What To Know

Luke Bryan revealed his sister Kelly’s cause of death nearly 20 years after her unexpected passing in 2007.
He shared that caring for her children has helped him process his grief.
Bryan described a profound spiritual experience at Kelly’s funeral, which brought him a sense of peace.

Nearly two decades after Luke Bryan lost his older sister, Kelly, the country singer clarified speculation about the circumstances of her death.

Bryan opened up about loss on the Tuesday, October 28, episode of Anderson Cooper‘s All There Is podcast. “I’ve never really explained what happened to my sister. You know, there’s some misinformation out there on the internet, and I think some people kind of wonder what happened, and they think that we’ve tried to cover it up,” he explained. “But there is a very, very small percentage of people that die for no reason in the world, and it’s called sudden death syndrome. And that’s essentially what they described my sister’s death as. She was in her home, doing her laundry, and Anderson, it was like somebody just turned the switch off on her, and it was just tragic beyond words.”

According to the Cleveland Clinic, sudden arrhythmic death syndrome (SADS) is “an inherited problem with your heart’s electrical system, which gives you an abnormal heart rhythm,” and can be treated with medication or surgical procedures. Kelly died at the age of 39 in May 2007.

On the podcast, Bryan said the medical diagnosis helped give him and his family answers. “Your typical findings of an autopsy of someone 39 would be an aneurysm or an embolism or a blood clot of some kind, and everything was inconclusive. She had a pretty severe orbital bone injury, so whether she fainted — I think she may have went into the floor and kind of knocked herself out,” he said. “My nephew was 3 at the time, and I just think if someone could have been there, maybe her chances of surviving would have been a lot better. She really was just a … she was everything in our lives.”

Jason Kempin/Getty Images for ABA

He continued, “She was a mother of three children, and she was, I mean, the best mother you could ever dream of. And we all leaned on her for so many things, and it’s hard to really wrap your brain around her being gone.”

Bryan previously lost his older brother, Chris, in a car crash at the age of 26 in 1996. He explained to Cooper that his grieving process for his brother was “massively different,” as the cause of Chris’ death was easier to “conceptualize.”

“With my sister, being able to have her children and look into their eyes and see my sister has been a much more helpful process,” he shared. “I can see her in them. I can see mannerisms in them. I can see so many tangible things in my nieces that are my sister.” (Luke and his wife, Caroline Boyer, took over care of Kelly’s three children following her husband Lee’s death in 2014.)

Recounting his reaction to Kelly’s death, Bryan said, “I remember when I got to my nieces, I just kept screaming I was sorry to them. I kept saying I was sorry, and they were too little at the time to understand that I was just telling them I was sorry because I couldn’t believe I was so sorry for them that they were gonna have to go through this life without the beautiful human being that she was. I could not understand how these kids were gonna go through their life without the best mother on the planet.”

He also recalled how he experienced “one of the most amazing situations” at Kelly’s funeral, despite dreading going to the service. “When I walked in the room — and I’m a pretty spiritual guy, and I’m pretty grounded in my belief in Christ and Christianity — and I would say it was the first time in my life I felt a spirit of another world take away my burden in that room,” Bryan told Cooper. “When I saw her, it was like something, it was almost like a pressure valve released. … I can’t explain it. It was truly like she set me free in that room. … I think I was the only one in the family that had that experience.”