Amy Yasbeck - With Love and Laughter, John Ritter

Gallery Books
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Copyright 2010 by Amy Yasbeck

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First Gallery Books hardcover edition September 2010

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Lyrics to Hurt by Trent Reznor used by permission.

Designed by Jaime Putorti

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Yasbeck, Amy.

With love and laughter, John Ritter / by Amy Yasbeck.

p. cm.

1. Ritter, John. 2. Television actors and actressesUnited StatesBiography. 3. Motion picture actors and actressesUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

PN2287.R545Y37 2010

791.4502'8092dc22

[B] 2010011346

ISBN 978-1-4165-9841-1
ISBN 978-1-4391-5056-6 (ebook)

For Stella

contents

preface

John Ritters Window

John died the night of September 11, 2003. Not only was it our daughter Stellas fifth birthday but it was only a few days into her first real week of school. In fact, it was the first day that we parents were expected to drop our kids off instead of walking them in and hovering.

I think the thing with which children and their parents comfort themselves is the knowledge that these separations last only a few hours. Moms and dads reassure their little ones that they will be back for them, even though most parents feel in the pit of their stomachs that theyre kind of abandoning themespecially if its their first kid and/or only one. I remember seeing parents and their kids dotting the campus in little intimate clumps, basically having the same conversation: Well be back for you. Its just a few hoursyoull have a lot of fun and itll go by before you know it.

Stella had gone to a small co-op nursery school for the previous two years. Co-op, mind you, means that the parents work at school, so John and I were there a lot. This whole kindergarten thing on a giant campus at a big school that went up to eighth grade was a really different feeling for all of us. It was like trying to merge onto an L.A. freeway driving a Big Wheel. As a brand-new five-year-old, Stella was as brave and trusting of the worldand of usas we could have hoped. She shared a good-bye kiss with her father that morning believing, on faith, that her time at school would be bookended by another kiss at the end of her day. Shell never have that kiss.

Late that afternoon, John was taken from work to the emergency room of the hospital across the street. I rushed there to be with him. He died hours later. Stella never saw him again.

Every five-year-olds nightmare, whether they can verbalize it or not, is that when they say good-bye to their parents, their parents disappear. Good-bye is good-bye. No differentiation between good-bye see you later and good-bye forever. This nightmare came true for Stella. I know kids live through this. Ive met plenty of adults who lost a parent very, very young. But you can never imagine, until it happens to you, what its like to witness your childs suffering. As much pain as I was in, trying to wrap my head and heart around my own loss, nothing will ever compare with the absolute despair of experiencing this tragedy through my daughters eyes.

My first instinct was to keep her out of school and hibernate the rest of the year away; she could just start again the next September. I knew this was the wrong tack and I would have to pull her out of school for a while and then slowly reintroduce her to the idea of kindergarten. After a pretty cruel false start, it wasnt going to be easy. Besides, John was the big school fan. He loved school, everything about it. He had an abundance of warm memories about his adventures in grade school and at his beloved Hollywood High and USC.

Me? Not so much. My experiences were not so nice. John and I had an understanding that he was going to be holding my hand for the next twelve or so years when it came to anything school-related. I was in this alone now and everyones advice that September was that Stella needed school and normalcy right. Okay.

One week after John died, Stella started back at school. The drill was: I would go to school with her, drop her off in class, hang around close by, and then slowly start to leave campus for longer and longer periods of time. Clearly, this was as hard for me as it was for her. Her school was up on Mulholland Drive. And when I first forced myself to get back in my car and actually drive away from her, I didnt get very far. In fact, I just drove in huge loops down to Ventura Boulevard, slowly cruising along for a couple of miles, then back up another canyon to Mulholland, across the tops of the mountains past her school, and then back down another canyon road to Ventura Boulevard in the Valley.

I didnt listen to the radio. Not only was talk radio to be avoidedespecially Howard Sternbut every song was about John. When I was pregnant with Stella, he told me that one of the many amazing effects that having a baby has on your relationship to the world is that every song on the radio becomes about your baby. Every love song is suddenly about your new love. This little person.

Its true for every parent. I remember my dad, who sang me to sleep every night with a repertoire of songs from the thirties and forties, his era, used to effortlessly replace the word baby with Amy. As in, just Dorothy and me and Amy makes three, were happy in our blue heaven. Now here I was driving radio-free, testing the radius of my invisible umbilical cord; all the songs were about John now. Just the thought of music, any song, made me cry so hard my glasses would fog up. Unsafe at any speed.

At some point during that first week back at school, I decided to widen my comfort zone by taking a longer drive down Ventura Boulevard before I climbed back up the mountain on the way to Stellas school. I found myself at the stretch between Jerrys Deli and The Good Earth Restaurant, two of John and Stella and my favorites. This was worse than being blindsided by a Beatles song. My face flushed and my glasses fogged and I had to pull over. I happened to have stopped in front of a newsstand. I had purposely been avoiding headlines. No TV. No Internet. Nothing. I should have been expecting some stories about John to show up in the gossip magazines, but I certainly wasnt seeking them out. And, thankfully, I had been surrounded by friends and family kind enough to keep any knowledge of press coverage to themselves.