Former Sex Pistols singer John Lydon recently appeared on an episode of the XS Noize Podcast and talked about how he coped with his wife Nora Foster’s passing earlier this year. Johnny Rotten explained the unhealthy drinking habit he picked up:
“I’m getting fit, right? There was a period there for three months solid of just non-stop drinking. And I wasn’t getting drunk and it wasn’t helping push the sadness away. And I stopped. And that was hell. Hell, all right?”
He continued by saying that thinking about Nora helped him and he emphasised the importance of the grieving process and not rushing it:
“But I’m getting better. And I’m focusing more on doing things right rather than selfishly saddened. If Nora’s around and she’s looking at me, the last thing she wants to see is me crying into a bottle of whiskey. But it’s a thing you definitely have to do. I’ll tell you, you have to go through that. You have to do that because it’s just too overwhelming otherwise.”
Lydon also explained how he perceives life now:
“So it’s a series of ladders, steps up the ladder until you get where you need to be. Now I can deal with the sadness sometimes, not always. But I know that is what I have to do because I’ve been giving the gift of life and I’m certainly not going to take my own life.”
Nora Foster passed away on April 6th, 2023, five years after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. On April 12th, in an interview John had, he told how he initially coped with losing her:
“In an odd weird way, this is actually a gift from God, not a curse. Because it offers enormous self-reflection. And it reminds me of that famous tradition in the Lydon family, ‘Don’t have self-pity – all it does is arm your enemies.'”
In a separate interview in July, however, Johnny revealed his attachments and that he failed to cope:
“I thought I would be able to handle this side of it, but it is, if anything, worse. I like to sleep with Nora’s ashes in the cupboard next to the bed because there is no expectancy of meeting her in this life again. And if there is a hereafter… Some of them rules I haven’t been following could prove a problem. It doesn’t bode well!”
You can watch the whole interview below.