Laurie Anderson, the wife of singer Lou Reed and a musician in her own right, offered an insight into the rock icon’s final days in a letter she sent to the local paper in Springs, East Hampton, the New York village where they lived.
Reed, who had been recovering from a liver transplant since May, died Sunday morning from liver disease at the age of 71.
“Last week I promised Lou to get him out of the hospital and come home to Springs,” she wrote in a letter posted Thursday by the East Hampton Star. “And we made it!”
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“Lou was a tai chi master and spent his last days here being happy and dazzled by the beauty and power and softness of nature. He died on Sunday morning looking at the trees and doing the famous 21 form of tai chi with just his musician hands moving through the air.”
Anderson and Reed, who influenced a generation of rockers with his raw and lyrical work with the Velvet Underground and subsequent solo career, were married in 2008.
“Lou was a prince and a fighter and I know his songs of the pain and beauty in the world will fill many people with the incredible joy he felt for life. Long live the beauty that comes down and through and onto all of us,” she wrote.