Nick Carter became visibly emotional while remembering his little brother, Aaron Carter, with the first anniversary of his death two days away. Nick noted that as the holidays loom, it’s especially painful, and called the loss “unbelievable.” “When I think back, and I get to these holidays, like Halloween — these are like moments, and milestones, and times when I’ve actually shared those memories with my brother, and with my family. Good times,” he told E! News in an interview you can view below, tearing up as he spoke.
“It’s still unbelievable to me,” he continued. “I’m still processing the whole situation and trying to make sense of it—because it hasn’t.” Nick explained that he’s continuing to navigate the grief of Aaron’s death at the age of 34 on November 5, 2022, after being found unresponsive in a bathtub at home by his fiancée Melanie Martin. “But I’m hoping that one day I can make sense of it all,” he said.
Nick added that his own three children are now the most important thing to him, as he moves forward. “My children are my everything,” he said of Odin, 7, Saoirse, 4, and Pearl, 2, whom she shares with wife Lauren Kitt. “If I lost everything—if I wasn’t a Backstreet Boy anymore, if I didn’t have the opportunity to still perform for people and entertain them—as long as they still had my kids and still had my family, I’d be OK. All this stuff on the outside doesn’t matter to me.”
The boy-bander admitted in August that he didn’t know if his famous family would ever recover from the grief of the loss of Aaron. “It’s definitely been tough for me and my family,” he told ETOnline for an interview in August. “It is still something that we are still processing, to this day. I don’t think we will ever really get over it. It’s been a lot for us, and we are finding ways to try and take a really tragic situation in our family and do something with it.”
Aaron’s rep confirmed his death to HollywoodLife last November. “He was found unresponsive this morning by his [fiancée] Melanie Martin at the home in Lancaster, California,” they said. “Everyone is so devastated right now.”
Aaron’s official cause of death was determined in June to be a drug related accidental drowning.