When Grief Hits Different: Chrissy Teigen on Losing Her Dad

There’s no rehearsal for the moment your parent dies—no matter how much you think you’ve prepared yourself. Model and cookbook author Chrissy Teigen, 40, learned that the hard way on Wednesday, June 10, when her father Ron passed away at age 86. And in the days following, she’s been brutally honest about what that kind of loss actually feels like.

In an Instagram Story video posted Friday, June 12, Teigen opened up about the waves of grief that everyone warned her about—turns out they were right.“There’s a lot of emotions. Everybody said it’d be, like, waves and it is,”she shared, adding that she and her sister have found solace in laughing together, channeling their dad’s funny, sarcastic personality. It’s that kind of real-talk vulnerability that makes her grief feel less isolated and more universally human.

What’s striking about Teigen’s account isn’t just the emotional weight—it’s the surreal, mundane details she’s been grappling with. While arranging Ron’s funeral, she found herself studying gravestones, thinking about the stories behind each one, noticing people who’d died on her own birthday. Then came the brutal logistics: picking a casket or an urn when she knew her dad“would hate the frills of buying a casket and being buried in it.”Everything about the process felt wrong, felt weird—her word repeated like a mantra because sometimes“weird”is the only word that fits.

Before Ron’s death, Teigen had managed to hand him a letter expressing her gratitude for his hard work and love. In her initial tribute posted Wednesday, she described him as someone who“hated nearly everything in the world that wasn’t a bass guitar, swing dancing, wood carving, animals, YouTube or his family.”Those specific, quirky details—the hundreds of videos of him mad at things he wasn’t even watching—are what make him real to us now, what keep his memory from being abstract or sanitized.

What Teigen’s openness reveals is this: grief doesn’t look like how movies show it. It’s not just crying or silent devastation. It’s the jarring juxtaposition of a normal morning shower, answering emails you’d rather avoid, putting on a pretty dress for a friend’s birthday party, and then your dad just dies. It’s the strange comfort of dark humor with your sibling. It’s the impossible task of choosing what box to put someone’s remains in. Teigen’s willingness to sit with all of it—the sadness, the absurdity, the love—makes space for anyone else navigating loss to know they’re not alone in feeling completely unmoored.