https://www.facebook.com/101156109646104/

Creature Facts, Columbus, OH (2026)

08/09/2026

Every weekday, the heavy wooden doors of Saint Boniface Church in San Francisco unlock. Outside, dozens of men and women wait in the damp morning cold, clutching thin jackets and plastic bags filled with everything they own.

They are not gathering for a standard religious service, and nobody asks them to show an ID, sign a roster, or prove why they are there.

They walk down the center aisle, find an empty wooden pew, wrap themselves in a clean blanket, and close their eyes.

San Francisco’s Tenderloin district is known for its steep hills, high rent, and stark social contrasts. By day, tech workers hurry down the sidewalks with laptops and coffee cups.

By night, hundreds of unhoused residents try to survive on concrete pavements, constantly alert to noise, weather, and danger.

When local night shelters close their doors at break of dawn, street-weary individuals often have nowhere left to go where they can sit or lie down without being told to move along by law enforcement or property owners.

That is where The Gubbio Project steps in.

Founded in 2004, this unique non-profit initiative partnered with Saint Boniface Church to address a fundamental human need that is frequently overlooked in public conversations about homelessness: restorative sleep.

On any given morning, the front half of the church sanctuary serves local parishioners attending daily Mass, while the back two-thirds of the sanctuary belong entirely to those who desperately need rest.

Inside the quiet sanctuary, the atmosphere is calm, soft, and deeply respectful. Volunteers move gently down the aisles, handing out dry socks, hygiene kits, lip balm, and fresh blankets.

If someone is shivering in their seat, a volunteer silently lays an extra blanket over their shoulders. There are no security guards barking orders and no clocks counting down the minutes.

"When you sleep on the street, you never really sleep," says Marcus, a fifty-two-year-old man who has visited Saint Boniface for three years. "

You keep one eye open because you are constantly worried about someone stealing your shoes, taking your bag, or hurting you. When I step inside these doors and lay down on a pew, my nervous system finally shuts off. For six hours, I know I am safe. That safety gives me the strength to survive the next night."

Beyond physical protection from the elements, the project provides basic care services that quietly restore a person’s sense of self-worth.

Guests have access to clean restrooms, medical referral consultations, and compassionate peer counseling. Yet, as staff members frequently point out, the most crucial offering is not a physical item—it is unconditional dignity.

Nobody is preached at, forced to convert, or required to listen to a lecture in exchange for a warm place to sleep.

"We do not treat our guests as charity cases or problems that need to be solved," explains one long-time volunteer. "We treat them as neighbors. When you look someone in the eyes, learn their name, and offer them a quiet place to rest, you are telling them that their life matters."

In a country where cities increasingly install anti-homeless architecture—such as spiked benches, divided seating, and loud alarm systems designed to deter sleeping in public spaces—Saint Boniface offers a striking, radical alternative. It turns church pews, which are traditionally reserved for Sunday prayer, into sanctuaries of genuine human refuge.

If a house of worship cannot offer shelter to a shivering human being on a cold morning, then what is it actually built for?

While city officials spend millions on defensive architecture and aggressive enforcement campaigns to push unhoused people out of sight, a simple parish in the Tenderloin proves that compassion requires neither grand technology nor complex bureaucracy.

It only requires opening a door.

Follow us

08/09/2026

A young dad was sitting near the back of a full flight from Denver to Atlanta, holding his crying baby girl.

The flight had been bumpy, the cabin was packed, and the infant had been screaming for almost an hour without stopping. People were visibly annoyed, huffing, sighing, and rolling their eyes as the noise echoed through the cabin.

The father was clearly overwhelmed, his hands trembling as he rocked his daughter back and forth, whispering,

"Please, baby. Please, just sleep."

The flight attendants tried offering extra quiet drinks and warm towels, but nothing seemed to calm the stressed child. Just as the tension on the plane reached its peak, a tall figure stood up from the first class section and began walking down the aisle toward the back.

