Alex Van Halen opened up about coping with the death of his brother, Eddie Van Halen, in an interview with Anderson Cooper for his CNN podcast, All There Is With Anderson Cooper.
“I’m grieving all the time. I’m not running from it, because that doesn’t solve the problem,” Alex shared. “At times, it can be overwhelming, and the more I dwell on it, the more complicated it becomes.”
Although Eddie had been battling cancer for years, Alex said, “None of us really thought he was going to die.”
“He’d always bounced back. He had the most incredible DNA that I’ve ever seen in anybody,” he said. “He could do more and more drugs than anybody, and still wake up the next day and perform.”
He noted, “I don’t think anybody really thought he was gonna die. So when he passed, it was really a shock.”
Alex says even Eddie didn’t think he was going to die.
“Being human, you think you’re gonna go on one more day, one more day. You keep going forward,” he said. “But then one day you don’t. So up to the very end, we were still making music and we talked about, what are we gonna do next year? But it was clear that he was going downhill.”
Alex also talked about his final moments with Eddie in the hospital.
“All I know is that when he stopped breathing, I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t see anything. There were no bells. There were no angels,” he says, noting that because of the COVID-19 pandemic Eddie’s body was immediately taken away. “[It was] a very uneventful ending to an eventful life. But you know what? He fought it till the very end. I wanna think of Ed’s life in terms of that he never gave up.”
Copyright © 2024, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.