As you surely know, the Fuller House star was found dead in his hotel room at the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando, Florida back in January. Just eight months earlier, though, he was reflecting on the concept of death itself and the ways it was helping him change for the better.

These reflections were made during a candid interview on the Til This Day with Radio Rahim podcast in May 2021 — which hasn’t been made public, until now.

Related: Bob’s Wife Reveals Wish To Have ‘One More Day’ With The Late Full House Star

During the conversion, which will be released by Luminary in three parts this week, Saget opened up about losing multiple loved ones throughout his lifetime and explained how that helped him “grow” as a person. He told host Radio Rahim in the first part of the interview, per People:

“I’m proud of myself because I’m onto a new thing. At 65, I’m different than I was. We’re all rethinking what we said 20 years ago, 10 years ago, four years ago. I’m not even rethinking it, I just don’t have the same way of doing humor or conversation… I guess therapy, having three kids, watching people pass away in the past few years, mortality, all that stuff has fortunately changed me. My kids tell me, ‘Dad, you’re different. It’s so nice to watch you grow.’”

While Saget explained the losses of loved ones like his uncles, aunt, cousins, and sisters, each had a profound effect on him, he was inspired at an early age to embrace life thanks to his father’s reactions to family members passing away.

“I was 9, and we had so many deaths growing up that my dad would just, instill [having fun] in me — he didn’t teach it to me. I just saw, hey, he reacted. He buried four brothers and a sister in his life. He buried all his siblings. I helped him write the speech at 3:30 in the morning in Philly… I said, ‘It’s going to be the shortest funeral of your life, Dad. You’re 85 and I’m not putting you through this anymore.’ And his brother passed away and he lived to about 78, which was longer than any of the others. They died at like 40, 37, really weird heart attacks, so I have a heart doctor as my [general practitioner]. And my dad wrote a speech, we did it together.”

Saget shared that it was ultimately the way his father delivered the speech that helped shift his perspective about life and death, adding:

“[His] ending was something like, ‘I’ll see you in 30 years, Joe.’ And it’s good to close with something sweet that makes people feel the love.”

Elsewhere in the chat, the actor revealed that he started filming with an eight-millimeter camera as a way to cope with the many deaths in his family. He explained:

“[The deaths] started when I was, like, 7 and then every two years somebody died. [I had] a cousin die — she died at 23 of cancer after giving birth to her child — and then a lot of cousins went through a lot of hardship, so I was like 9, 10, 11, 12, 14. It was a lot. And then I lost both my sisters… There’s so much pain, and my parents couldn’t deal with it. And every time they finally started to try to regroup, something else terrible happened. And then one of my sisters got this disease Scleroderma in 1994.”

The industry vet said his role as Danny Tanner on Full House earned him enough credit to produce and direct a made-for-TV movie about the disease, loosely based on his sister’s life. He explained of the 1996 project:

“I was working with ABC, so they let me make this TV movie with Dana Delaney starring in it, playing my sister. I’ve done over 30 years of benefits and we’ve raised over $50 million for the Scleroderma Research Foundation. It affects mostly women and you can die from your lungs, pulmonary hypertension. This is an autoimmune and vascular disease, but it’s more prevalent than you would think… It’s one of my life’s work because my sister died at 47.”

Hopefully, Saget’s wise words will inspire others to look at mortality the same way.

Watch the first episode of the actor’s interview (below) for more.

[Image via CBS]