Roger Ebert’s widow says she’s “devastated” to lose the man she called the love of her life, adding that he was “getting tired of his fight with cancer.”
“We were getting ready to go home today for hospice care, when he looked at us, smiled, and passed away. No struggle, no pain, just a quiet, dignified transition,” Chaz Ebert said in a statement released shortly after the legendary film critic’s death today.
She said her husband – whom she called her friend, confidante and partner for more than 20 years – had fought a “courageous fight.”
“I’ve lost the love of my life and the world has lost a visionary and a creative and generous spirit who touched so many people all over the world,” she wrote, adding that they had a “lovely” life together…
Ebert posted a blog about the depth of his feelings for his wife on their 20th wedding anniversary…
“How can I begin to tell you about Chaz?” he posted on July 17, 2012. “She fills my horizon, she is the great fact of my life, she has my love, she saved me from the fate of living out my life alone, which is where I seemed to be heading. If my cancer had come, and it would have, and Chaz had not been there with me, I can imagine a descent into lonely decrepitude.”
During his long illness, Ebert wrote, his wife “never lost her love, and when it was necessary she forced me to want to live…her love was like a wind forcing me back from the grave.”
