David Bowie’s Son Breaks Social Media Silence to Share Emotional Thank You Letter

Duncan Jones returned to social media on Sunday for the first time since his father David Bowie‘s death, re-sharing a letter from a British palliative care physician written to the late British singer.

Jones, 44, initially wrote he’d be “offline for a while” when Bowie died a week ago after a battle with cancer, but ended his silence to share a Twitter link to the note through the Marie Curie organization.

In the thank you letter, U.K. palliative care consultant Dr. Mark Taubert wrote that Bowie’s own private approach to his health helped him ease a dying patient’s fears.

“At the beginning of that week I had a discussion with a hospital patient, facing the end of her life,” Taubert said. “We discussed your death and your music, and it got us talking about numerous weighty subjects, that are not always straightforward to discuss with someone facing their own demise. In fact, your story became a way for us to communicate very openly about death, something many doctors and nurses struggle to introduce as a topic of conversation.”

Taubert later concluded that discussing Bowie’s life helped the patient visualize the thoughts she “had of her own dying moments.”

He wrote, “you gave her a way of expressing this most personal longing to me, a relative stranger.”

Taubert also issued a number of “thank you”s to Bowie, including for his final album Blackstar, which was released just days before the singer’s death.

“Thank you for ‘Lazarus‘ and Blackstar,” Taubert said. “I am a palliative care doctor, and what you have done in the time surrounding your death has had a profound effect on me and many people I work with. Your album is strewn with references, hints and allusions. As always, you don’t make interpretation all that easy, but perhaps that isn’t the point.”

Bowie’s longtime friend Robert Fox opened up about Bowie’s private nature in a new interview Saturday, explaining that “nobody knew” the star was dying.

“He wanted the minimum of fuss,” Fox said. “He was just a private man. And I think he wanted to protect his family from the insanity there would have been. It would have impinged on the album, Lazarus, his family – everyone would have been inundated at a time when he didn’t need that or want that. And he did it perfectly.”
This article originally appeared on People.com