Valerie Bertinelli Looks Back on Relationship With Eddie Van Halen: ‘We Went Through a Lot of Hell’

Valerie Bertinelli stopped by TODAY on Tuesday (Jan. 18) to discuss her new memoir and relationship with late ex-husband Eddie Van Halen.

“We went through a lot of hell as well,” the Hot in Cleveland star told Hoda Kotb about her relationship with the late Van Halen rocker, to whom she was married from 1981 to 2007. “We weren’t really good to each other at a lot of points in our lives because we met so young and were very immature. But I’m so happy that we were able to come to a beautiful place by the end of his life. I wish he was still here.”

Bertinelli further opened up about her ex-husband’s passing in October 2020 from cancer in her new memoir, Enough Already: Learning to Love the Way I Am Today, and wrote, “‘I love you’ are the last words Ed says to Wolfie and me and they are the last words we say to him before he stops breathing…The love we have always had for each other proved stronger and more resilient than anything else. We chose to remain friends and family.”

In her TODAY interview, the actress turned Food Network star counted the former couple’s son Wolfgang at the top of the list among the many good things that came from her and Van Halen’s decades-long relationship.

“I think soul mates, I think we have more than just one,” she said. “I think that partly Wolfie is a soul mate of mine. When I think of soul mate, I think of souls that come here to experience this life on Earth together again and get to a higher place. I definitely, definitely know that was part of Ed. I loved his soul deeply.”

Watch Bertinelli’s interview below: