Valerie Bertinelli is sharing the tender final words her ex-husband Eddie Van Halen said to her before passing away in October 2020 after a long battle with cancer. In an early excerpt of her memoir, Enough Already: Learning to Love the Way I Am Today, published by PEOPLE ahead of its Jan. 18 release, the 61-year-old actress recalled the final moments she and their 30-year-old son, Wolfgang, had with the late rocker.
Bertinelli said she and Wolfgang spent every day in the hospital with Van Halen during his final days, as did his second wife, Janie Liszewski, and Eddie’s brother, Alex Van Halen. In their final moments together, Bertinelli wrote that Van Halen made sure to express his true feelings. “‘I love you’ are the last words Ed says to Wolfie and me,” she recalled, “and they are the last words we say to him before he stops breathing.”
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Bertinelli and Van Halen were married in 1981 and welcomed Wolfgang in 1991. The couple separated in 2001 and divorced in 2007 but remained amicable throughout the years. Bertinelli added in her book that there was “no greater love than what we had between the two of us,” adding that she loved Van Halen “more than I know how to explain. …I loved his soul.”
“We were portrayed as a mismatch,” she continued in the book. “The bad boy rock star and America’s sweetheart but privately, Ed wasn’t the person people thought he was and neither was I.” In Van Halen’s later days, Bertinelli said she regrets not getting closer with him due to both of their second marriages.ย
“There is no chance we are going to get back together,” Bertinelli wrote, “but I do know if one of us were to open up, the other one would too, and I don’t want to get into that.” More than a year after Van Halen’s death, Bertinelli said it’s difficult to express the relationship they had over the years. “I can’t explain the feelings Ed and I had for each other,” she wrote. “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.”
