“My wife had been diagnosed with breast cancer. My son was diagnosed with this very rare cancer … within two months of each other,” recalls the Forrest Gump star, whose son Mac died in January at 33.
Gary Sinise is opening up about his family’s fight with cancer.
In an interview with Fox News Digital, the actor revealed he put his acting career on hold, and moved his family from Los Angeles to Nashville, Tennessee, in 2021 after his wife and son were both diagnosed with cancer.
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“We were in the cancer fight during that time,” Sinise, 69, said of the cross-county move.
The Forrest Gump star’s wife Moira and son McCanna “Mac” were both diagnosed with different forms of cancer in 2018, with Sinise telling Fox News that he decided to take a break from his career in 2019 to help his family.
“My wife had been diagnosed with breast cancer. My son was diagnosed with this very rare cancer … within two months of each other,” he recalled. “My dad had just had a stroke, and my mom was alone, and I had to … take care of her. … I kind of had my hands full.”
Sinise’s wife is now cancer-free, but his son Mac tragically died in January. He was 33.
Mac suffered from chordoma “a rare type of bone cancer that happens most often in the bones of the spine or the skull,” according to Mayo Clinic.
Sinise told Fox News Digital that his son’s battle with the rare cancer was “especially difficult.”
“Our son was fighting this cancer with no cure,” he said. “Trying to find drugs and doctors or anybody that could do anything for him was like a full-time job. Plus, he became more and more disabled by the cancer as time went on. … He needed more and more care.”
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Despite Mac’s difficult journey with cancer, Sinise said his son, a musician, was “happy at the end of his life.”
“I will say this about Mac and the album that he made last year … he had achieved something that he set out to do, which was to record all this music in May and make a full album of it … that gave me a lot of joy … just watching him kind of enjoy those moments,” he shared.
In the wake of his son’s passing, Sinise is keeping Mac’s memory alive by sharing his son’s unreleased music. Resurrection & Revival: Part 2, started shipping earlier this week on November 10, which would have marked Mac’s 34th birthday.
Sinise announced the album’s release in late October, sharing a post on Instagram at the time.
“Friends, I’m truly moved to share the presale launch of Resurrection and Revival: Part 2, an album created from my son Mac’s music. After Mac passed away on January 5, I began going through his files and discovered so many beautiful compositions that he had never released,” he said. “With the help of his dear friend Oliver Schnee and some of Mac’s talented musician pals, we’ve been able to bring these pieces to life.”
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While discussing the album with Fox News Digital, Sinise said, “This has been a real labor of very deep love. Because a lot of this music, I was not even aware that he had it until I discovered it on … his files.”
Sinise is also a musician and performs with his group, the Lt. Dan Band. He performed alongside Mac before his passing.
“He’s just an exceptional drummer. He’s really solid, so solid, and it was always so much fun to play with him … he just had a natural talent,” he told Fox News Digital, reflecting on the “beautiful” music his son made, which included music for his charity the Gary Sinise Foundation, along with documentaries and movies.
“I just started listening to this stuff that he’d written for the movie, and I was very, very moved by it,” Sinise said. “I started discovering all this other music that he’d written and tucked away that I never knew about … that he never told me about.”
