In her new memoir “It’s Never Too Late,” Kathie Lee Gifford recounts comforting Ethel Kennedy after the death of her son Michael, who was killed in a skiing accident on New Year’s Eve in 1997.

Fox News reported that Michael, a political activist and businessman, was the sixth son of Ethel and the late Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968. He had been married to Gifford’s stepdaughter Vicki Gifford at the time of his death, although they had just separated at the time of his passing due to a cheating scandal. However, Gifford and her husband Frank were still close to the Kennedy family when Michael died.

Gifford has never forgotten sitting beside Michael’s body with Ethel, who was still in her skiing clothes and in “utter shock.”

“She was grieving so deeply that she couldn’t move,” Gifford, 67, told People Magazine. “She was literally paralyzed with grief.”

“‘My God,’ I thought, ‘how much can one woman take?’” she added. “I quietly walked over to her and embraced her and whispered how sorry I was. She had always been very candid that Michael was her favorite child of the 11 she had born. And now, he, too, was gone.”

Gifford recalled sitting with Ethel by her son’s body for more than an hour, and when anyone came to take him away, the grieving mother shook her head “adamantly.” They prayed together silently before Gifford whispered a Bible verse to Ethel that seemed to help.

“To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord,” she said.

Gifford saw the change in Ethel immediately, and to this day she believes that Bible verse did wonders for her in that moment.

“Ethel is someone who’s had religion her whole life,” she explained. “And so [God had] been a huge part of her life, but she’d never heard the scripture before that I shared with her in the book … It changed her life.”

This taught Gifford a lesson that she has never forgotten.

“The word of God has power,” she said. “It is the power of all life is in the word and the words. And that’s what broke through the darkness for her — the light of the truth of God’s word.”