Liam Payne’s sister still has ‘reoccurring nightmare’ about his final moments

Liam Payne’s sister Ruth has revealed she has a ‘recurring nightmare’ where she is powerless to save him.

The late One Direction singer died aged 31 in October 2024 after falling from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires, and his older sibling marked the anniversary of his death with a lengthy post detailing her profound grief.

She shared a family photo with her famous brother alongside a photo of the pop star dressed as a pirate.

‘Your death will never make sense, no matter how much I study it, whatever angle I look at it, it never makes sense. You shouldn’t have died,’ she wrote on Instagram.

‘I have a reoccurring nightmare where I am in your hotel room just before it happened and you can’t hear me screaming for you, my brain is locked on your last minutes on this earth, the unaccounted minutes, the minutes I will never have the answers to, the minutes that changed everything.’

She described his death as ‘the most heartbreaking truth’, comparing the loss of her brother to seeing the 1D singer ‘go away on tour’.

‘l’d cry that you’d be gone for a while, I always knew you’d come back, but now I can’t get you home,’ she said.

‘I can’t meet up with you somewhere in the world, I can’t facetime or text to see how you’re doing, it’s an eternal homesick feeling because we can’t go back.’

Ruth insisted she ‘underestimated grief’, before the heartbreaking reflection that she took the idea of having her sibling around ‘for granted’.

She continued: ‘I thought I had felt [grief] before but I know the losses before you were just intense sadness, you are the loss of my life, the one person who l will miss at every single occasion in my life.

‘I’d taken for granted that my little brother would be there through life, what a cruel lesson to learn in our 30s, that a sibling is not guaranteed to be a lifer, that I have to face this without you.’

She also opened up on how Payne’s son Bear, who he had with ex Cheryl Tweedy, has ‘changed massively’ over the last 12 months.

In the tribute, she told her late brother he would ‘continue to be in awe of your son’.

Ruth also made a lighthearted reference to her own sense of humour, before admitting she ‘will still feel [his] void’ all over the world.

She said: ‘I’ve definitely got funnier (I know you’re thinking how is that possible right?!) – some of the jokes I make really make me smile because I know they would have earned me a “ruuu” off you, l’ve visited some beautiful places but each place has confirmed, no matter the view, I will still feel your void from all corners of the earth.’

Ruth often imagines her brother’s reactions to certain moments before feelings of ’emptiness of your absence’, while recalling ‘promises’ she hasn’t been able to keep, without going into detail about what they were.

‘It will forever haunt me how little I have been able to do as you said,’ she admitted.

‘We were so naive in our conversations about this serious stuff in how much of the law is in death, outdated laws we never knew existed where nothing is simple, why would we know about them in our early 30’s, the devastation just sinks deeper with every bit of you I fail.’

Ruth reflected on how she would have spent five minutes ‘to properly say goodbye’, saying it would be at his house, as she felt ‘joy’ in the moment he walked in the room.

She’d have wanted them to have a walk around his garden listening to birdsong, sharing jokes, and having one last embrace, which she described as ‘the only hug that made me feel calm’.

‘Your absence is something that happens to me everyday before I even open my eyes,’ she wrote.

‘Wherever you are, I hope you can hear me, I hope you are guiding me and I hope you know the love I have for you is infinite.’

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