One explanation is simply that he loved her. Whatever the nature of their relationship—and biographers have been careful to note that accounts differ significantly, ranging from a purely professional partnership to a deeply romantic one—Gaye experienced her death as a personal loss of the first magnitude.
Another explanation, advanced by some of those who knew him, is that her illness made him confront his own mortality in ways he found intolerable. He was in his late twenties when she first collapsed. He had been performing at high pressure for years. The possibility of sudden, catastrophic loss—the body simply turning against you—became very real to him in a new way.
A third explanation is harder to articulate but has been gestured at in the biographical literature: that in some part of his mind, Gaye experienced his own survival as a kind of guilt. He had been the one holding her when she collapsed. He had continued working while she was dying. He had been alive and successful while she was losing her fight. This kind of survivor’s guilt doesn’t follow the logic of causation. It follows the logic of loss.
What we know is what emerged from the silence: *What’s Going On*. One of the greatest artistic acts of witness in the history of American music. A record about pain and love and the state of the world, made by a man who had just watched someone he cared about die.
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THE MOTOWN SYSTEM—AND WHAT GAYE FOUGHT AGAINST