Tony Bennett’s daughter still doesn’t feel as if she has had “time to grieve” a year on from the crooner’s death.
Tony Bennett’s daughter still doesn’t feel as if she has had ‘time to grieve’ a year on from the crooner’s death
The ‘I Left my Heart in San Francisco’ singer died aged 96 after an Alzheimer’s fight on 21 July, 2023, and his girl Johanna, 54, has now opened up about how she is still processing her emotions since his passing.
She told People in a joint interview with her sister Antonia: “(I’ve been) really looking back and trying to understand what my grief process has been.
“For me, I don’t really feel like I’ve had the time to actually grieve.
“You have this idea of everything stops, and you’re allowed to go cry somewhere or something like that for days or months or something.
“Everything seemed to speed up for me. I just feel like I had to put everything aside, and then every once in a while, it would slam me in the face.”
Johanna added she was overcome with grief during one of her first social outings after father-of-four Tony’s death.
She said: “Everyone was like, ‘Oh, nice to see you. I haven’t seen you in a while’, and just being normal.
“Then there was one person that it hit them that it was the first time that they’d seen me since dad had passed.
“All of a sudden, this look of shock and concern comes over this one person’s face and was like, ‘Are you OK?’
“I was like, ‘Well, I was until right now!’
“It bubbles up in weird ways. I happen to live in New York in the neighbourhood that he lived in for many years, so it’s a weird reminder sometimes.”
Antonia, 50, who is a singer-songwriter, said she has had a similar experience to her sister as she “got really busy” after his death and may not have processed her grief.
She added: “Sometimes you put yourself on autopilot because you feel like you need to put one foot in front of the other.
“People have told me in the past that it is difficult because after the first year, people stop asking you if you're OK or how you’re doing or whatever, but that’s actually the first moment in which you really start to feel it.
“It waxes and wanes and it comes like a roll of (waves.) It’s complicated, I guess.
“It’s been complicated for me to just allow myself to feel everything. “Sometimes things come up and you’re in social situations, you really don’t want to be having those types of feelings because it feels too vulnerable out in public all the time to be doing that.”
Three-times married Tony had two sons with his wife Patricia Beech and his daughters with his second, Sandra Grant, who he divorced before getting hitched to Susan Crow in 2007.
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