Eric Dane's shattered girlfriend Janell Shirtcliff shared her memories of him Saturday, two days after his death at 53 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
Dane, 53, who shot to fame on Grey's Anatomy as Dr. Mark Sloan aka 'McSteamy,' announced less than a year ago that he had been diagnosed with the illness, which is known colloquially in America as Lou Gehrig's disease.
The rare, incurable degenerative condition impairs the nervous system over time and causes the muscles to increasingly suffer from paralysis.
Although Dane split from his wife Rebecca Gayheart in 2017, they remained friendly co-parents to their daughters Billie, 15, and Georgia, 13, and never finalized the divorce, which they called off altogether just before he revealed he had ALS.
Gayheart remained a stalwart source of support for him amid his final decline but they continued to date other people, with Dane involved with model Shirtcliff.
Now Shirtcliff, 42, has shared a heartbreaking string of photos and videos memorializing the time she shared with Dane in the last year of his life.
She included pictures of him breaking out his unmistakable charming smile, including while having a tattoo applied and sharing a laugh with her.
Shirtcliff also shared a video of her driving him through what appeared to be a desert as they sang the classic Dire Straits song Money for Nothing together.
Dane could be seen holding his last girlfriend close and planting an affectionate kiss on one of her temples as they posed together at a set of steps.
In a heartwarming video that closed out Shirtcliff's tribute, Dane's youngest daughter Georgia was seen setting up his pose for a photo that she would snap of him.
Dane's friends set up a GoFundMe to help provide for his daughters in the wake of his death, and by Saturday morning over $183,000 of the $250,000 goal had been raised.
He had sharply declined after his diagnosis, using a wheelchair, losing the use of one of his arms and pulling out of a public appearance last month citing the 'physical realities' his illness has forced him to face.
Nevertheless Dane, whose recent work includes playing the father of Jacob Elordi's character on Euphoria, insisted as recently as December that he would keep acting.
'I still have my brain and I still have my speech,' he said on a virtual panel for IAMALS.org. 'I'm not about to concede my purpose for some disease.'