Eddie Van Halen’s ex-wife, actress Valerie Bertinelli, has revealed the legendary guitarist’s last words.
“‘I love you’ are the last words Ed says to Wolfie and me,” she wrote in her new memoir Enough Already: Learning to Love the Way I Am Today, referring to their son Wolfgang. “And they are the last words we say to him before he stops breathing.”
Bertinelli recalled she told him: "Maybe next time. Maybe next time, we'll get it right."
Van Halen died in October 2020 after battling throat cancer. He was 65.
Bertinelli wrote that she and Wolfgang spent every day in the hospital during the musician’s final weeks, along with his second wife Janie Liszewski and his brother Alex Van Halen.
“I can’t explain the feelings Ed and I had for each other,” Bertinelli shared in her book, according to People. “Who really knows had he not died. I doubt it. I loved him more than I know how to explain and there’s nothing sexual about it. It was more than that. And Ed and I understood that.
“There is no greater love than what we had between the two of us and with that, we made this beautiful son.”
The pair were married in 1981 and separated in 2001. Bertinelli filed for divorce four years later and it was finalized in 2007.
Bertinelli described their relationship as a mixture of “love, anger, frustration and friendship.” She admitted his addiction issues were problematic. “I hated the drugs and the alcohol but I never hated him,” she wrote. “I saw his pain.”