It was NFL legend Peyton Manning.

He didn't make a big scene or draw attention to himself. He simply walked down the narrow aisle, crouched beside the exhausted father, and offered a warm smile.

"Mind if I hold her for a bit?" Peyton asked gently. "Sometimes I've got a pretty good spiral."

The dad let out a soft laugh through his stress, wiped his tired eyes, and carefully handed his daughter over.

Peyton took the baby into his arms naturally, holding her securely against his chest like he had done thousands of times with his own kids. He began to rock her back and forth in a slow, steady rhythm while humming a low tune under his breath.

The baby shifted, took a deep breath, and within just a few minutes, the crying completely stopped.

The entire plane seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief. Passengers who had been glaring moments earlier were now turning around in their seats, smiling and nudging each other in disbelief as they watched the hall-of-fame quarterback gently soothe an upset infant.

Instead of handing the baby back and heading right back to his comfortable seat in first class, Peyton decided to stay. He took a nearby empty seat next to the dad and spent the rest of the flight right there in coach.

"You're doing great, man," Peyton said softly, turning to the young father. "Flight noise makes it tough on little ears, but you're handling it like a pro."

The two men spent the next hour talking about parenting, sleepless nights, and the chaotic beauty of raising children.

Peyton listened attentively while the dad shared how nervous he had been about taking his first solo trip with his daughter. For the first time all day, the young father felt heard instead of judged.

By the time the plane touched down in Atlanta, the little girl was fast asleep, resting peacefully against her dad's shoulder.

The heavy weight of embarrassment and panic that the father had carried during the flight was entirely gone.

As the plane prepared to deboard, Peyton stood up and reached out to shake the dad's hand. Before walking away, he handed him a folded paper napkin from his drink service.

On it, Peyton had written a simple message:

"You're doing better than you think. Don't measure your fatherhood by the noise. Measure it by the love. — Peyton"

Follow for

08/09/2026

By 29, he had everything. Then his left hand started shaking on a film set — and he hid it from the world for seven years.

Michael J. Fox was born on June 9, 1961, in Edmonton, Alberta, the son of a Canadian Army officer whose postings moved the family repeatedly during Fox's childhood. At 17, Fox moved to Los Angeles alone to pursue acting — technically too young to join the actors' union without a parent's signature.

It worked. By the late 1980s, Fox had won three Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe for playing Alex Keaton on Family Ties. He had appeared in ten feature films in his twenties, including three Back to the Future movies that made him one of the most recognisable young actors on Earth. In 1988, he married his Family Ties co-star Tracy Pollan. Their son Sam arrived the following year.

Then, in 1990, while filming the movie Doc Hollywood, Fox noticed a tremor in his left hand. Remember that moment. It was the beginning of something he would spend the next seven years trying to hide from everyone around him.

The diagnosis came in 1991: early-onset Parkinson's disease. Fox was 29 years old.

He told almost nobody. Instead, he built an elaborate system of concealment. Fox later described timing his dopamine medication to peak at exactly the right moment for each scene, controlling his body's performance the way a technician controls a machine. He became, in his own words, a virtuoso of manipulating his drug intake. Nobody watching him on screen could tell.

Privately, the effort was collapsing him.

During those years, Fox began drinking heavily to cope with a disease he was not yet ready to name out loud. He has described himself publicly as "definitely an alcoholic" during that stretch of his life. The hiding and the drinking fed each other, year after year, behind a career that looked from the outside like it was still intact.

Then came a morning that changed everything.

Fox came home after a night of drinking to find Tracy waiting for him. He expected anger. She wasn't angry. She was tired.

She looked at him and asked one question: "Is this what you want? This is what you want to be?"

He never had another drink after that morning. By his own account, he has now gone more than 30 years without alcohol.

Fox entered therapy. He began facing what he had been running from since 1991. In 1998 — seven years after his diagnosis — he told the public the truth in an interview with People magazine.

