Valerie Bertinelli said she and Eddie Van Halen shared a tender moment on the guitarist’s deathbed.
“As he took his last breath in the hospital, the last words I said to him were, ‘I love you,'” the 65-year-old actress writes in her newly published memoir, Naked: The Quiet Work of Being Perfectly Imperfect.
Van Halen was hospitalized in 2019 after battling throat cancer for five years. He was also diagnosed with oral cancer and lost a third of his tongue during treatment.
He passed away in 2020 at the age of 65 due to a stroke.
The two met at a Van Halen concert in 1980 and married the following year. Then, in 1991, their son Wolfgang was born.
The “One Day at a Time” alum filed for divorce in 2005 after four years of separation. They officially divorced in 2007.
Van Halen’s alcoholism was a major factor in their breakup.
“I had a front row seat to Ed’s drunken behavior,” she wrote. “The way Ed acted when he was drunk, the way he didn’t know how to deal with or even look at the trauma, the pressure he put on himself, the shame he felt afterwards.”
The former Food Network star says they “shared a flawed love, but it was real.”
“Even though we were angry, we remained loving. It changed, evolved, and came back stronger than it was when our relationship began. It healed us.”
Bertinelli shared that during Van Halen’s final months, he began to make amends and “talked to all the people he had been involved with in his life. He was giving them the cold shoulder. It was sweet, and that was essentially Ed, it was sweet.”
Heartbreakingly, Bertinelli revealed that when he left the Jump musician’s hospital room, “he looked around and said, ‘The biggest mistake of my life was letting her go.'” In our own way, we never let go. ”
Van Halen married Janie Liszewski in 2009, and Bertinelli attended the wedding.
The “Hot in Cleveland” star married financial planner Tom Vitale in 2011, but they split 10 years later.
Bertinelli wrote that the dissolution of her second marriage left her angry — “angry at him, angry at the legal system, and even more angry at myself.”
