Alicia Witt speaks out about the recent loss of her parents

Worcester native Alicia Witt, the 46-year-old star of several films and TV shows, took to Facebook Tuesday to address misconceptions surrounding the recent deaths of her parents.

Police found Robert, 87, and Diane, 75, dead in their Worcester home on Dec. 20, 2021. The home’s heater wasn’t working, but authorities haven’t released an official cause of death, according to The Boston Globe.

Witt — whose credits include “The Walking Dead,” “Nashville,” and “Orange is the New Black” — talked about the day she discovered her parents had passed away.

She explained that she hadn’t heard from them and asked a cousin to check on the couple.

In the statement on Facebook, Witt recalled, “waiting, phone in hand, praying fervently that the next call would be from them.”

Instead, that call came from police.

“Knowing, as soon as I heard the detective’s voice on the other line, that they were gone. Knowing I would never hear their voices again,” she said. “Beginning the rest of my life, of finding them on the breeze, in a song, in a dream.”

She said she was grateful to return to Worcester, to mourn them privately.

She noted that the circumstances around her parents’ deaths have become fodder for the press, and that there were misconceptions.

“This is very delicate for me to write because I’m wanting to honor their privacy, which they held so tightly,” she said. “There’s an awful irony in the fact that, because of the very lengths they went to in order to protect their privacy in life — that privacy has been stripped away in death.”

Witt said she hadn’t been allowed in her parents’ home for well over a decade.

“Every time I offered to have something repaired for them, they refused to allow workers into their house,” she said. “I begged, cried, tried to reason with them, tried to convince them to let me help them move — but every time, they became furious with me, telling me I had no right to tell them how to live their lives and that they had it all under control.”

Witt said she and others tried to help her parents. She said they were not penniless, but “fiercely stubborn, beautifully original souls, and with that, they made choices — choices that I couldn’t talk them out of.”

She said she helped them in all the ways they would let her.

“I struggle, as much as I helped, with what else could I have done — short of petitioning the court system for taking control of two otherwise very sharp, very independent, very capable adults,” Witt said.

She described her parents as a “united, intertwined, indivisible force, determined to do things their own way.”

“I had no idea that their heat had gone out,” Witt said. “I will never understand how or why they made the choice not to tell me this.”

She said even if she could have looked into the future and told them of the dangers of their choices, she believes they would have made the same choices.

“They weren’t willing to make different ones,” Witt said.

She noted their last words to each other were, “I love you.”

“That part was simple; never in doubt. They loved me so. I loved them so,” Witt said.

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