Madonna’s family have suffered another heartbreaking blow after the passing of the singer’s younger brother, Christopher Gerard Ciccone, aged 63.
Ciccone’s is the latest in a string of deaths to have befallen the family, with the dancer and art director reported to have succumbed to cancer on Friday, October 4.
As per a representative, Christopher passed away “peacefully” with this husband by his side. His stepmother, Joan Gustafson Ciccone, was reported to have died of cancer last month, while his eldest brother, Anthony Ciccone, died last year at 66 from respiratory failure and throat cancer.
Fans of the family may remember how Christopher and Madonna’s mother, Madonna Louise Ciccone, tragically also passed away from cancer when both were just children in 1963.
Christopher later moved to New York City to work alongside Madonna during the early stages of her wildly successful music career. In his sister’s earliest music videos, including Everybody and Lucky Star, he featured as as dancer, before eventually moving on to hold down more significant roles in her creative projects.
As per reports, Christopher served as art director for Madonna’s Blond Ambition World Tour and was the production design lead for The Girlie Show in 1993.
Madonna expressed her grief over losing her younger brother in a lengthy post on social media, revealing “its hard to explain our bond.”
Part of her statement reads: “We soared the highest heights together
And floundered in the lowest lows.
Somehow, we always found each other again and We held hands and we kept dancing.
The last few years have not been easy
We did not speak for sometime but
When my brother got sick. We found our way back to each other.“
Readers will of course recall that Madonna had her own health scare just last year when the popular singer had to be revived with a NARCAN injection.
The 66-year-old was found unresponsive after contracting a bacterial infection that had gotten so severe that she had to be hospitalized and put into a 48-hour medically-induced coma.
She spent days hooked up to a ventilator while her family was told to “expect the worst.”
At the time sources insisted that Madonna had been pushing her body too hard in preparation for an 84-date world tour, and had subsequently taken too many painkillers in a bid to keep going.
“I didn’t think I was going to make it, neither did my doctors. That’s why I woke up with all of my children sitting around me,” Madonna later said about her traumatic experience. “I forgot five days of my life – or my death. I don’t really know where I was. If you want to know my secret and how I pulled through and how I survived, I thought, ‘I’ve got to be there for my children. I have to survive for them.’”
Rest in peace, Christopher Ciccone.
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