, 77, recently admitted he had while recording a song. The music legend confessed he broke down for 45 minutes as he thought about his husband David Furnish, 62, and children Zachary, 13 and Elijah, 11.
He also addressed the issue in his recent documentary Never Too Late when he said of his children: “They think about my mortality. They worry about my mortality. Not so much David, but me.”
As an older parent these thoughts are not unusual but psychotherapist Diana Parkinson who specialises in family counselling and regularly provides relationship and health advice said there are things he can do to make it easier for his sons and to bring him some comfort also.
Speaking exclusively to she said: “In a way, it doesn’t really matter what age the children are, but obviously it’s particularly important when you’ve got young children and you are aware that you’ll miss milestones. I think something that would be good for all parents to think about is leaving letters.
“It might sound a bit morbid, but for someone like , he’s got the magic of he could actually record songs that were geared up to his children to listen to. That would be lovely that they have songs that he’d written especially for them to listen to all through their lives. That would be wonderful. But letters – writing letters that can be kept for special occasions, you know, for birthdays, for Christmas, if they go to university or get married, or all of those life events, people can write letters and leave them to be opened at certain dates,” she said.
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Elton John and husband David Furnish have two sons Zachary and Elijah (Image: Getty)
“I think having a memory box or something similar can also be really nice. It is comforting and can be full of simple things that connect the parent and child. Mementos that you can leave and think about, and none of this is to do with money. It’s all to do with connection that soul to soul connection.
“Also, I would say to older parents like Elton we can achieve immortality through our children, because our children are part of us. His children, that never changes. There is always a connection, even after the older parent has left this life. Having conversations about things like this and having conversations about life is a god thing.
“I think it’s good for parents if they can tell their life story to their children. Particularly as an older parent, there’s a huge gap between somebody like ‘s childhood 70 years ago. That’s a big gap to his child now – roughly 60 odd years and to talk about what it was like when he was growing up, and things that he got up to or did, or naughty things, or fun things. Those are things that make parents seem very human to their children, and I don’t think we forget.”
Although Elton’s life has been well documented, most recently in his autobiography Me and his biopic Rocketman which both came out in 2019, Diana beleives this is different to the way he would present his story to his children.
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Elton John is an older parent, here with husband David Furnish and sons Elijah and Zachary in 2015 (Image: Getty)
“Those things are for an audience rather than for his children. There’s a difference between how we communicate with other people, to the way that we would communicate with our children. It’s much more personal. I mean while books and things can be very personal, they’re probably not as personal as the things we would say to our children, perhaps things, or we’d share them in a different way, probably a warmer way,” she said.
Elton was close to tears speakng about his mortality on a recent edition of The Graham Norton show. “Bernie Taupin (Elton’s lyricist) gave me a lyric for a song called, ‘When This Whole World Is Done With Me’, and I’m writing the verse (music) quite quickly, and I think this is a really lovely verse.
“And then I get to the chorus, and I find that it’s about my death, my demise. And as a 76 year old man, which I was at that time, and having children and having a husband, mortality, and you think about,’How long have I got? How long? I hope I’ve got much longer than maybe I’ve got [left],”” he said
“And so by the time I got to the chorus and suddenly realised that I started singing it (and) I lost it for 45 minutes. It was a very, very heavy moment for me,” he confessed.
is a psychotherapist based in Hertfordshire who established her practice in 1990.