Dak Prescott is speaking out.
The 27-year-old Dallas Cowboys quarterback, along with brother Tad, spoke about the loss of his brother Jace Prescott in an interview with In Depth with Graham Bensinger on Wednesday (September 9).
In the interview, Dak shared that his brother died by suicide in April, and that he had a difficult time being their mother’s primary caretaker as she battled colon cancer.
“Jace at the time was finishing with school and was home, was with her and watched it. She couldn’t necessarily hide it from Jace because he was there every day. He saw the times where she would have to spend probably 10-plus hours throwing up, this and that, and saw the medicine she had to take,” he said.
Their mother died in 2013, and Jace carried the pain of her death without opening up much about his experience taking care of her.
“You can’t even put into words the burden. It’s something only Jace knew. And he didn’t necessarily share that. Jace never was really much of a talker,” Dak explained.
“When something like that was a huge burden on him, he didn’t know how to share it — didn’t know how to be vulnerable about it,” he continued.
“I mean, obviously tears and tears and tears. I mean, I sat there and tried to gather what had happened, and wanted to ask why for so many reasons…and as much as you want to ask why as much as this, I mean, I know my brother, and as we said, he had a lot of burdens on him,” he said of his reaction to the horribly tragic news in April.
“All throughout this quarantine and this offseason, I started experiencing emotions I’ve never felt before. Anxiety for the main one. And then, honestly, a couple of days before my brother passed, I would say I started experiencing depression. And to the point of, I didn’t want to work out anymore. I didn’t know necessarily what I was going through, to say the least, and hadn’t been sleeping at all,” he explained.
“He had a lot of tough things, and my sense of saying that is it showed me how vulnerable we have to be as humans, how open we have to be. Because our adversities, our struggles, what we go through is always gonna be too much for ourselves and maybe too much for even one or two people, but never too much for a community or too much for people in the family that you love. So you have to share these things.”
Our thoughts are with Jace‘s loved ones at this difficult time.
If you or someone you know is in crisis in the United States, please call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-8255. If you are international, please click here for a list of numbers to call in your country.