Two years later, in 2000, Fox launched the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research alongside co-founder Deborah Brooks.

The Foundation has since directed more than two billion dollars into Parkinson's research. It has become the single largest nonprofit funder of Parkinson's research on Earth, surpassing even the United States government's own funding for the disease.

In 2023, a study the Foundation helped fund identified a biomarker capable of detecting Parkinson's years before symptoms appear — a breakthrough with enormous implications for early diagnosis and treatment. That same year, Fox appeared in a documentary called Still, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and detailed the full arc: the hiding, the drinking, and the decades of building something larger than himself from a diagnosis he never chose.

Fox kept acting. He returned to television in supporting roles, this time choosing parts where he could let his symptoms show rather than conceal them. He won a fourth Emmy Award for his role on Rescue Me and earned additional nominations for The Good Wife.

The marriage held through all of it.

In 1995, Tracy gave birth to twin daughters, Aquinnah and Schuyler. In 2001, their fourth child, Esmé, was born. As of 2026, Fox and Tracy Pollan have been married for 38 years.

The two are still seen together at public events decades later — Fox now often using a wheelchair, Tracy beside him the way she has been since a television set in 1987 first put them in the same room.

Fox has said many times that none of it would have been possible without her. Not the sobriety. Not the Foundation. Not the second act of a career that once appeared finished at 29. He has said she never treated him as someone who needed pity, and never made him feel like a burden.

She just stayed.

A disease with no cure met a foundation with two billion dollars in research funding behind it.

A man who hid his diagnosis for seven years became one of the most public advocates for Parkinson's awareness on Earth.

And it began on an ordinary morning, with a tired woman asking her husband one honest question instead of walking out the door.

Tag someone who needs to read this today. Like and share for Michael J. Fox and Tracy Pollan.

08/08/2026

May 1981. Yale University.
Maya Lin was studying for finals when someone knocked on her dorm room door.
Two men stood in the hallway asking if she was the Maya Lin who had submitted entry number 1026 to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial competition.
Her stomach dropped. Had she broken some rule?
"You won," they said.
Out of 1,421 anonymous entries — submissions from decorated architects, established design firms, professionals who had spent careers building monuments — the jury had chosen hers.
Maya was twenty-one years old. A senior architecture student. She had never designed anything that actually got built.
She had just won the most significant memorial competition in modern American history.
For approximately forty-eight hours, she felt pure joy.
Then America learned who she was.

Rewind to fall 1980.
Maya's architecture professor at Yale was teaching a seminar on funerary design. When he mentioned a national competition for a Vietnam War memorial in Washington D.C., it seemed like a good portfolio piece. The competition was open to anyone — no age limits, no credentials required, entries judged anonymously.
Maya had spent time studying how different cultures approached death and remembrance. She'd noticed that some cultures integrated cemeteries into daily life rather than hiding them away. Death wasn't morbid — it was honest.
For this memorial, she wanted something that didn't glorify war or make political statements. Something that honored 58,000 individual human beings who had died — not abstract concepts like heroism or sacrifice.
She sketched two polished black granite walls forming a wide V, cutting into a gentle slope. The surface would reflect visitors while displaying every single name, listed chronologically by when they fell. Walking toward the center, you'd descend below ground level, surrounded by the accumulating weight of names. Then you'd ascend back to the present.
Simple. Quiet. Brutally honest.
Her professor gave her a B.
Maya submitted it anyway.

Established architects submitted elaborate designs — traditional white monuments reaching skyward, heroic bronze soldiers, flags, eagles, classic patriotic imagery.
The jury examined every entry without knowing who created them. No names. No résumés. Just designs.
They chose Maya's unanimously.
The jury praised its extraordinary power and appropriateness — its honesty, its refusal to romanticize war, its focus on individual loss rather than political messaging.
Then they opened the envelope.
A college student. Still finishing her senior year.

