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It's been almost two years since Natasha Richardson was killed in a tragic ski accident, but her husband, Liam Neeson, stills remembers every detail of the day she died.
Neeson was filming a movie in Montreal when he got the call that his wife that his wife had been hurt, and proceeded on a frantic journey to make it to her hospital bed. "I walked into the emergency -- it's like 70, 80 people, broken arms, black eyes, all that -- and for the first time in years, nobody recognizes me," he tells the new issue of Esquire. "Not the nurses. The patients. No one... So I went outside. It's freezing cold, and I thought, What am I gonna do? How am I going to get past the security?"
Finally, a nurse realized who he was, and ushered him to his wife's bedside. "I'll tell you, I was so f--king grateful -- for the first time in I don't know how long -- to be recognized," he says. "And this one, she says, 'Go in that back door there.' She points me to it. 'Make a left. She's in a room there.' So I get there, just in time. And all these young doctors, who look all of eighteen years of age, they tell me the worst. The worst."
Married 14 years, with two sons, Neeson, 58, had to figure out how to go on with his life without his wife.
"I think I survived by running away some. Running away to work," he admits. "That's the weird thing about grief...You can't prepare for it. You think you're gonna cry and get it over with. You make those plans, but they never work."
But the loss and sadness finds away to sneak up on the Unknown star, who says he's often blindsided by it.
"It hits you in the middle of the night -- well, it hits me in the middle of the night," says Neeson. "I'm out walking. I'm feeling quite content. And it's like suddenly, boom. It's like you've just done that in your chest."
