Eric Dane was eating sushi with his children in January 2024 when his right hand began tingling and his fingers went numb. The trouble handling his chopsticks would become an early sign of ALS, though he initially blamed his phone use.
“Some kind of weird nerve thing, I think. I shake it off. I’m probably texting too much,” he wrote in My Book of Days: A Memoir in Moments.
The problem returned 3 weeks later. “I can’t grip the chopsticks at all,” he recalled.
Dane spent 9 months looking for an explanation before receiving his ALS diagnosis. He made it public in April 2025.
The Grey’s Anatomy and Euphoria actor died in February 2026 at 53. His memoir, which arrives November 3, describes both those early symptoms and the moment he told his estranged wife, Rebecca Gayheart, what doctors had found.
“It’s what we feared,” he told her. He recalled Gayheart crying on the phone and promising: “I’m here, we’ll fight this together, I’m not going anywhere.”
Gayheart, who shares daughters Billie, 16, and Georgia, 14, with Dane, said she’d initially worried about his decision to write the book. She later said she was grateful because “it gives my girls the opportunity to know their dad as a human being.”
Dane wrote that his daughters gave him a purpose after the diagnosis: “I’m going to show my girls how to walk through this life with grace and dignity, no matter what.”