(Photo by Gustavo Caballero/Getty Images for NYCWFF)

Valerie Bertinelli is opening up about the final words she said to Eddie Van Halen, her first husband, before he passed away from cancer in 2020. The two were married for 26 years between 1981 and 2007.

People obtained an excerpt from her new memoir, Enough Already: Learning to Love the Way I Am Today, which touches on the subject. In the excerpt, she writes that as Eddie was passing, she told her him while crying, “Maybe next time. Maybe next time, we’ll get it right.”

She adds in the extract that they shared almost four decades of “love, anger, frustration and friendship.” She adds, “I loved Ed more than I know how to explain. I loved his soul.”

“We were portrayed as a mismatch,” she says of their relationship. “The bad boy rock star and America’s sweetheart but privately, Ed wasn’t the person people thought he was and neither was I…. I hated the drugs and the alcohol but I never hated him. I saw his pain.”

Enough Already: Learning to Love the Way I Am Today will arrive on Jan. 18.

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