Kate Garraway has heartbreakingly shared Derek Draper's bedroom is a "very different room now" after his death. The Good Morning
Britain presenter has given viewers a look into the last year of her husband's life in the ITV special Kate Garraway : Derek's Story. She gave a candid insight into the final year of Derek's life before he passed away aged 56 in January. Derek had been hospitalised for over a year during the Covid pandemic and battled the severe effects of the
Coronavirus for over three years which damaged all his major organs. In the latest documentary, Kate was shown in February walking into the room which used to be Derek's bedroom on ground floor of their
London home. She opened the curtains, and showed there is a table now where his bed was. In the programme, a painful image showed the bed empty in December when Derek was taken into hospital. Kate said: "A very different room now, back to how it was before March 2020." Speaking on camera in February, Kate said: "We've got the Lego which never was finished Actually this is the book he was reading, very slowly, at the very end and this is as far as he got. I said to him, trust you to be reading 'A Little Life' because if anybody had a big life it was Derek and it's left a big hole. Sunseekers can snap up two holidays for the price of one with money-saving travel deal Kate admitted the room looks very different now without Derek's bed ( Image: ITV) "A lot of people, as a way of comforting me I think, say it must be a relief in a way that he's out of pain. And for you, that your day isn't consumed with caring for him, but there isn't a relief." She added: "I think if I have any regrets, it's every single minute that I didn't spend holding his hand because I had to go and write an email, I had to go and make a phone call, having to fight the system that should be there to catch you when you're fall, but feels when you're going through it like it's there to catch you out. And that's what now I want to be Derek's legacy to fight on for that change." "The one thing Derek has taught me is never give up fighting for what is right," she added. "It is not about Derek or me, it is about having a society where caring is not a luxury. We are all going to need it." Derek is shown in the film speaking in brief snatches last year and headed to a pioneering brain cell clinic in
Mexico at the end of 2023 to further aid his recovery. He suffered a cardiac arrest and after 14 hours of neurosurgery was flown with Kate on a "terrifying" intensive care unit (ICU) plane to a London hospital. In late December, Kate was also filmed at home and was aware that Derek may not leave hospital and the end of his life could be near. At the time she said: "Derek had a cardiac arrest. The heart muscles basically had been weakened by COVID at the very beginning, and they went out of sync, and this created a blood clot of massive proportions. "And that blood clot has now gone to Derek's brain. By the time I got there, they'd managed to get the heart going and they'd managed to stabilise him and he was breathing, but the clot had caused huge damage. Then relentlessly from then on, consultants have just been saying there's no way back. Derek had a bedroom in the downstairs of their home "He's still breathing, they think he could hear. So I sat down with him and holding his hand, I just said to him 'look you know me, I'm gonna fight this all the way. But if you can't fight it more and actually what you need now is peace, then don't think about us. We're going to be fine'. Because I do feel like an awful lot of what he's done has been about wanting to be the dad or be a husband. "It was a different kind of love that we have before. But it was love and even though it was chaotic and crazy, and you know, a slog, an absolute slog, in the midst of all that was this family. I've just got to try to hold on to that. I've just said well, we'll stick with it to the end." The screen then faded to black and it states 'Derek passed away in hospital on January 3 2024, with Kate, Darcey & Bill by his side'. The final word in the documentary goes to Derek, he is asked by film director Lucy Wilcox what's been the most important thing to him in the last three years and replies "family" in reference to Kate and their children Darcey, 18, and Billy, 15. In an upbeat moment, he is also shown walking again with the aid of a walking frame nine days before his cardiac arrest and other home video moments show him interacting with his children over the past few years. *Kate Garraway: Derek's Story aired on ITV1 and is available to watch on ITVX. Follow Mirror Celebs on TikTok , Snapchat ,
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