Eric Dane’s Childhood Tragedy Left Him With a Fear He Couldn’t Shake

Long before fame and his ALS diagnosis, Eric Dane learned how suddenly a life could end when his father died at a young age — and years later, the Grey’s Anatomy actor revealed he often worried history might repeat itself.

Dane died at 53 on Feb. 19. After receiving his diagnosis, he said he felt “angry” at the thought that his daughters might endure the same pain he experienced as a boy. “I’m angry because, you know, my father was taken from me when I was young,” he told Good Morning America. “And now, you know, there’s a very good chance I’m going to be taken from my girls while they’re very young.”

Dane’s father, a Vietnam veteran, died from what the family believed was either an accidental or self-inflicted gunshot wound when the actor was just 7 years old, a loss that haunted him especially once he became a father.

“When you don’t have too many memories [of him] and I was 7 at the time and for a long time I sort of passed that off as when anybody would ask me what it was like to have your father die when you were 7 I’d say well I was young I don’t remember much,” Dane recounted to Huffington Post long before his diagnosis. “It was probably no big deal, and that was just me kind of dealing with it and coping that way. But I have two children of my own now. I have two daughters. I see how attached the 3-and-a-half-year-old and the 5-year-old are to me. They know me intimately, and they’re aware of my existence.”

Dane continued: “Looking back on myself at 7, I could only imagine how devastating that must have been for me, how really attached I was to him. So the old, ‘I didn’t know much about him’ thing really didn’t play anymore. And having and seeing that in my own children and the love they have for me, it just constantly makes me think, God, I must have been crushed.”