Shannon Lee is no stranger to death. Her father, Bruce Lee, the actor and martial-arts legend, died from cerebral edema in 1973, just before the release of his breakout film “Enter the Dragon.” A coroner in Hong Kong deemed the cause “death by misadventure.” Though she was just
4 years old at the time, Shannon remembers being “out of my body” at the mob scene of a funeral.
Twenty years later, her brother, Brandon Lee, got shot in the abdomen while filming a scene for “The Crow” in Wilmington, NC. A prop gun had an errant dummy bullet lodged in the barrel. It hit him with the power of gun-powdered ammo.
A middle-of-the-night phone call from their mother, Linda Lee Cadwell, roused Shannon from slumber in her New Orleans home. “My mom said that there was an accident,” she told The Post. “We knew nothing more.”
En route to the hospital in Wilmington, the recent Tulane University grad received a disturbing vibe. “In the air, I had this energetic sensation; it was as if something passed through me,” said Shannon, author of the recently published “Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee” (Flatiron Books). In the book, she describes the feeling as her brother’s “spirit exiting his body through my own.” Shannon explained to The Post: “The only thing I could think was that Brandon had died.”
For three years, through the course of a failed marriage and the birth of her daughter, Wren, now 17, Shannon could not make peace with the tragedies. “I struggled with taking care of myself,” the 51-year-old recalled. “I’d shut down and tune out. I would stop returning phone calls and e-mails until I had the strength to continue.”
She also developed unhealthy eating habits. “I’m a comfort-food gal and the only way I could ground myself was to feel full,” she said, noting her mom’s homemade spaghetti as a go-to.
Then the teachings of her father intervened. Bruce had gone from owning a martial-arts dojo in Oakland, Calif., to being the instructor of choice for Hollywood A-listers and co-starring in “The Green Hornet.” Along the way, he developed deep thoughts for living and fighting — maintaining copious notes.
Decades after her husband’s death, Linda was working with an editor, hoping to publish the philosophy of Bruce Lee. She thought Shannon might find the material interesting. “It was like three phone books of writing,” Shannon said. “An incredible gift dropped in my lap.”
Her father’s heartfelt wisdom and instructive experiences — like the time he refused to go to the Hong Kong set of “Enter the Dragon” until producers reinstated his script revisions — form the core of Shannon’s book, a combination of self-help, biography and memoir.
Boiled down, she said, “the key to my dad’s philosophy is self-actualization: It’s the fulfilling of goals and ambitions.” As for Bruce’s most iconic line — “You must be shapeless, formless, like water” — Shannon interprets it to mean “achieving one’s essence, being able to work with whatever is coming at you.”
While poring over his writing, she was particularly taken by a single nugget: “The medicine for my suffering I had within me from the very beginning . . . Now I see that I will never find the light unless, like the candle, I am my own fuel, consuming myself.”
It convinced her that she needed to take control of her grief and find answers. “I realized that I had been mildly depressed for most of my life and [then] became a detective for my own cure,” said Shannon, who now lives in Los Angeles and is an executive producer on the Cinemax series “Warrior,” based on a treatment that Bruce wrote and had hoped to star in.
“I read further into my dad’s writing, I went to therapy, trained in Jeet Kune Do [a martial art created by Bruce]. I’ve done work with herbs and various kinds of massage. A medicine woman pulled energy out of me. By looking deeply at grief, you come to understand life.”
