Luke Bryan is reflecting on his heavy history of loss.
Nearly 20 years after the “Country Girl” singer’s sister Kelly Bryan Cheshire died in 2007 at age 39, he shared rare insight into the difficult time, including what led to his sister’s untimely passing.
“I never really explained what happened to my sister, there’s some misinformation out there on the internet and I think some people wonder what happened and they think that we’ve tried to cover it up,” Luke explained during an Oct. 29 appearance on CNN’s All There Is podcast. “There is a very, very small percentage of people who die for no reason—and it’s called sudden death syndrome and that’s essentially what they described my sister’s death as.”
As the 49-year-old recalled, “She was in her home doing her laundry and it was like somebody turned the switch off on her and it was just tragic beyond words.”
Luke—whose older brother Chris Bryan died in a vehicle collision in 1996—admitted there were “so many unanswered questions” regarding her death, noting Kelly’s autopsy was completely inconclusive.
“She was everything in our life,” Luke recalled of Kelly, mom to Jordan, now 30, Kris, now 27, and Tilden, now 23. “She was the best mother you could ever dream of, and we all leaned on her for so many things and it’s hard to wrap your head around her being gone.”
And while Luke had previously grieved his brother Chris, who died at 26 when the country singer was just 19, he emphasized that grieving his sister was “so different.”
“My brother, you can conceptualize a car accident,” he explained to Anderson Cooper, “but you can’t really conceptualize someone that was healthy as a horse and she’s just gone.”
It was also especially painful for Luke to see his nieces and nephew lose their mother so young. As he put it, “I could not understand how these kids were going to go through their life without the best mother on the planet.”
Despite that hardship, the American Idol judge admitted that his own loss was partially alleviated by having his sister’s kids around.
“I can see her in them,” he added. “I can see mannerisms in them. I can see so many tangible things in my nieces that are my sister.”
In 2014, however, Luke and his family experienced what he called another “unbelievable scenario” when Kelly’s widower Ben Lee Cheshire suddenly died of a heart attack in 2014 at 46.
“At this point in life, you’re like, ‘What’s going on here, God? What have we done to have this happen?’” Luke explained. “It just hit me like a ton of bricks.”
Following that tragedy, Luke and his wife Caroline Boyer—who share Thomas, 17, and Tatum, 15—officially adopted Luke’s nephew Til, and became parental figures for his nieces.
“It’s just what you do as family,” he said. “You do what you can to try and make it.”
Despite all the heartbreak in his life, Luke emphasized that his grief has put life into perspective.
“I’ve just been put in situations where I really try to appreciate every day,” he noted, “and appreciate every moment that you can with people and people that you love."