Photo: Hulton Archive
Alex Van Halen emotionally recalled the last moments of Eddie Van Halen's life in a recent visit to the All There Is With Anderson Cooper podcast.
“None of us really thought he was gonna die,” he revealed. “He'd always bounced back. He had the most incredible DNA that I've ever seen in anybody. He could do more and more drugs than anybody and still wake up the next day and perform. I don't think anybody really thought he was gonna die. So when he passed, it was really a shock.”
Alex continued by saying he didn't think even Eddie knew his time had come. “I don't think he knew. Being human, you think you're gonna go on one more day, one more day. You keep going forward. But then one day you don't," he explained. "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.”
The Van Halen guitarist died in October 2020, at the height of the COVID pandemic, so it was challenging to see him. But Alex was with him at the end. "He had a massive stroke. We were in the room with him when he actually took his last breath,” he recalled. “We just sat there. Everybody was in their own headspace.”
“All I know is that when he stopped breathing, I didn't hear anything. I didn't see anything,” Alex added. “There were no bells. There were no angels. It stopped. And then the room was empty. That was it. And then they pulled the plug because he was on a ventilator. And that was it. And because of COVID and the restrictions and the rules, they immediately carted the body off and that was it. Then we didn't see him anymore. [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."
Alex recently published Brothers, a memoir about his personal and professional relationship with his late brother. Listen to Alex's full conversation with Anderson Cooper below.