Chrissy Teigen Describes Waves of Grief After Ron Teigen Dies at 86
Chrissy Teigen said she is moving through “waves” of grief after her father Ron Teigen died at 86, giving the first detailed account of how she is handling the loss. In a Friday, June 12 Instagram Story video, she described the immediate work of funeral arrangements and the emotional whiplash that followed the announcement two days earlier.
June 12 Funeral Home Visit
“There’s a lot of emotions. Everybody said it’d be, like, waves and it is,” Teigen said in the video. She also said, “Me and my sister [are] joking, laughing ‘cause my dad was very funny and sarcastic. We talked about death and stuff.”
Teigen said she was headed to the funeral home and found herself studying gravestones instead of moving straight through the paperwork. “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,’” she said. She added that some of the people she noticed had died on her birthday.
Ron Teigen Arrangements
The practical choices were already part of the grief. Teigen said, “He would hate the frills of buying a casket and being buried in it,” then added, “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.”
That discomfort sits beside a harder fact: Ron Teigen died on Wednesday, June 10, and a cause of death was not immediately revealed. He is survived by his wife, Vilailuck “Pepper” Teigen, their two daughters and multiple grandchildren, while Chrissy Teigen shares four children with John Legend.
Chrissy Teigen Tribute
In her Wednesday tribute, Teigen wrote, “Yesterday I woke up with a daddy and went to bed without one,” and added, “And then my dad just like … f***ing died.” She also said, “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.”
She wrote that she had recently delivered Ron a letter about how grateful she was for him, and described him as someone who loved “a bass guitar, swing dancing, wood carving, animals, YouTube or his family.” The post also said she has “hundreds and hundreds of videos” of him being mad at things he was not doing, watching or eating, which gives the tribute a sharper edge than a standard announcement.
For now, the story is moving through the part families know well and public posts usually skip: the memorial decisions that come right after a death. Teigen has put both the emotional scale and the logistics in public view, and her next statements will likely matter most if they shift from memory to the actual arrangements she makes for Ron.
