Gary Sinise Speaks Out About His Son's Death & Why He Left Hollywood | PEOPLE

Mac was so the way he dealt with it was just pure grace and courage. He knew from the beginning that he had an uphill battle to fight. If he wasn't in pain or sick from the treatment, he was trying to live.

It was a tough period. My dad had a stroke. He was in the hospital for a month.

I was in the hospital with them, you know, intensive care for a month with my dad in uh it was toward the end of 2016. Then um just about a year and a half later, we find out my wife is diagnosed with stage three breast cancer, but then she had to go through uh chemo and radiation. and she had to have eight chemo treatments and 35 radiation treatments like every day for 35 days on the radiation.

Well, that first treatment just knocked her for a loop. I had to call the doctor because she was just it it was bad. And I called the doctor.

He said, "Bring her to the ER right away. " So, we had to check her into the hospital after that first treatment. So I remember bringing her home from the hospital and sitting outside and we were talking about, you know, what we were going to do for the next treatment and Mac had been having this this pain in his tailbone.

Moira had some spine surgeries and so we asked her spine doctor to look at Mac and you know see if he could figure out why why he was in pain and he put him in a scanner and that's when he called me. I'm sitting there with my wife talking about her chemo and he calls me and tells me Mac has a tumor. He had been having this pain on and off for for a while and they thought it was a due to a a bicycle accident.

Maybe it was a bruise that he had on his tailbone or a fracture or something. Uh he had done an X-ray but the X-ray didn't show anything. But when the doctor put him in the CT scanner that showed up and then he put him in the MRI machine and that that thing lit up, you know, big like this.

And I have pictures of it. It looks like it looks like a monster just grabbing my son's spine. the doctor who's an excellent excellent spine surgeon and had become a friend because he had operated on my wife so many times he said you know I I think this is something called cordoma so when you get with cordoma when you get there you're dealing with an incurable cancer that's spreading and it was uncharacteristic I mean it's usually a very slow growing tumor right this particular tumor that was on his sacrum could very possibly have been there since he was born.

That long growing growing for that long over that long a period of time to the point where he was feeling it and it was it was uncomfortable to sit down. Within a month, Mac was in the operating room having that initial tumor removed. Mac had his tumor removed in September of 2018, spring.

I had a book come out in February of 2019 and I was on a book tour and and I was doing the mission of the Gary Senise Foundation and all of that. Moira had few treatments in in 2019, early January, but she completed all of that and then thankfully, thank God that she was clear. That was a blessing cuz Mac was getting more challenging.

I get a call that uh you know we we got to go in for a routine scan for MAC in May of 2019 and that's when they told us that it had come back and it was spreading. The doctor knew what he was going to tell us that day. the surgeon.

All of a sudden, he left the room and he walked back in with an oncologist who he had called in advance and said, "You need to come over cuz we're going to have to start treating this with drugs and radiation and you know you but with this particular cancer cordoma, there are no drugs. For the rest of 2019, he had that surgery. He was going through treatment and you wouldn't have known, you know, that he was going through all that by his attitude and the way he was dealing with it.

But in early 2020, he was having he was having a lot of pain uh there were two more tumors growing on his spine now in different places. So he had to have two major surgeries that year in 2020. One on his thoracic spine and one on his cervical cervical spine.

And each time they would fuse his spine. So Mac was he had rods and screws holding him together from the top of his spine all the way down to the bottom of his thoracic spine. So he couldn't, you know, he couldn't do any of this or anything.

So he was kind of locked in. And after the second spine surgery that year, it it disabled his right side because it's affecting all these nerves in the spine. So he was he was starting to become more and more disabled by it.

He was in the hospital for six out of the first eight months of the of the year. And that's when I stopped uh stopped acting. Uh, I I just I told I told my my team, my agents and managers and everything, I I just can't I can't leave home for, you know, to go do jobs.

So, I started putting everything I had into into trying to find this miracle for Mac. And uh there were day there were days that were tough, you know, days were just anybody who's going through this kind of thing knows what I'm talking about. You know, where you're trying to fight, you're the caregiver, you're trying to fight hard, you're trying to figure stuff out, you're trying to take the pain away, you're trying to take any thoughts of cancer away from the patient so that they don't have to think about it.

And then sometimes you just fall down, you know, and there were a few times where I felt like I like I couldn't do enough or I didn't know what to do. And and then you just go through that moment and say a little prayer, get back up and and go back into the fight. Eventually, we had to get a hospital bed at home.

He was confined to a hospital bed in a wheelchair. He was paralyzed from the chest down. You know, it really did damage it damaged uh him.

