Christopher Aaron Nicks died at 72 after a two-and-a-half-year battle with cancer, and his daughter, Nixi Parkinson Nicks, announced the death on Instagram on Friday, September 4. She said he died early that morning surrounded by family.
Nicks’s death closes a long illness that his family had kept largely out of public view until now. His daughter wrote that he had never wanted people to worry about him, so he kept his diagnosis to himself. That privacy is part of why the news landed so suddenly for some who had known him only through the circle around him.
In her post, Nicks said her father had left his mark on many people and that his friends, whom he called his lost boys, meant the world to him. She added a line from Neverland and wrote, “I love you, daddy. rest easy.”
He was the younger brother of Stevie Nicks, the former Fleetwood Mac frontwoman, though she had not publicly commented on his death at the time of writing. The family connection has long been part of the public record: Christopher Aaron Nicks welcomed Nixi Parkinson Nicks with his ex-wife, Lori Perry-Nicks, who once sang as one of Stevie Nicks’s backing singers. Stevie Nicks also said in a 1986 interview that she missed Christopher and that her family was very important to her, a sentiment that now reads differently in the wake of his death.
What remains unanswered is the one detail the family did not share: the type of cancer he had. For now, the news is the death itself, the private fight behind it, and the public grief that began with a daughter’s post and may not be over until the family decides whether to say more.
