Ellen Degeneres Honors Stephen “tWitch” Boss With Holiday Message

Ellen Degeneres shared an emotional video message regarding the death of Stephen “tWitch” Boss on Instagram, Friday. In the post, Degeneres admitted that the last several days have been hard on her following her former colleague’s passing.

“I just wanted to say the past 11 days have been really tough for everyone. Everyone is in pain and trying to make sense of it, and we’ll never make sense of it,” Degeneres said. She also captioned the post with a red heart emoji.

Degeneres continued: “The holidays are hard, I think, anyway, but to honor tWitch I think the best thing that we can do is to laugh, hug each other, play games, and dance and sing. That’s the way we honor him, is we do the things that he loved to do, which is dancing.”

From there, Degeneres added: “I know it seems hard, it seems impossible, but that’s how we honor him. And hug each other, and tell each other we love each other, and let people know we’re there for them and check in on people.”

tWitch, who worked on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, died by suicide on December 14 at the age of 40. He was married to Allison Holker, with whom he shares three children: Zaia, 3, Maddox, 6, and Weslie, 14.

In addition to his work on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Boss rose to fame on the show, So You Think You Can Dance. He was also a semifinalist on MTV’s The Wade Robson Project, back in 2003. He’s additionally appeared in both the Step Up movie franchise as well as Magic Mike XXL.

Check out Ellen Degeneres’ message below.