Jennifer Grey’s entire family came together ahead of her mother Jo Wilder’s death.
“The day before [my mom died], my dad and my daughter [Stella] and I came to her room and we were going through photographs,” Jennifer, 66, recalled on the Friday, August 7, episode of the “Waking Up With Ryan” podcast. “[There were] all of these family photographs that we had never seen or some of us had [not] seen since the ‘60s or whatever, and it was a treasure trove of … chapter upon chapter of life … of us being a tight, good family and them being really good parents.”
Wilder was married to Joel, 94, from 1958 to 1982, during which they welcomed the Dirty Dancing actress and son James Katz. Nearly two decades after their divorce, Wilder died last month just one week after being diagnosed with lung cancer. She was 94.
A County of Los Angeles department of public health death certificate obtained exclusively by Us on July 14 noted that Wilder was cremated on July 10 and was scattered at sea. The funeral establishment that handled her burial was Lifesource.
“You know when people say when they die they see, like, a movie of their life? It was like we were looking at a physical kind of catalog of our life with her and her life before us, and her childhood and all of that,” Jennifer noted on Friday of her final moments with Wilder. “It was very moving because the story we started to tell ourselves about what our childhood was, what their marriage was, in retrospect, how we rewrite the whole thing and in this, kind of, jaded way like, ‘Oh, now I see what the truth really was,’ and then you go, ‘No, this happened, this was real, this was love, and my parents loved each other.’”
In revisiting her parents’ memories, Jennifer realized that Wilder and Joel’s marriage was “really good” for 24 years before they went their separate ways.
“It made me so sad because the truth was they were really good for twenty four years, and then you have an awakening when you realize this isn’t what I want to continue doing,” Jennifer said. “It doesn’t negate what happened and how real it was.”
Jennifer and her 24-year-old daughter, whom she shares with ex-husband Clark Gregg, sat by Wilder’s bedside as Joel also shared a touching message to his former spouse.
“He said, ‘The day you said ‘I do,’ was the first time I felt whole in my entire life, and I couldn’t believe how lucky that I was getting to marry this most incredible, beautiful woman,’” Jennifer recalled on Friday’s podcast episode. “We were all just crying our heads off, and it was just pure love of him remembering that moment, and it was like it was happening. It wasn’t like someone talking about something in the past, it felt like I was there.”
Jennifer also heard Joel make a simple yet “off-the-cuff” remark about their divorce, adding, “We went through … some bumps.”
“[My mom replied], ‘All is forgiven,’” Jennifer said. “I feel so much closer to her since then because what I was witnessing [in her illness] was hell, and all of a sudden, I’m going through all the things in her apartment and I’m seeing her life, [which] was so major and so beautiful and so fun, and so many chapters I didn’t know. All of a sudden, she feels like a whole person, and what that was just a blip.”
