uphill all the way.”
In Mac’s final days, he found comfort watching his father’s 1994 movie Forrest Gump.
“I was staying with him at the hospital at the end… I had to step out for something at one point, and I stopped by the nurse’s station on the way in. I said, ‘How’s Mac doing? What’s he’s doing?'” he remembered. “[The nurse said], ‘He’s watching Forrest Gump on his phone.’ He was in there watching Forrest Gump. It made him feel good. I think it made him feel closer to me sometimes. He would watch it when I was gone.”
Please join us in saying a prayer for the entire Sinise family as they mourn this devastating loss.
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