Paulina Porizkova is sharing intimate and difficult memories of her last few days with late ex husband Ric Ocasek.
The supermodel talks about the Cars frontman’s final days on Wednesday’s episode of Red Table Talk, hosted by Jada Pinkett Smith, her daughter, Willow, and her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris. In an exclusive clip shared with PEOPLE, Porizkova reflects on finding Ocasek dead in his bedroom.
“He had surgery because they’d found stage 0 lung cancer,” she recalls in the clip above. “And he was recovering really well. Two weeks [later], he was walking around, he was starting to feel much better, he was sleeping better. And this night, he said, you know what, I’m feeling kinda tired.”
The next morning, Porizkova, 57, remembers thinking he was sleeping late but wasn’t too concerned because he “tended to sleep late” due to his “rockstar hours.”
Jordan Fisher Paulina Porizkova
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But as it got later into the day, the model decided to wake him up.
“By 11, I was like, he’s sleeping in a little bit too long, so I’m going to make him a cup of coffee and I’m going to bring it up to him,” she explained.
When she got to his bedroom, it took a minute to realize he wasn’t sleeping. “I brought him a cup of coffee and he just looked like he was sleeping,” Porizkova remembered. “I set the coffee down next to him and that’s when I saw his face. I saw his eyes. And they didn’t look like eyes anymore.”
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Ocasek died suddenly of natural causes on Sept. 15, 2019, at his New York City home.
The year prior, in May 2018, Porizkova and Ocasek announced they had split after 28 years of marriage. Though the pair had been separated for several years when Ocasek died, they were not legally divorced and were still living together. They share two sons Jonathan and Oliver.
RELATED VIDEO: Paulina Porizkova Speaks Out One Day After Former Husband Ric Ocasek’s Death
Soon after his death, the model learned she had been left out of his will, but announced in October 2021 she had settled with his estate. She declined to reveal how much money she will be getting but told Los Angeles Magazine’s podcast The Originals that she’s “gonna be fine.”
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A new episode of Red Table Talk will stream Wednesday, November 16 at 9am PT/12pm ET on Facebook Watch.