But his spirit was incredible throughout. I mean, I I was so um we all were. I mean, our entire family were just so inspired by the way Mac dealt with everything.

and you never heard him there were so many things he couldn't do anymore, but he was always kind of looking to try to figure out what he could do. Mac um he came to work for the foundation in 2017. He's a musician and composer and uh went to USC music school and came out of school uh in 2014 and then did the touring thing.

He was a great great drummer and he was playing with different bands and going on different tours overseas and around the country and trying to make you know make his living playing drums. But he was also, you know, somebody who wanted to write music and compose and uh I kept trying to get him to stick his toe in the water at the Gary Foundation just to get off the road a little bit. I think being on the road was was kind of tiring for him.

He didn't enjoy it all that much and so I encouraged him to come even part-time and he kind of started part-time at the Gary's Foundation in the beginning and within months he wanted a full-time job. One of the jobs that he would have was kind of u manager of the education and outreach center. And I also encouraged him to write music for our videos because we have a video crew that's constantly making videos of of the program so that our our donors and people that support us can actually see what's going on.

And then he got he got sick and um had to step away from it in early 2023 because we were so consumed with cancer fighting. You know, Mac was just consumed with it. Couldn't play anymore.

His his mom suggested, hey, you know, he could he couldn't move his fingers on this hand, but he could move his arm up and down. He could move the fingers on his left hand, but there was a tumor over here that fractured his shoulder. So he couldn't do that.

He couldn't move his arm up and so he had like one good arm. You know, this one could go up and down and the fingers on this one worked. So his mom suggested he get a harmonica.

So he's teaching himself how to play harmonica. He's thinking about music a little bit more. He hadn't been thinking about it much because of the cancer.

And he had a piece of music that he wrote at USC that he never finished. and he asked me if I thought some of my band members who he was very good friends with a lot of my band, he was my number two drummer. If my guy couldn't be there, Danny Gotautle, if Danny couldn't be there, Mac was the guy.

So, he knew all my band members. He grew up with them. He asked a couple of them, my violin player Dan Meyers and and my piano player Ben Lewis, if they would help him flesh this music out.

And so, they started to work with him on it. And that's when we get out of the blue, Mack gets a call from a buddy of his from college whose name's Oliver Schneay. And Oliver was composer.

They rekindle their friendship. This is about April of 2023. And Oliver asked him, "Have you been thinking about music at all?

" And Max said, "You know, there's this one piece that I wrote in college that I've been working on a little bit. " And so he played it for Oliver. Oliver loved it.

and Oliver went to work with him to finish it. By July of 2023, they were in a studio with an orchestra recording this piece called Arctic [Music] Circles. A very very moving piece and and that's when I said, "Mack, you'll have the orchestra there.

Have Oliver do a an arrangement of uh Mack had started to teach himself Shenandoa on the harmonica. I said uh have Oliver do an arrangement and back you up and you play the harmonica. So we did two pieces that day.

I went to the studio. I hadn't heard Arctic Circles at all and I was completely overwhelmed by it. They kept it from me.

They they didn't want Mac was working on it quietly. He he just kept kept it from me and didn't didn't play it for me at all. My daughter was there.

She'd never heard it. I mean, none of us had heard it. And we heard it for the first time with this orchestra playing it.

Gorgeous piece. And you can see him. He's sitting there and he's working.

You know, he's looking at the music and he's giving Oliver notes about different things and and it was a beautiful a beautiful moment that kind of started a whole album of music that he ended up doing. We we moved. So that was July of 2023.

September, at the end of September, we made our move from California to Nashville. We got here and in the meantime, him and Oliver had been cooking up some more music. So we decided that they decided to uh set up some sessions here in in Nashville.

So in early November, November 5th and November 10th, Mac was in the studio recording more music for the record and I played on some things. My band was playing on it. November 10th is Max, that was Mac's 33rd birthday.

So we're in the studio recording his album. He couldn't have had a better birthday. He was so happy that day.

We finished, you know, the recording. They went to work on the videos for those recording sessions. Um Oliver's dad, Bill Schneay, who's a world famous sound mixer, he was mixing the record.

They finished the record up in December. And uh at the end of December, we we had a party and we watched the new videos and listened to the music and Mac was he was struggling, but he was happy. And two days later, I had to take him to the hospital, you know.

So, the timing the timing was was incredible that that he finished what he wanted to do and then he went to the hospital and and we didn't come out. He went in the hospital on December 30th and he died on January 5th. I know Mac was at peace at the end.

