Spencer Matthews thanked his wife Vogue Williams for her unflinching support when he travelled to Everest to retrieve his brother’s body only days after she gave birth.
Spencer undertook a pilgrimage to Nepal last year with a team of skilled climbers in search of Michael, who died in 1999.
Michael vanished three hours after being the youngest Englishman to reach the summit and was later ruled dead.
Spencer, who was followed by a film team who documented the voyage for the documentary series Seeking Michael, has revealed more about how tough it was to leave his family behind in the first place.
After the expedition had to be pushed back from its initial 2021 date, Spencer said 2022 had been locked in at the time to do it, but as that date approached, it was also becoming closer and closer to Vogue’s due date.
‘We had agreed to make sure it was all bombproof for 2022 obviously not knowing Vogue would be pregnant on that date in the future, so there was a pretty serious clash in conflicts of timings,’ he said.
‘I had to go shortly after Otto was born which made the whole thing more difficult,’ he explained while appearing on This Morning on Friday.
The former Made in Chelsea actor then spoke of his wife’s support, assuring him that the plans should still go forward, even though he would be gone for nearly six weeks.
‘I would have been able to go if Vogue wasn’t so supportive,’ Spencer said.
‘She is so family orientated and would do the same thing for her siblings.
‘She thought honestly what we were doing was really special.’
He added: ‘For my mum she [Vogue] also completely understood that taking this on was so important to us and she didn’t even come close to standing in the way.’
While Michael had surpassed Bear Grylls’ record to become the youngest British to climb the world’s highest mountain, he is reported to have gone into danger a few hours after making his way down the top through the ‘death zone’.
He had already scaled Kilimanjaro, the Pyrenees, and the Swiss Alps, but he became the 162nd person to die on Everest.
Spencer, who was just eleven years old when his brother died, has indicated that completing this goal has helped him come to grips with what occurred.
‘This has really helped me move through the pain of his loss,’ he said.
‘There’s no resentment there anymore; I’ve come to terms with his death completely.
‘Now when I look at photos of him in our house, I smile. It makes me happy to see him instead of feeling angry about it.’
Spencer and Vogue also have two other children, Theodore and Gigi.
Finding Michael is now streaming on DisneyPlus.
Source My Celebrity Life.