Gordon Ramsay Reflects on Infant Son’s Death: ‘There [is] No Substitute’
By Movieguide® Contributor
In a PEOPLE exclusive, celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay opened up about the traumatic death of his son Rocky and how his family is closer after the birth of his youngest child, Oscar.
Rocky was born prematurely at 20 weeks in 2016.
“There’s no book that guides you through that loss, and so losing Rocky was really tough,” Ramsay told PEOPLE. “Watching the trauma unfold, it’s this life-changing moment.”
PEOPLE reported that Ramsay and his wife Tana “also share daughter Megan, 25, twins Jack and Holly, 23, daughter Matilda (“Tilly”), 21, and son Oscar, 4. They named their Cornwall home after Rocky, and each member of the family wears a piece of jewelry with his name on it.”
Ramsay told the Daily Mail that it was hard for his kids “to be there and to witness those little hands and feet, then to say goodbye.”
The loss was traumatic, but the arrival of their son, Oscar, brought the family closer.
“We wouldn’t have had Oscar had we not lost Rocky. There was no substitute—far from it—but it brought us a bond that you’d never experience in a normal situation,” Ramsay shared.
The chef told PEOPLE that he admires Tana’s resilience and openness about the tragedy. He credits her strength for holding their family together.
Movieguide® reported on Tana’s dedicatory Instagram post about Rocky:
‘A happy picture taken of us celebrating Megan’s 18th, I was just under 20 weeks pregnant,’ Tana wrote. ‘Little did we know, a few days later I would be holding our little boy Rocky – born with a strong heartbeat, but too little to survive. Although it’s 7 years today, it still feels like yesterday.’
She continued, ‘We all miss you everyday. We love you Rocky, forever in our hearts. I couldn’t do this without my family, you are all everything to me.’
In 2020, Tana sympathized with Chrissy Teigen, who experienced a similar loss. Tana told Metro, “You go from having a baby kicking inside of you to suddenly it’s not there, and it was a really hard experience.”
Tana shared that while others didn’t want to talk about the loss, she did.
“I have to be honest, when it happened to me, I found it really hard when people would talk to me and not mention it because it was like it never happened. All I wanted to do was talk about it with friends, with family, with anyone who asked me about it because it was incredibly hard,” she said.
Movieguide® previously reported on Ramsay’s experience as a father:
While chef Gordon Ramsay is known for sharp criticism and cutting remarks, the father of five reveals his softer side when it comes to his family.
“I think that everyone’s got a good side and a bad side in them,” Ramsay told PEOPLE. “I’m just very good at highlighting the bad that turned into something incredible.”
“The kids have brought the most emotion out of me,” he added. “It’s funny, isn’t it?… Tana’s super fierce, an ex-Montessori school teacher. So I’m the softie…”
“My job as a dad is to come up with a solution to their problems. That’s the most important role of a dad,” he said. “But boy, that’s…hard with five kids, five problems, 25 a week, a hundred a month—that’s a lot of solution fixing.”
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