Michael Palin has revealed he feels “lopsided” and without a “rudder”, following the death earlier this year of his wife Helen Gibbins.

The Monty Python star, 80, announced in May that his wife of 57 years had died after suffering from chronic pain and kidney failure.

Palin and Gibbons met when he was still a teenager, and he described her as “the bedrock of my life.”

“We were together for a very long time. We were married for 57 years and I met her before that – so more than two thirds of my life was spent with her. And, so you form a kind of unit,” Palin told Rob Brydon’s Wondery podcast Brydon &.

“You don’t realise that until someone’s gone and then it’s slightly lopsided, like something tips over, and your rudder goes.

“You end up thinking it was just me, but I need my partner there to sort of keep me on the straight and narrow.

“It’s not the great things that you’ve said, very often a lot of things that are unsaid because if you know somebody really, really well, you don’t have to sort of analyse everything or say everything, you just know the way they will feel. So I had to get adjusted to that.”

Palin met his future wife while holidaying in the English seaside town of Southwold, and later fictionalised the encounter in a 1987 TV drama for the BBC titled East Of Ipswich.

The couple shared three children and four grandchildren.

Speaking about Gibbons’ health issues, Palin told Brydon she eventually decided to stop having dialysis.

“She was very, very unwell for a few years really. When she got to the stage with her kidney failure that she really couldn’t do an awful lot for herself, and carers were coming in,” he said.

“Helen was a very independent woman and the idea of having to be dependent on somebody else for the rest of her life didn’t appeal, for almost everything, like going upstairs and all that sort of stuff.

“She stopped having dialysis. That was her decision, backed up by all the family and the doctors.

“They said this is it … dialysis is just keeping you going, for what? And it’s quite an unpleasant process.

“She said, ‘OK, I’ll stop the dialysis’, and she did. And we had a few days; when you stop dialysis, your systems [have] got a few days, 10 days, maybe a couple of weeks to keep going.

“We were able to say goodbye many times really, and I don’t think there was anything at the end of her life that I felt oh gosh, we never discussed that, we never talked about that.

“But her sense of humour, [that] was what I missed most, you know, she had that right up to the very end. She made little jokes about her sisters.”

– AAP