Bernie Mac’s Daughter Reveals Sad Details About His Last Days

Je’Niece McCullough, the only daughter of the late comedian Bernie Mac, is speaking out about her father, sharing a heartbreaking and dark moment from his final days in a new interview.

McCullough recently appeared on the “Death Talks” podcast, where she discussed her struggle with grief. She revealed that her upbringing hadn’t equipped her to “deal with feelings or emotions,” which intensified the difficulty of her loss. Adding to her sadness was the fact that her father passed away at the peak of his career, meaning that reminders of him were inescapable immediately following his death.

McCullough offered specific details about her father’s final days, recalling how she spent time with him in the hospital. She revealed that he suffered from repeated bouts of pneumonia and a scarred lung, necessitating the use of a ventilator for weeks leading up to his passing. This severe hospital stay followed a previous admission three years earlier.

As the star of “The Bernie Mac Show” neared his end, McCullough said her father grew weary of the ventilator and tried to remove it. This led to him being sedated and physically restrained to the bed to prevent him from pulling out any other medical devices.

One day before he died, Mac briefly regained consciousness. He signaled to his daughter and mouthed the words, “I’m dead.” Initially, she didn’t take him seriously, as he had joked like that before, but he nodded and repeated the words. The next day, McCullough received a call that her father had coded twice but was revived. Sadly, after she and her mother returned to the hospital to see him, he passed away later that evening.

What’s more is that McCullough shared that losing her father drove her into deep depression and having suicidal thoughts, revealing that she once toyed with the idea of taking one of the many guns the “Ocean’s 11” star had stored in his safe and ending her life.

“I used to sit in my parent’s basement and my dad was a proud card-carrying member of the NRA and had an arsenal of guns. And I used to think, ‘you know what? I could just take one of his guns and blow my brains out and I wouldn’t have to deal with this and I’d be done,’” she explained.

She went on to say that while she never went into the safe and went that far, she only stopped considering it because she didn’t want to cause pain or inconvenience for her mother, daughter and others. Still, the pain of losing Mac has been too incredulous to bear at times to this day.

“My dad was my superhero. Superheroes don’t die. Like he’s not–that just–my dad can’t die. That can’t be,” she later said.