When Maya's identity became public, the backlash was immediate and vicious.
A degrading ditch. A black scar of shame. An insult to veterans.
Prominent veterans groups erupted. They had expected something traditional — white marble reaching toward heaven, heroic soldiers cast in bronze, symbols of honor and glory.
Not this dark thing designed by a twenty-one-year-old girl who hadn't even been alive when the war started.
Then they learned she was Asian-American, and the attacks turned uglier. How dare an Asian woman design a memorial for Americans who died fighting in Asia — never mind that Maya was born in Ohio, as American as anyone criticizing her.
She was young. Female. Asian. That was enough.

Decorated military officers testified before Congress demanding the design be scrapped. Major donors threatened to withdraw millions. The Secretary of the Interior refused to issue construction permits. Maya received death threats. Hate mail piled up.
She was barely out of college, sitting in congressional hearings while powerful men who had never met her questioned her patriotism, her qualifications, her right to participate in American civic life.
She attended meeting after hostile meeting, calmly defending her vision to audiences determined to destroy it.
She explained repeatedly: the black granite would reflect visitors' faces, connecting the living with the dead. The chronological listing placed each name alongside the soldiers who died the same day — recreating the bonds formed in combat. Descending below ground wasn't degrading. It was intimate. A space for personal grief rather than public propaganda.
The simplicity wasn't disrespectful. It was honest. Fifty-eight thousand names speaking for themselves without politicians or generals telling people how to feel.

After months of brutal fighting, officials proposed a compromise: build Maya's wall as designed, but add a traditional statue and flagpole nearby to appease critics.
Maya reluctantly agreed. The wall itself was what mattered.
Construction began in 1982.

November 13, 1982. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial opened to the public.
Veterans approached cautiously. Many had opposed the design. Some arrived expecting to feel insulted.
Then they saw the names.
They touched the polished black granite. Traced letters of friends who had died fifteen years earlier. Found names they had been searching for since the war ended.
They wept.
They left flowers at specific panels. Made pencil rubbings to take home. Brought their children to show them which names mattered.
Within days, veterans who had testified against the memorial returned and stood in silence before it. The monument they had called a black scar had become sacred ground.
Critics who had demanded Maya's design be destroyed brought their families to visit. The items people left at the wall — letters, photographs, combat boots, wedding rings, children's drawings — revealed what Maya had understood from the beginning: this wasn't about politics or glory. It was about 58,000 individual human beings. And the people who loved them needed a place to grieve honestly, without being told how to feel.
The National Park Service now collects and preserves every item left at the wall. More than 100,000 objects annually. All catalogued. All saved.

Today, more than five million people visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial each year.
More than the Lincoln Memorial. More than the Washington Monument. More than any other monument in Washington D.C.
The design that nearly didn't get built became the most visited memorial in America.
Before Maya Lin, monuments were about glory — heroic figures, patriotic symbols, messages about honor and sacrifice. After her wall, memorials could be about truth. About individual human cost. About grief acknowledged rather than propaganda enforced.

She was told she was too young to understand. Too female to design something serious. Too Asian to honor American dead.
Powerful men testified before Congress that her vision was fundamentally wrong.
She built it anyway.
And when veterans finally stood before those polished black walls and saw their own reflections merging with the names of the dead — they understood what she had known all along.
Honesty honors the dead more than propaganda ever could.
Her professor gave her a B.
The jury chose her unanimously over 1,421 competitors.
Congress tried to stop her.
Veterans initially hated it.
Now it is the most visited monument in Washington D.C. — and Maya Lin, the twenty-one-year-old student they said didn't understand sacrifice, created the most powerful war memorial in American history.
Not by glorifying war.
By telling the truth about what it costs.
Fifty-eight thousand names. Every one of them someone's son, brother, father, friend.
Her professor gave her a B. The jury chose her unanimously. Congress tried to stop her. Veterans wept at the wall. That is the complete story.

