Neil Peart , drummer for Rush , passed away on January 7, 2020, due to an aggressive brain cancer. The news shocked the music world, and now, three years later, Peart's sister, Nancy Peart Burkholder , has spoken publicly about her brother's death .
The news of Neil's death, at age 67, caught the world by surprise. According to Nancy, however, the drummer's family had "three and a half years" to prepare for the worst, ever since they learned of the diagnosis.
“We had three and a half years to prepare, so we knew it was going to happen,” she says in an interview with Etcetera with Kelly Barrett . “And after it happened, we had a week of total silence, where we couldn’t tell anyone.”
Nancy also recounts that the family received a 10-minute warning before the news aired on the media. “We had 10 minutes to tell everyone what we hadn't told them in three and a half years. 'I'm sorry, we lied. Nothing is right.' It was the hardest week we've had because we knew and we couldn't say anything.”
In 2022, Geddy Lee of Rush revealed that it was Neil Peart's own choice to keep his diagnosis a secret (via Blabbermouth ).
“He didn’t want anyone to know,” Lee said on the talk show House of Strombo . “He just didn’t want to. He wanted to keep things at home. And we did. It was hard. I can’t say it was easy because it wasn’t. And it was like that for a while. The diagnosis gave him 18 months at most, and he lived three and a half years. So we [from Rush] constantly went to see him to give him support.”
Check out the full interview with Neil Peart's sister:
