Rebecca Gayheart is offering some clarity on where she stands with estranged husband Eric Dane following his ALS diagnosis.
“It’s a very complicated relationship, one that’s confusing for people. Our love may not be romantic, but it’s a familial love,” Gayheart, 54, wrote in an essay published via The Cut on Monday, December 29. “Eric knows that I am always going to want the best for him. That I’m going to do my best to do right by him. And I know he would do the same for me.”
Gayheart noted that she will do “whatever” she can to make Dane’s ALS “journey better for him or easier for him.” This is also something she wants to “model” for their daughters, Billie, 15, and Georgia, 14.
“That’s what you do,” she wrote. “That’s the right thing to do.”
If you ask Gayheart, she and Dane, 53, have known each other “for a million years.” They met in 2003 and were married the following year.
“I care about him deeply. We had a really lovely marriage for a long time — we were married for 15 years — we created two beautiful girls,” Gayheart wrote. “But also, lots of s*** went crazy in our relationship, and it wasn’t good.”
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They separated in September 2017 but “never got a divorce,” Gayheart explained. (She filed for divorce in February 2018, but filed to dismiss the divorce petition earlier this year.)
“We were about to and then we didn’t. We haven’t lived in the same home for eight years; he’s dated other people, I’ve dated someone,” Gayheart explained. Despite their separation, both Gayheart and their girls have “spent a lot of time” at Dane’s over the past few months.
“We have a lot of meals together. We do a lot of drop-by visits — well, I don’t just drop by. I always call and say, ‘I’m coming up the hill’ or ‘I’m dropping Georgia off.’ We wanna take advantage of the time that he has right now,” Gayheart wrote. “He made it very clear that he wants to spend time with his family as much as possible, and I am committed to facilitating that. That was an easy conversation to have.”
Gayheart explained “some of the harder conversations” about Dane’s health have not yet been unpacked between them. “They are just too sad,” she added.
Dane went public with his ALS diagnosis in April, but Gayheart explained that his symptoms started about a year before.
“When we would have a meal with the kids, he’d say things like, ‘Something’s wrong with my hand.’ He was struggling to use his chopsticks, dropping his food,” she wrote. “That was when he started seeing doctors. He was initially diagnosed with a few other things, but he had this sinking feeling that it was something more serious.”
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Gayheart also detailed the day Dane called her with his official diagnosis.
“I was in my closet the day I heard those three letters: ALS. Eric called me from the doctor’s office in San Francisco; he’d flown down to see a neurologist there,” she wrote. “When he told me that day, he just started weeping, as did I. It didn’t feel real because he was still OK.”
She added, “I didn’t know all the details like I do now, but I knew enough about ALS to know that there wasn’t a cure.”
A week after Dane’s diagnosis, they told their daughters. It took “probably six months to wrap our heads around it,” Gayheart recalled, noting that things changed drastically since Dane’s diagnosis — especially since he went public.
“Eric’s diagnosis has changed my approach to everything,” she explained. “Even with strangers, sometimes I’ll be standing on line to get my coffee and I’ll just look at them and go, I wonder what they’re going through. Because I know everyone is going through something.”
