Jennifer Love Hewitt Learned Her Mother Died From the Press

Jennifer Love Hewitt has revealed a devastating detail about the day she lost her mother in 2012 — media outlets reported Pat Hewitt’s death before her own daughter even knew about it. In a new interview with PEOPLE magazine, the 47-year-old actress shares this previously undisclosed aspect of her grief process. “The one thing I didn’t put in the book that I’ve been talking about afterwards … maybe didn’t want that to be the focus … But that day, the press actually knew that my mom had passed before I did, which was such a crazy feeling,” Hewitt explains.

“When I landed and I heard his voice at the airport, I knew in that moment that he would not have left her side if she was still with us,” Hewitt tells PEOPLE. “He was waiting for me at the airport, and it had already been published somewhere that my mom had passed. And there was just a lot of stuff about that day that was just so out of my control.”

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The heartbreaking revelation comes as Hewitt promotes her new book, Inheriting Magic: My Journey Through Grief, Joy, Celebrating, and Making Every Day Magical. The memoir details her experience of losing her mother, Pat, to cancer at age 67, though she intentionally omitted the press incident from its pages.

In an exclusive excerpt from the book’s preface, Hewitt describes her final moments with her mother in June 2012. Her mother had been diagnosed with cancer in February of that year, and despite having surgery and starting chemotherapy, was feeling hopeful. Against her own instincts, Hewitt left for a TV festival in Monaco after planning her mother’s future cancer-free celebration.

“Before I took off, I texted my mom a picture of me holding champagne and said, ‘Cheers!’ She texted back, ‘Cheers!’ with a picture of her in a silly rainbow wig filter. It was perfect. It was her,” Hewitt writes. “But it was the last exchange I would have with my mom.”

After landing, events unfolded rapidly. “There was a message from my mom’s friend: ‘She had a rough night and got very sick. She’s in the hospital,’” Hewitt recalls in the book. “I knew deep down that I shouldn’t have left her, and that I would never forgive myself.”

Her mother was given a 20 percent chance of survival, and despite rushing back, Hewitt never got to say goodbye. “I’d walked out of her front door hopeful and laughing, and now I could barely walk in because she was gone. My whole life changed. I changed,” she writes.

Now, twelve years later, Hewitt has found new ways to honor her mother’s memory while building her own family life. The former Party of Five star currently appears as 911 dispatcher Maddie Han on the TV drama 9-1-1, where her daughter Autumn, 10, recently earned her SAG card after performing alongside her.

Her entire family, including husband Brian Hallisay, 46, and sons Atticus, 9, and Aidan, 3, will appear in her upcoming Lifetime Christmas movie, The Holiday Junkie, premiering Dec. 14. “If you had asked me when my mom was still on the planet if I could live without her, I would’ve said no,” she tells PEOPLE. “So I’m really proud of myself.”

The book, which blends memoir, self-help, and party-planning guidance, aims to help others transform “sorrow to celebration.” As Hewitt writes, “Later, in processing my grief, I began to feel very deeply that my mom and I weren’t supposed to say goodbye. We were supposed to be laughing, planning a party and excited for the joy it would bring us and others. That’s what we loved to do, and in our last moment together that’s what we did. We planned one hell of a party. I found myself through grief — as a wife, mommy, magic-maker and Holiday Junkie.” Inheriting Magic: My Journey Through Grief, Joy, Celebration, and Making Every Day Magical is now available wherever books are sold.