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Griffin Nagel/Bravo via Getty
“I wish I’d sat down, even for five minutes, and I feel really bad that I didn’t,” she told cameras about the last time she saw her father. “That was just so selfish of me.”
Sutton Stracke is saying goodbye to her late father, John T. Brown.
On The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, the reality star, 53, looked back at some of her painful history while visiting her mother in her hometown of Augusta, Georgia alongside costars Kyle Richards and Garcelle Beauvais.
While getting ready for the day, Sutton’s memories came flooding back to her after Kyle asked when she began to notice John T.’s health decline.
“I was in my 20s when I got the call, [saying] you need to come home. And it was very surprising for me, I didn’t understand my father, who was our rock, could be starting to break,” she recalled to cameras. “We put him in the hospital twice. I’m talking put him in the car, like shoved him in the car.”
(L) John T. Brown and Sutton Stracke.
Sutton Stracke/Instagram
She revealed that her father was in a “depressive state” while on anti-depression medication and sleeping pills.
“They had him on all these pills just to try to regulate stuff that wasn’t working,” she explained. “He would go on and off of them for years, and then he would self-medicate with alcohol. He was very confused.”
Sutton recalled how her father would talk about “how he wanted to kill himself” and often didn’t know what day it was. Despite the severity of his chronic depression, she said that he never went to therapy and revealed that his treatment — or lack thereof — was “so disjointed.”
Downstairs, Sutton, Kyle and Garcelle had brunch with her estranged mother and Sutton shared the group’s plans to revisit the childhood home where her father died by suicide. When the trio asked if she’d like to join, her mother was uninterested and refused Sutton’s offer of a “full report.”
In a conversation with cameras, Sutton couldn’t help but admit that she harbored “a little pent up resentment” towards her.
“So when my dad shot himself, my mother was home. She was in the kitchen,” she recalled. “She knew that he was taking sleeping pills, he was taking Xanax, he was self-medicating with alcohol. There was a loaded gun in the house, and he shot himself right then and there.”
Elsewhere in the episode, Sutton was emotional as she worked herself up to get out of the car and enter her old home. As she took the ladies on a tour, she told cameras that she wanted to use the opportunity to say goodbye to her father.
“I loved him so much and miss him every day,” she said as she led Garcelle and Kyle through the kitchen, her old bedroom and her parents room.
When they came to what appeared to be the den, Sutton pointed out a spot on the couch and revealed it was the last place she saw her dad alive.
“I can remember it so clearly,” she said as tears began to form. “I was leaving for one of my last dance performances, actually, and I remember saying goodbye to him and I tugged on his toe. He was real sick, and very out of it and he died the next day.”
Sutton recalled how she and her father would often high five and clasp each other’s hands for a second before letting go as a greeting. But that night, her dad was “so out of it” that he didn’t put his hand out. Though she thought it was “a little strange,” she didn’t say anything and pulled on his big toe before leaving.
“Those [are] moments where you think, ‘I should have sat with him, or something like beyond the tug toe,'” she cried as Garcelle and Kyle rushed to hug her.
“I wish I’d sat down, even for five minutes, and I feel really bad that I didn’t. That was just so selfish of me,” she added to cameras. “Just five minutes, the last time I saw him.”
