Amy Yasbeck still checks in with her late husband, John Ritter, and shares moments with his children when a comedian or a piece of physical comedy reminds them of him.
“I still talk to John. I check in all the time. … I talk to him every day,” she said. Watching something he would’ve enjoyed can feel “like John is with us or beside us when we’re watching something entertaining.”
“John was such a good audience. He loved being on stage. He loved to be in an audience.”
Ritter’s son Jason has his own way of keeping those conversations going. Speaking on the Joy 101 podcast in August, he described imagining his father nearby when he needs guidance.
“I go, ‘I need you in this corner right here, dad,’ and I just sort of sit him down and talk to him.”
Jason said he doesn’t need to resolve whether his dad’s presence comes from somewhere beyond him or from how well he knew him: “There’s so much about this world that’s such a mystery, and whether he’s out there somewhere, or I know him so well that he’s within me somewhere, it doesn’t matter. I know him.”
For Yasbeck, what she misses most is watching Ritter be a father. They met while working on Problem Child, released in 1990, and were married for 4 years before his death. They share son Noah; Ritter also had Jason, Carly and Tyler with his first wife, actress Nancy Morgan.
“That encompasses everything. His humanity, his comedy, his empathy, his frustration at the world,” Yasbeck said of his fatherhood. She described him as fair-minded and progressive, particularly upset by unfair treatment of children, including his own.
Ritter died on September 11, 2003, at 54, after suffering an aortic dissection while working on 8 Simple Rules. An aortic dissection is a tear in the body’s main artery. Yasbeck said people still approach her to tell her what the Three’s Company actor meant to them.
For Jason, his memories also offer a way to find an answer: “There are times where I can ask him a question that I don’t necessarily know the answer to, and I filter it through what I knew about him as a father and as a person, and I can kind of guess what he would say.”