He was graceful in accepting what was happening to him and uh I saw him smile a whole bunch in the hospital uh before before he couldn't smile anymore. So when Mac died, I started looking through all his files and his phone and his iPad and his laptop and I found all this additional music that he'd written and tucked away. And that's when I called his buddy up, Oliver, and I said, "We have another project.

We got to go to work on this project. I want this music. I don't want it to disappear on on his laptop.

So, I immediately like within within weeks of Mac dying, I'm on a mission, you know, I'm just like tunneling into this project. His first record is called Resurrection and Revival. And then I produced Resurrection Revival Part Two, which is all all Mac music.

Oliver went to work on on part two like he did on part one kind of expanding things and he had to transpose everything because it was written on computer. So we were in the studio last summer and uh Resurrection Revival we had u a launch for that on Mac's birthday November 10th uh of this year or last year 2024. So, there are two records now, and I'm still on that mission because I want live orchestras to play the music.

Um, I want people to hear it. I want people to share it. We were blessed that our son had this gift of writing music and that he wrote so much of it that we can actually share it, share a lot of it.

And people are really enjoying the music. Uh, and I'm enjoying that people are enjoying it. There's a couple different things that can happen.

It can destroy you or it can make you come together, you know, and um make you see things a little little differently, you know. We were blessed in so many ways, you know, and we always knew that and Mac always knew that, too. We all felt blessed even though we were dealing with a horrible thing.

So we we kept counting those blessings all the time and and keeping our eye on that and those little miracles that that were we kept praying for the big miracle, you know, the cure, the thing. And Moira, my wife, never stopped for one second thinking she she she just knew in her heart he was going to be okay. And and we had you have to have that you have to have that hope, you know, since losing Mac.

I mean, I'm just holding my daughters a lot tighter. I always grabbed him and held him tight. But, you know, you just you just you you think about all those things are that are really important.

Um, and you and you and you focus on that. and uh you know I haven't been back to work you know since 2019. It's possible, you know, something may come along and it'll it'll be it'll be right, but it's harder to leave leave home now, you know, for long periods of times periods of time because I just want to be around the family now.

My daughters have kids, they're, you know, all this stuff. My wife can't travel, so just being away from home is not something I I want to do that that much. I go out and do my concerts for the troops and, you know, the events and things like that.

And I'll tell you that the mission of the Gary Senise Foundation and what we do here, it's all about helping people. That's that's it. I just, you know, I started the foundation to raise money to put it somewhere that would help the men and women who serve our country and their families and their kids and our first responders, all these people that sacrifice daily.

And we benefit from all that because we're safe and secure and, you know, somebody's got to do that work, you know. So continuing that mission throughout this cancer fight has been important. Mac never wanted me to stop doing that.

My wife didn't want me to stop doing it, but I just couldn't go on those long overseas trips anymore and, you know, I I would go for two weeks at a time and stuff like that. Those I I just can't do that, you know, with this situation at home. Yeah, I'm Papa.

I love everything about it. I mean, it's it's great to This morning before I came here, I My daughter uh needed to do something and so I went and picked them picked up her two. Our youngest daughter has two.

We We want more now. Uh she's got two. And so I went and picked those up, brought them over to our house, then then came over here.

I It's the It's the best thing. It's just the most wonderful thing. And they're all are it's they're growing up too fast.

Uh all of that, but um being around them is just always a joy and and really really fun. And that's one of the things you don't want to miss. You know, like as a parent, I was gone a lot when kids were young.

Being away from the grandkids now is you don't want to don't want to miss those little days, you know. So, it's a it's a joy. And I'll tell you, just having them throughout all this stuff with our son and uh being able to just love on them and love on our daughters and everything, that's that's helped helped me a lot.

So many people go through cancer fights, you know. I mean, we're we're another story, you know, in the long tableau of cancer patients, you know, and uh so it was it didn't feel right for me to talk about it, you know, like I know I'm going to have this public platform and uh as an actor and all of that, but I I just didn't feel like it was right to talk about it publicly. I wanted I wanted to keep that with our family.

I made the decision to write something on the Cordomo page and tell them what happened. About 6 weeks after Mac died, I I posted a story on it. And you know what?

When I posted that story, I just wanted people to know who he was. He was a member of our team here at the Gary Senise Foundation. I wanted them to know that he worked here, that he loved the mission.

but that we lost him and what and that there was, you know, a rare cancer that took him. And once I posted that story, I mean it was I can't tell you how moved I was by the response to that because thousands and thousands millions millions of people saw that story. It it flew all over the place and we started I mean the foundation started getting donations in Max's honor and the Cordoma Foundation started getting donations and messages were pouring in and it was it was helpful.

I mean just to know that people cared enough to do that and the response was overwhelming and I'll never forget that.