Chrissy Teigen Details ‘Waves’ of Grief After Dad’s Death

Chrissy Teigen is getting candid about grieving the death of her beloved father, Ron.

“There’s a lot of emotions. Everybody said it’d be, like, waves and it is,” Teigen, 40, said in an Instagram Story video posted Friday, June 12. “Me and my sister [are] joking, laughing ‘cause my dad was very funny and sarcastic. We talked about death and stuff.”

Teigen announced on Wednesday, June 10, that her dad died at age 86. A cause of death was not immediately revealed.

“I’m going to the funeral home, and it’s so crazy because I was looking at all the gravestones, like, ‘Oh my God, they all tell such a beautiful story,’” the Cravings founder detailed on Friday of making funeral arrangements. “All these gravestones, I noticed all these people or a few of them had died on my birthday. All these people are connected, and I was, like, ‘Man, I wonder what their story is.’”

Teigen also felt overwhelmed picking out either a casket or an urn for Ron’s remains.

“He would hate the frills of buying a casket and being buried in it,” she mused. “He would hate that so much, actually. Then, you see the caskets and [think], ‘Well, I’m kind of an a**hole if I don’t get the casket.’ Then, picking an urn? Everything’s so weird, everything’s so weird. Everything’s weird.”

Ron is survived by his wife, Vilailuck “Pepper” Teigen, their two daughters and multiple grandchildren. (Chrissy shares four children with husband John Legend, while her sister, Tina, is mom of daughter Pasha.)

“Yesterday I woke up with a daddy and went to bed without one,” Chrissy previously wrote in her Wednesday tribute. “All the same things happened. Hurried shower. Picked up stuffing from the dog toys. Answered some emails. Avoided some. Laughed with my friends and put on a pretty dress for a friend’s birthday. Took a video. How cute is this dress! And then my dad just like … f***ing died.”

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She continued, “I thought that since we talk about it and I’ve come to terms with him always having been an ‘old dad’ that I wouldn’t have fallen to the ground the way I did. I’ve thought about this phone call for years. I’ll be ready.”

According to Chrissy, she was recently able to write and deliver Ron “a letter about how grateful [she] was for him” prior to his death. 

“[I wrote] about how hard he worked for us growing up and how much I love him. I am forever grateful for the moment I handed him the letter, and all our years before,” the model wrote via Instagram at the time. “If you didn’t know my dad, my dad hated nearly everything in the world that wasn’t a bass guitar, swing dancing, wood carving, animals, YouTube or his family. I have hundreds and hundreds of videos of him just being mad at things he isn’t even doing, watching or eating. They make me so happy now.”