Follow us

08/08/2026

One day, a four-year-old Reggie sat down at a piano and perfectly recreated a song he had heard only once on the radio. It was a moment of pure magic, a sign that a star was being born, the moment Reggie Dwight began the long transformation into Elton John. Most parents would have wept with joy, but Stanley Dwight was not most parents.

An officer in the Royal Air Force, Stanley was a man of cold discipline and rigid rules. He didn’t want a musical prodigy; he wanted a son who played sports, stayed quiet, and followed a traditional path. While Reggie’s mother, Sheila, supported his talent, his father became a wall of ice. Stanley famously forbade his son from wearing certain clothes, criticized his interests, and viewed the boy’s sensitivity as a weakness.

Stanley famously berated his son for everything from the way he ate his food to the way he kicked a football in the garden. This wasn't just discipline; it was a total rejection of who Reggie was at his core.

Even more heartbreaking was the relationship with his mother, Sheila. While she was the one who brought home the Elvis Presley and Bill Haley records that sparked his love for rock music, her love came with a sharp edge. Elton has recently shared harrowing details about his youth, describing his mother as someone who was frequently "physically violent" and prone to dark, unpredictable moods.

He lived in a constant state of fear, walking on eggshells to avoid "the Dwight family temper." When he finally found the courage to come out to her years later, her response wasn't a hug, but a devastating curse: she told him he would never be truly loved and would be alone forever. This chronic cruelty from both parents created a void that no amount of fame could ever truly fill.

Despite the hell to pay at home, Reggie found a sanctuary in his grandmother’s house and at the Royal Academy of Music, where he won a scholarship at age eleven. On Saturday mornings, he escaped the tension of his parents' screaming rows to study classical piano, though his heart was already drifting toward the rebellious energy of the pub scene.

By fifteen, he was sneaking out to play piano at the Northwood Hills Hotel for a few pounds a night, wearing horn-rimmed glasses to look like his hero, Buddy Holly. This double life—a classical prodigy by day and a pub pianist by night—was his way of surviving. He wasn't just playing music; he was building a new identity, one where he could finally be loud, colorful, and free from the suffocating shadows of his childhood home.

The final break from his painful past came in the late 1960s when he decided to shed the name Reginald Dwight forever. He chose "Elton" from saxophonist Elton Dean and "John" from Long John Baldry, effectively killing off the shy, rejected boy his father hated to give birth to the flamboyant superstar the world needed. This name change wasn't just for the stage; it was a desperate act of self-preservation.

As Elton entered his adult years and transformed into the global icon we know today, the gap between him and his father grew into a canyon. Elton would pour his soul into the keys, but the only response he received from the living room was the sharp, indifferent rustle of his father’s newspaper.

That sound—the sound of a page turning while a genius played—became the soundtrack of his youth. Even when he was selling millions of records and topping the charts across the globe, the validation he craved never came. Stanley never attended a single one of Elton’s concerts. He never told him he was proud. He never acknowledged that his son had become the greatest entertainer on the planet. This rejection fueled a deep sense of loneliness that Elton carried for decades, often leading him toward addiction as he tried to fill the silence.

It is a tragic irony that the man who gave the world so much love through his music felt so fundamentally unloved by his own flesh and blood.

In the silence of his own heart, Elton was still just a little boy waiting for a father who never showed up.

Follow us

08/08/2026

She escaped Hi**er as a toddler.

At 59, standing at the height of American power, she discovered that her parents had hidden one of the most painful truths of her life.

Prague, 1937.

A baby girl named Marie Jana Korbelová was born into a Europe that was about to be torn apart.

Before she turned two, N**i Germany invaded Czechoslovakia.

Her family fled.

First came England, where they lived through the dangers of wartime Europe.

Then came America.

There, Marie became Madeleine.

She learned English, grew up as an American, and built a new life in a country her family hoped would give her a future untouched by the horrors they had escaped.

But inside their home was a secret.

Her parents rarely spoke about the relatives they had left behind.

They didn't talk about the people who disappeared.

