Alicia Witt reflects one month after parents were found dead in their home

One month after her parents were found dead in their Massachusetts home, actress Alicia Witt has opened up about her sudden loss and her parents' legacy.

Witt, best known for her roles in David Lynch's Dune, Orange Is the New Black, and The Walking Dead, hadn't heard from her parents, Robert and Diane Witt, in several days when she asked a relative to check in on them. She shared the anxiety she felt at that moment in a social media post.

"Waiting, phone in hand, praying fervently that the next call would be from them, angry I'd gotten someone else involved," Witt wrote on Facebook and Instagram. "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. Beginning the rest of my life of finding them on the breeze, in a song, in a dream."

According to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, "freezing temperatures, a malfunctioning furnace, a temporary space heater, and a home in need of repairs may have contributed" to the couple's death. Neighbors also told police that the Witts had been ill for some time, though a cause of death has yet to be revealed.

Witt revealed she attended a "beautiful service and burial, to mourn and to celebrate" her parents "in total privacy" earlier this month. While acknowledging her parents' ultimate wish to protect their privacy, Witt described them as "fiercely stubborn, beautifully original souls" with whom she often clashed over their autonomy; she describes being barred from entering their home for more than a decade. Still, she wondered what she could have done to prevent such a tragic outcome.

"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. They were a united, intertwined, indivisible force, determined to do things their own way," she wrote. "Knowing they had each other — battling them the way I would have had to in order to do this truly felt like it would have destroyed them. I had no idea that their heat had gone out. I will never understand how or why they made the choice not to tell me this, not to let me help them with this. My heart is broken."

Witt concluded her post with the final conversation she shared with her parents.

"Our last words to each other were 'I love you,' " she recalled. "That part was simple; never in doubt. They loved me so. I loved them so."

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