🕊️ Nearly a year after the world said goodbye to Tina Turner, her husband Erwin Bach has shared a deeply personal memory that’s left fans across the globe in tears — a six-word handwritten note the Queen of Rock ’n’ Roll left behind as her final keepsake.
In a recent interview with Vogue Germany, Bach opened up for the first time about his wife’s final days at their peaceful lakeside home in Küsnacht, Switzerland. Amid the flowers, music, and quiet laughter that filled her last moments, Tina left behind a small folded card on her piano — one that Bach said he discovered the morning after she passed.
💬 “It wasn’t long. It wasn’t dramatic. Just six words,” Bach recalled, holding back emotion. “But it said everything she ever wanted me — and all of us — to remember.”
The note, written in Tina’s unmistakable bold script, read simply:
“I had love. I gave love.”
Bach said he has kept the card framed beside a photo of the two of them smiling during a quiet day at home — no stage lights, no makeup, just peace. “That’s who she really was,” he said softly. “She didn’t measure her life in fame or money. She measured it in love.”
When the story broke, social media erupted with emotion. Thousands of fans shared the quote under the hashtag #IHadLoveIGaveLove, turning it into a viral tribute celebrating Tina’s lifelong message of strength and kindness. One fan wrote, “Those six words are everything she stood for — love, resilience, and grace.” Another commented, “She spent a lifetime giving energy to others. Now she’s still teaching us how to live.”
Close friends of the late star confirmed that the phrase perfectly encapsulated Tina’s worldview. Throughout her decades-long career — from her early struggles in the 1960s to her triumphant solo comeback in the 1980s — she often spoke about the power of love and gratitude. In her memoir, My Love Story, she wrote: “My greatest success wasn’t fame. It was finding peace and giving love back to the world.”
Bach described those final months as peaceful and full of light. “We played her favorite songs — mostly her own,” he said with a smile. “She loved to listen to ‘Simply the Best,’ not as a hit, but as a message to herself. She lived it — she gave her best, always.”
Since the interview aired, fans have begun leaving flowers and handwritten notes outside Tina’s lakeside home, many bearing those same six words. Her official social media pages have also reposted the message, accompanied by a simple caption:
💬 “Forever our Queen. Forever love.”
Music historians are already calling Tina’s final note “a lyrical farewell,” perfectly fitting for an artist whose life was a song about endurance, freedom, and the redemptive power of love.
💬 As Bach concluded, “Those words — they were Tina. She had love. She gave love. And she left the world full of both.”