Stressing that she tried to help her mother and father, the 'Walking Dead' star describes Robert and Diane Witt as 'fiercely stubborn' with 'beautifully original souls.'
- Jan 26, 2022
AceShowbiz - Alicia Witt is speaking out one month after her parents Robert and Diane Witt were found dead in their Worcester, Massachusetts home. In a lengthy Facebook post, the actress detailed her relationship with her mother and father, and addressed "misconceptions" regarding circumstances surrounding their deaths.
"the circumstances around my parents' sudden passings have become fodder for press, and there are some misconceptions rolling around - understandably so," she wrote on Tuesday, January 25. "this is very delicate for me to write because i'm wanting to honor their privacy, which they held so tightly. there's an awful irony in the fact that, because of the very lengths they went to in order to protect their privacy in life - that privacy has been stripped away in death. i never imagined i would have to talk about this publicly - much less, amidst overwhelming floods of grief."
Alicia said, "i hadn't been allowed inside my parents' home for well over a decade; every time i offered to have something repaired for them, they refused to allow workers into their house. i begged, cried, tried to reason with them, tried to convince them to let me help them move - but every time, they became furious with me, telling me i had no right to tell them how to live their lives and that they had it all under control. it was not for a lack of trying on my part, or the part of other people who loved them."
"my parents were not penniless," the 46-year-old star clarified, "they were fiercely stubborn, beautifully original souls, and with that, they made choices - choices that i couldn't talk them out of. i did help them, in all the ways i could - in all the ways they would let me."
Stressing that she tried to help her parents, Alicia claimed, "i struggle, as much as i helped, with what else could i have done - short of petitioning the court system for taking control of two otherwise very sharp, very independent, very capable adults. they were a united, intertwined, indivisible force, determined to do things their own way. knowing they had each other - battling them the way i would have had to in order to do this truly felt like it would have destroyed them."
"i had no idea that their heat had gone out," the "Still Sorry" singer revealed the circumstance that contributed to her parents' death. "i will never understand how or why they made the choice not to tell me this, not to let me help them with this. my heart is broken."
Alicia also opened up about her feeling over the loss. "it still doesn't feel real," she admitted. She went on recalling how she got the news, "it's been a month since i got scared, not having heard back from them, and called to have them checked on. waiting, phone in hand, praying fervently that the next call would be from them, angry i'd gotten someone else involved. knowing as soon as i heard the detective's voice on the other line that they were gone. knowing i would never hear their voices again. beginning the rest of my life of finding them on the breeze, in a song, in a dream."
The former child actress, who first came to fame for starring in "Dune" (1984), remembered her late parents as "brilliant educators, deeply kind, curious, intuitive, wise, young at heart, funny." She went on gushing, "there will never be enough adjectives to describe them."
Sharing her fond memory of her parents, Alicia penned, "our last words to each other were 'i love you'. that part was simple; never in doubt. they loved me so. i loved them so."
Alicia's parents were found deceased on December 20, 2021 after the actress asked a cousin who lives nearby to check on them. At the time, there were reports that the couple had been experiencing furnace issues and were using a space heater. However, firefighters checked the air quality inside the home and did not detect any noxious gases.
Meanwhile, a neighbor told the local news outlet that the Witts had been ill for some time and they rarely stepped out of their home. Some neighbors also said that the couple politely declined their offer to help though their home fell into disrepair.
