Losing a Loved One to Cancer
- More than a year after Eddie Van Halen’s death, his first wife, Valerie Bertinelli, is opening up about her final moments with him.
- Bertinelli, 61, tells the complete story of how she said goodbye to Van Halen in her new book, entitled Enough Already: Learning to Love the Way I Am Today, a memoir. The book will be released on Jan. 18.
- While Van Halen and Bertinelli were not together when he died, they continued to have a close bond even after their marriage ended. Recovering after losing a loved one to cancer is never a "one-and-done" process.
Now, more than a year after his passing, his first wife, Valerie Bertinelli, is bravely opening up about her final moments with the man she describes as her "soulmate."
Read More"We were portrayed as a mismatch," Bertinelli writes about when she and Eddie first got together. "The bad boy rock star and America's sweetheart but privately, Ed wasn't the person people thought he was and neither was I."
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'I Love You'
"I love you." Those were Eddie Van Halen's final words to Bertinelli and their son. "And they are the last words we say to him before he stops breathing," she writes in her memoir.
Before his passing, in the weeks leading up to it before the "I love yous" Bertinelli details how she and Wolfgang spent every day in the hospital with Eddie Van Halen, in addition to his second wife, Janie Liszewski, and his brother, Alex Van Halen.
While she and Eddie had been separated for some time, and there was no chance of them reuniting, she says she regrets holding herself back from getting too close to her ex-husband during his cancer battles.
"There is no chance we are going to get back together," she writes in the book, "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."
"I can't explain the feelings Ed and I had for each other," she adds. "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."
Eddie Van Halen's Cancer Battles
Van Halen’s first diagnosis tongue cancer came in the year 2000 when his son, Wolfgang, was just 9 years old. For treatment, he had part of his tongue removed, but he was declared to have entered remission in 2002.
Then around 2014, he was diagnosed with throat cancer after cancerous cells traveled there from his tongue. In 2017, cancer struck again when Eddie Van Halen was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer.
Then came a brain tumor in 2019. He received treatment for his lung cancer in Germany to extend his expected survival time and reportedly had gamma knife radiation, a type of a radiosurgery, to remove his brain tumor.
Van Halen struggled with his health for many years. SurvivorNet obtained a copy of the death certificate issued two months after his passing which revealed that he was suffering from both lung and skin cancer. The document lists his cause of death as a cerebrovascular accident (stroke), but underlying conditions included pneumonia, lung cancer, myelodysplastic syndrome and squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck.
Myelodysplastic syndrome, a disorder which causes a disruption in blood cell production, often occurs in response to cancer treatments. He had been suffering from this disorder for the last six months of his life.
One important thing to note is that while we do not necessarily know why each of his cancers developed, we do know that years of heavy drinking, drug use and chain-smoking might have increased his risk for cancer. And despite Eddie Van Halen's claims that his throat cancer was caused by putting copper and brass guitar picks in his mouth for years, there is no sufficient evidence to back up these claims.
Losing a Loved One to Cancer
While Bertinelli and Eddie Van Halen were not together when he died, they continued to have a close bond even after their marriage ended. So recovering after losing a loved one to cancer, especially a partner or even former partner, is not a "one-and-done" process, many members of the SurvivorNet community have told us.
One widower tells us that the idea of "moving on" is not realistic, or even desired.
"I don't even think I want to move on," Doug Wendt, who lost his wife of 25 years to ovarian cancer, said during a previous interview with SurvivorNet. "But I do want to move forward, and that's an important distinction. I encourage anyone who goes through this journey as a caregiver who then has to face loss to think very carefully about how to move forward."
The point is that moving on and dealing with grief is different for everyone; Bertinelli's experience moving on has been different than Wendt's experience, and that is OK.
Related: The Toughest Conversations: Losing a Spouse to Cancer
For Bertinelli, she wrote her memoir. In the book, she also details what Eddie Van Halen's death taught her: live more in the moment, and to stop judging herself and her weight.
"The book is more vulnerable than anything else I've ever written," she tells People.
Contributing: Abby Seaberg
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