They didn't talk about the concentration camps.

They didn't tell Madeleine that her family was Jewish.

And they never told her that three of her grandparents had been murdered during the Holocaust.

For decades, Madeleine knew none of it.

She simply grew up.

She earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

She raised three daughters.

She became a respected scholar and foreign-policy expert.

She advised presidents and eventually became one of the most influential women in American diplomacy.

Then, in 1997, at the age of 59, everything changed.

Madeleine Albright had been nominated to become the next U.S. Secretary of State.

During the confirmation process, journalists investigating her background uncovered something her family had kept hidden for more than half a century.

Her grandparents had been victims of the Holocaust.

The truth arrived after Madeleine had already built an entire life around an identity she believed was complete.

Suddenly, the past she had never known became part of her present.

Her parents hadn't kept the secret because they didn't love her.

They had believed they were protecting her.

They wanted their daughter to grow up without carrying the unbearable weight they had carried themselves.

But now Madeleine knew.

And only weeks later, she took the oath of office and became the first woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State.

The little refugee who had fled Europe as a child had risen to one of the most powerful diplomatic positions in the world.

And she wasn't finished.

Albright became a major voice in American foreign policy, confronting authoritarian regimes, advocating for human rights, and supporting NATO's expansion.

Her experiences as a child refugee shaped the way she viewed dictatorships and genocide.

But Albright also brought something unexpected to diplomacy:

Personality.

Jewelry became her secret language.

After Iraqi state media compared her to a serpent because of her criticism of Saddam Hussein, Albright reportedly responded by wearing a snake-shaped brooch to a diplomatic meeting.

The message was unmistakable.

If you call me a snake, I'll wear the symbol myself.

Soon, her collection of pins became famous.

Flowers and butterflies could signal optimism.

A spider or crab could signal tension.

A dove could suggest peace.

Her lapel became a diplomatic message before she had even spoken.

In rooms filled with men wearing nearly identical dark suits, Madeleine Albright made herself impossible to overlook.

She wasn't trying to blend in.

She belonged there.

And she wanted other women to believe they belonged there too.

After leaving office in 2001, Albright continued teaching, writing, advising leaders, and mentoring the next generation of women entering international affairs.

She became closely associated with a powerful belief:

“There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”

To Albright, success wasn't supposed to be a locked door behind you.

It was supposed to become an open door for someone else.

Madeleine Albright died on March 23, 2022, at 84.

She had escaped N**i-occupied Europe as a child.

She discovered the truth about her family at 59.

And somehow, she turned that painful history into part of the reason she fought so fiercely against tyranny and for democracy.

Her story isn't simply about becoming America's first female Secretary of State.

It's about surviving displacement.

Building a new life.

Discovering a painful past.

And still finding the strength to shape the future.

She lost grandparents she never had the chance to know.

She crossed borders as a child.

She entered rooms where women had rarely held power.

And when those rooms tried to tell her how power was supposed to look, she wore her own answer on her lapel.

One brooch at a time.

follow us

08/08/2026

He wrote three words about her in his memoir. Just three words, buried inside a longer paragraph.

"Former girlfriend. Forever friend."
That is the whole story. Everything else is how they got there.

Val Kilmer was twenty-two years old and almost entirely unknown when he showed up at Cher's birthday party in 1982. She was thirty-six. He had been dining alone at a Manhattan restaurant when a mutual friend approached his table and told him someone wanted to meet him. When he asked who, she said: Cher.

He spat out his food.
He initially refused. He assumed they had nothing in common, that the real person would not match the image, that the whole thing would be awkward and brief. The friend pressed him. She told him her real personality was different from her TV personality. "I guarantee," the friend said, "she's the funniest person you'll ever meet."
He showed up.

