Eric Dane had reached a happiness Rebecca Gayheart hadn’t seen him find for much of his life when he began confronting his death. His fear stayed with her as she questioned how she was living her own life.
“Watching Eric grapple with the thought of his final days was unlike anything I’d ever really witnessed or been through, and it was painful to watch because he was still afraid, so afraid,” Gayheart said in a clip from The Drew Barrymore Show shared November 3. The show said the full interview would air the following day.
Dane died February 19, 2026, at 53. His cause of death was respiratory failure, with ALS listed as an underlying cause. He and Gayheart shared daughters Billie and Georgia.
“It made me consider my own mortality. It made me question life, religion, what it all means, my relationships, how I was living, was I being my best person, all the choices I had made,” she told Barrymore. “It made me question everything really because he was questioning everything.”
Speaking with Maria Shriver on Today on November 3, the release day of Dane’s memoir My Book of Days, Gayheart also described him as “relieved of that mental anguish that he had his entire life, to not feel so insecure.” She said he “was fully aware it was shifting” and “was in control of the way he was going to leave.”
In the Barrymore interview, she explained what made watching his fear so painful: “And he had finally gotten to a place where he was happy after probably having a lifetime of feeling uncomfortable in his own skin.”