Beach Boys' Brian Wilson Mourns Death of His "Savior" Wife Melinda

Originally appeared on E! Online

Brian Wilson has suffered an unimaginable loss.

The Beach Boys founder is in mourning after his wife of 28 years, Melinda Ledbetter Wilson, died on the morning of Jan. 30. She was 77.

"My heart is broken," Wilson wrote on Instagram in the wake of her passing. "Melinda was more than my wife. She was my savior. She gave me the emotional security I needed to have a career. She encouraged me to make the music that was closest to my heart."

Calling Melinda his "anchor," Brian—who shares kids Dakota, Daria, Delanie, Dylan and Dash with the former model—added that the family is "just in tears."

"We are lost," the 81-year-old wrote. " She was everything for us."

Brian also shared a separate statement from the couple's children, who described Melinda as a "force of nature and one of the strongest women you could come by."

"She was not only a model, our fathers savior, and a mother, she was a woman empowered by her spirit with a mission to better everyone she touched," they said. "We will miss her but cherish everything she has taught us. How to take care of the person next to you without expecting anything in return, how to find beauty in the darkest of places, and how to live life as your truest self with honesty and pride."

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They added in their statement, "We love you mom."

Melinda first met Brian in 1986, when she sold him a car while working at a Cadillac dealership. Their love story was documented in the 2014 biopic Love & Mercy starring John Cusack and Elizabeth Banks, which detailed Brian's mental health struggles and how Melinda helped him out of his conservatorship overseen by controversial psychologist Eugene Landy.

"I didn't know how tough it would be," Melinda said of the film in a 2015 interview with ABC News. "I think I was more nervous than him when I took him to see it, and after, I said, ‘So what did you think?' And he goes, ‘Oh, it was really a lot worse in real life.'"

Brian—who is also dad to singers Carnie Wilson and Wendy Wilson from his first marriage to Marilyn Wilson-Rutherford—tied the knot with Melinda in 1995. Four years later, she became his business manager.

"When I sold cars, I used to think, ‘Why am I doing this?'" she told Rolling Stone in 1999. "And now I know why—the music business is basically negotiating, and that's what I did every single day when I sold cars. There's not a lot of common sense in the music business, so I've been able to step in and put the commonsense aspect into Brian's career."

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