'I Miss Her More Every Minute'

THE ACTOR'S WORLD WAS COMPLETELY SHATTERED WHEN HIS WIFE DIED OF CANCER EARLIER THIS YEAR. NOW HE'S FOCUSED ON KEEPING HER LEGACY ALIVE 

- JOELLE GOLDSTEIN

John Schneider stares lovingly at a large mural of him and his late wife, Alicia Allain Schneider, painted on the side of their home in Holden, La. “Hello, my smile,” he tells it with tears in his eyes, his voice tender yet broken.

It’s just one of many items the Dukes of Hazzard star has on the property to keep the memory of Alicia—and the life they shared—alive. But the sprawling rural spread has also come to be what Schneider, 63, calls “a point of pain” since Alicia died from breast cancer at age 53 on Feb. 21. “We lived here, but we also survived here,” he says. “We chased our dreams and caught them here. This place has been very important to us from the very beginning and still is.”

With so many reminders of the plans he and his partner of nearly a decade won’t see come to fruition, Schneider is struggling to accept his new reality but feeling grateful for the love they shared. “I miss every damn thing, every day,” he says. “I have to get to the point where I look around and see where she is, not where she’s not. And I’m trying to do that, but that’s hard. Somehow I love her more every minute, but with that, somehow I miss her more every minute.”