She was.
They became friends before they became anything else. He slept over and it was just a friendship, Cher said later. They laughed at the same things constantly. He took her to a Japanese performance of Macbeth. She thought he was eccentric and brilliant and possibly nuts. He was good with her kids. He helped her prepare for her role in Mask. The 13-year age gap raised eyebrows all over Hollywood. They did not particularly notice.

They gave each other nicknames so they could call to each other in public without being overheard. He was Sid. She was Ethel. They also called themselves Valus Maximus and Cherus Reprimandus. "Of course he was Maximus," Cher told People, with the tone of a woman who had long ago made peace with that particular fact.
"Our sense of humor, and what we would put up with from one another," she said, "was more than I think I've ever had with any other guy."

Val ended the relationship in 1984. He called it off.
Cher has said she was the only woman in Hollywood who regularly dumped men. Val Kilmer was the exception. In November 2024, she told Howard Stern plainly: "Look, I was madly in love with Val Kilmer, and he left. Because sometimes you're only meant to stay with someone for so long."
She never forgot it. She did not stay angry.

In 2021, after seeing his documentary Val, which chronicled his career and the throat cancer that had taken most of his voice, she wrote to him. She used the old nickname. "Valus Maximus, I'm sorry if I did anything to p**s you off or hurt your feelings. I love you and your documentary was all things. You are brave and beyond brilliant. Ethel."

He had written about her by then, in his 2020 memoir "I'm Your Huckleberry." The full passage began with a list. "Cher. Former girlfriend. Forever friend. Funniest woman I ever met." He wrote that once Cher worked her way inside your head and heart, she never left. He wrote that he, a Valley boy, had fallen under her spell. He wrote: "We had a wild ride, and though we'd eventually veer off in different directions, our spirits stayed united."

Val was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2015. The tracheotomy. The chemotherapy. The permanent damage to the voice that had once commanded every room he walked into. He moved into Cher's guest house.

One night, he woke up vomiting blood. He called 911. Then he alerted his hostess.
When the paramedics arrived, Cher and Val made eye contact across the room. She later told People that they both knew what they were thinking, because the paramedics were so handsome. Even in the worst moment of his illness, the private joke was still running between them. The dark humour, unbroken. The shorthand that did not require explanation.

Cher was there for every hard day that followed. He was declared cancer-free in 2016 and continued making art, performing his one-man show as Mark Twain, painting, creating. She watched all of it. She praised all of it.
She had said, simply: "If he called, it wouldn't matter where I was. I would go."

Val Kilmer died on April 1, 2025. He was sixty-five years old. Pneumonia. His daughter Mercedes confirmed the news. He is survived by her and by his son, Jack.
The following morning, Cher posted on X.
She did not call him Val. She did not call him Mr. Kilmer. She wrote: "VALUS. Will miss u. U Were Funny, crazy, pain in the ass, GREAT FRIEND, kids U. BRILLIANT as Mark Twain. BRAVE here during ur sickness."

She signed it with nothing. The name at the top was enough. Valus. The name she had given him in 1982 when they were young and electric and still figuring out what they were going to be to each other.
Forty-three years later, she still knew exactly what he was.

Some people who read this will think of someone they once loved who is still in their life in a different form. Not as a romance, not as a stranger, but as something harder to name and more durable than either. The person who still picks up when you call. The person whose joke you hear in your head when something goes wrong. The person who shows up with no conditions attached, who already knows the shorthand, who does not need the whole story explained.

He called her the funniest woman he ever met.
She called him a pain in the ass.
He moved into her house when he was sick and she watched the paramedics arrive and made a joke about how attractive they were and they both understood that was how they loved each other.
"Former girlfriend. Forever friend."
Three words. Forty-three years. The kind of love that does not need to be a marriage to be permanent.
Some people get that. Val Kilmer and Cher gave it to each other for the rest of his life.

Follow us

Creature Facts

08/09/2026

08/09/2026

08/09/2026

08/08/2026

08/08/2026

08/08/2026

08/08/2026

Address

Website

Alerts

Shortcuts

Featured

Share

Category

Listing takedown request