(CNN) — The wife of prominent American journalist Grant Wahl, who collapsed and died while covering the World Cup in Qatar, says her husband died of a ruptured aortic aneurysm.
Speaking to CBS on Wednesday, network contributor Dr. Celine Gounder said “it’s one of those things that’s probably been years in the making and, for whatever reason, it happened right now.”
Dr. Gounder said that the tributes to her late husband are moving and heartwarming.
“He was so loved by so many people,” she says, and hearing their affection “is like a warm hug when you really need it.”
Dr. Gounder describes the moment she realized something was wrong following her husband collapsed on Friday covering a match between Argentina and the Netherlands.
He was wrapping up a work call on Friday and saw messages from a friend of Grant’s and fellow football journalist, and all of a sudden he started getting texts, emails and twitter messages.
Dr Gounder explained that she contacted the friend, who told her that he had collapsed and that medical staff had tried to revive him for 20 minutes before taking him to a local hospital.
He said he started trying to reach someone at the hospital to find out more, and kept asking if he had a pulse.
“Nobody was responding,” he says. “She was scared,” she tells CBS’s Gayle King.
She also describes how she went to see the body of her late husband. “She needed to see it,” she says.
“Honestly, this has been so surreal… even now that I’ve seen the corpse I can’t believe it’s real, but I needed it.”
Dr Gounder, who told the story of proposing to her husband, says that for him “football was more than a sport, it was something that connected people from all over the world.”
“There’s so much regarding the culture, the politics of sport, of football. For him it was a way of really understanding people and where they came from.”
“I want people to remember him as this kind and generous person who was really dedicated to social justice.”
She recalled how her husband promoted women’s soccer, and the recent statements he made regarding the rights of the LGBT community. “That was Grant.”
The autopsy was performed by the New York Medical Examiner’s Office, he said.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an aortic aneurysm is a balloon-shaped bulge in the aorta, the large artery that carries blood from the heart to the chest. Rupture occurs when the force of pumping blood can split the layers of the arterial wall, allowing blood to leak through.
If it ruptures, the aneurysm bursts completely, causing bleeding within the body.
The CDC says aortic aneurysms or dissections caused regarding 10,000 deaths in 2019. About 59% of those deaths were among men.
