Nancy Heche has had to deal with a lot of tragedies in her life. Her husband and four out of five of her children, including actress Anne Heche, have died.

Nancy’s first tragedy was when her second daughter, Cynthia, died of a heart defect when she was just a baby. Her second tragedy was when her husband, Donald Heche, revealed that he was a closeted homosexual living a double life. Then her husband died of AIDS in 1983. Just three months later, her only son, Nathan Heche, died in a car accident that some think might have been suicide.

In 1994, Nancy’s oldest child, her daughter, Susan, published a book called “Anonymity.” The book, which was about what it was like to grow up with a dad who was secretly gay, was published under her married name, Susan Bergman. Susan died in 2006 from brain cancer.

 

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This past Friday, Anne was pronounced officially dead according to California law. She was not able to survive the injuries she sustained after crashing her car into a home in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles one week earlier. She was 53 years old.

Nancy’s only surviving child is a daughter named Abigail who lives in Michigan and works as a jewelry designer.

Nancy and Anne’s mother daughter relationship was severely severed back in 1997 when Anne told her mother that she had fallen in love with a woman, Ellen DeGeneres. Nancy is deeply religious and works as a Christian psychologist. She thought there was “an unspoken rule” in her family that nobody would even mention the word “homosexual” after what happened with her late husband.

 

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In 2001, in Anne’s memoir “Call Me Crazy” Anne explained that she was estranged from her mother due to her lesbian relationship. Nancy reacted to the memoir by explaining there’s “no place among the lies and blasphemies in the pages of this book.”

In 2011, Anne told The Daily Telegraph, “Forgiveness is a funny word for me. I’m OK with my mother living her life the way she wants to live it, and I’m OK with her not participating in my life the way I want to live it.”

Watch the video below to hear Nancy explain how Anne told her that she was in a lesbian relationship and Nancy’s reaction to this revelation.