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Rebecca Gayheart, 55, Opens Up About Eric Dane’s Final Week: ‘I Had No Idea That Was It’
The actor recalls how she and their two daughters spent their last days with Dane as he died from ALS
4-minute read
Rebecca Gayheart and Eric Dane are seen here in 2015. His memoir is out on Nov. 3, and Gayheart has spoken out about how she's dealing with his death.
Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for AFI
Key takeaways
- Eric Dane died at 53 after being diagnosed with ALS, a disease that destroys the nerve cells that control muscle movement.
- Rebecca Gayheart and Dane married in 2004 and later separated. They lived in different homes, raised their two daughters together and never divorced.
- Gayheart and their daughters spent nights in Dane’s hospital room. When he was admitted, none of them realized it would be their last week with him.
Rebecca Gayheart had plans the day Eric Dane went into the hospital for the last time. He’d been through this before. The doctors would treat him, and he’d go home.
“I said, ‘Listen, I’ll be back. I have a dinner. I’m going to this event.’ I had no idea that that was it, that that week was going to be our last week,” Gayheart told Maria Shriver in an interview for NBC’s Today show, posted Nov. 3. “And nor did my daughters.”
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Dane, who played Dr. Mark “McSteamy” Sloan on Grey’s Anatomy, died Feb. 19 at 53, less than a year after he went public with his diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. The disease destroys nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord that control muscle movement. Over time, walking, speaking, swallowing and breathing become harder, according to the Mayo Clinic. Gayheart spoke with Shriver for the release of Dane’s memoir, My Book of Days: A Memoir in Moments.
Gayheart and Dane married in 2004 and separated in 2018, when she filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. They continued raising their daughters, Billie, 16, and Georgia, 14, together. In March 2025, Gayheart asked the court to dismiss the divorce petition. They remained married until his death.
Around the third day in the hospital, Gayheart noticed a change in how the doctors spoke to the family. Dane knew he was dying, she told Shriver. Speaking was hard, but she and the girls could still understand him most of the time. Friends who were doctors helped Gayheart sort through decisions. Dane made choices of his own. “He was in control of the way he was going to leave,” she said.
“A lot of people will say, ‘Well, at least you knew, and you could have those last conversations,’ ” Gayheart told Shriver. “But we didn’t know, because there is no road map. No one can tell you what the journey looks like because it’s so different for every patient.
“He was becoming more alive mentally, but losing all of his physical abilities. And for the girls, that was really hard to watch as well. But overall, it’s a blur, because it was just so overwhelming,” Gayheart said.
It can be difficult to determine when an illness has entered its final stages. Even Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider, a physician who had cared for dying patients, found it hard to recognize how close her own father was to death. She thought they might have weeks together when he entered hospice with pancreatic cancer. He died within days.
Ungerleider, an internal medicine physician who founded End Well, a nonprofit that helps people talk about serious illness, caregiving, grief and death, told AARP how doctors can help families prepare. “The more we can tell families what dying can actually look like,” she said, “the easier it is when the time comes.”
Some of that help can come from a hospice nurse, who can explain changes in breathing or appetite and what a family can do to keep someone comfortable, Emily Paul, a nurse case manager with MJHS Hospice and Palliative Care in New York City, told AARP.
There’s also a place for what families have done for one another all along. “Your presence, your voice, your touch and your love are all still forms of care,” end-of-life doula Kila Ealy-Acey told AARP.
Gayheart, Billie and Georgia found a way to bring a little of home into Dane’s hospital room.
“The girls and I just camped out there with him, and we had our family sleepovers,” Gayheart told Shriver. “And we brought in those little candles that aren’t real candles. They have batteries. And we played his favorite music, and we tried to make it as nice as you can be in the hospital room.”
In an interview with USA Today posted on Nov. 3, Gayheart expanded on how she’s dealing with Dane’s death: She and her daughters know that “grief is not linear,” Gayheart said.
“There’s a lot of time where you just feel angry or upset, and mad, or you miss the person, and just mad that you can’t talk to them again,” Gayheart said. “For me, it’s someone who I had my kids with, and watching my children grow up, and not being able to talk to the person that I want to tell about it. You know? They’re changing, and they’re having their firsts, and their disappointments, and their heartbreaks, and their triumphs, and I want to call Eric and tell him about it, and I can’t. And that’s really hard.”
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