Nate Berkus Opens Up About Grief Journey After Losing Partner in 2004 Tsunami — and Oprah's Advice (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Nate Berkus.Photo:Ashley Burns Photography

Ashley Burns Photography

In December 2004,Nate Berkustraveled to Arugam Bay in Sri Lanka with his then-boyfriend, photographer Fernando Bengoechea, for a vacation.

Ten days later, Berkus returned home to Chicago alone. The couple had been caught in the tsunami that tore through Asia on Dec. 26 after a 9.1. magnitude earthquake struck just off the coast of Indonesia.

Berkus survived. Bengoechea’s body was never found.

“I wasn’t eating, I wasn’t sleeping,” Berkus, 53, tells PEOPLE exclusively in this week’s issue, reflecting on the tragic event twenty years later. “I wasn’t able to maintain a conversation.”

Nate Berkus (left) and his then-partner, Fernando Bengoechea, in an undated photo.courtesy

courtesy

“I didn’t want to be weird,” Berkus recalls confessing to his therapist. “I think it’s such a case for admitting when you need help, admitting when, no matter who you are, that we find ourselves as people unable to cope, unable to understand, just unable to find the path again. Without the grief counselor and the therapist, I don’t know that I would’ve ever returned to any semblance of who I was before.”

In the days immediately after Berkus returned to Chicago, he also had to deal with his physical injuries, too. He was covered in wounds, and he remembers being conscious enough despite the “haze” to think to change his bandages.

“I had scars. I have scars still, not extensive, but if you know, you know. [They’re] on my upper arms and on my legs,” he says. He also remembers one of the first doctors he met with in Chicago asking to see the pills he’d been given while still abroad.

“He was like, ‘Oh my God, you can’t be on these. These are not okay,'” Berkus recalls, noting that the strength of the drugs were to blame for his fogginess.

As he endured his own devastation, Berkus also leaned on his dear friends, including none other thanOprah, who imparted a particular message he has yet to forget.

Slowly but surely, Berkus found his way back to himself. He realized that the best way to honor Bengoechea’s life was to continue living his own, which also meant never giving up on the idea of finding love again, either.

Nate Berkus and Jeremiah Brent attend the Housing Works’ 2023 Design on a Dime at Metropolitan Pavilion on April 20, 2023 in New York City.Gary Gershoff/Getty

Gary Gershoff/Getty

In 2014, Berkus married fellow interior designerJeremiah Brent. The two share children Poppy, 9, and Oskar, 6, who carries Bengoechea’s middle name as his own —a tribute that was Jeremiah’sidea.

For more on Nate Berkus’s account of the 2004 tsunami and other survivor stories, pick up this week’s issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, orsubscribe.

Some two decades later, Berkus still finds himself thinking back to the search and rescue efforts that persisted in the wake of the tsunami, too.

Every time a helicopter took off in search of Bengoechea, Berkus made sure that the aircraft was also equipped with plenty of supplies for the people in the area where it would land. He approaches life with the same philosophy today.

“A sentiment that governs almost everything I do is, ‘How can I leave this place better than I found it?'” Berkus says. “Twenty years later, that is what stays with me the most.”

source: people.com