Jamie-Lynn Sigler’s Heartbreaking Final Words to Gandolfini

Jamie-Lynn Sigler had one last thing to say to James Gandolfini. Standing at his closed casket in June 2013, she placed her hands on the wood, knelt down, and spoke quietly to the man who had been, for eight years on set and far beyond, something like a second father.

“Thank you. Thank you for loving me, thank you for seeing me, for caring for me, and for making me feel safe.”

Those are the words Sigler, now 44, writes she left with Gandolfini at his funeral — a moment she’s sharing for the first time in her new memoir, And So It Is…A Memoir of Acceptance and Hope, out now. It’s a book that covers her life with remarkable honesty — her rise to fame as Meadow Soprano, her multiple sclerosis diagnosis, a marriage she describes as “really toxic and complicated” — but the passages about Gandolfini carry a particular weight.

“I took my time walking up to the casket,” she writes, “not ready to face the reality.”

A Goodbye That Felt Like the End of an Era

Gandolfini died of a heart attack on June 19, 2013, at 51 years old. His funeral was held at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City, and HBO made sure his people got there — the network chartered a private plane from Los Angeles to bring the West Coast cast members in. “HBO had it locked down,” Sigler writes. “Nobody takes care of their people better than they do.”

Edie Falco, Steve Schirripa, Steve Buscemi, and Aida Turturro were all in attendance. Series creator David Chase delivered the eulogy.

After the service, friends and family gathered at an Italian restaurant for the repass — a detail Sigler found almost unbearably fitting. “With the buffet and the drinks flowing and the cigars lit, it felt like a scene we had done many times at Artie Bucco’s,” she writes, referencing the Vesuvio restaurant that served as a recurring backdrop throughout The Sopranos. The surreal quality of it all wasn’t lost on her.

Sigler was pregnant at the time, and she writes that seeing Gandolfini’s son Michael Gandolfini that day — now 26 and himself a working actor — made her think of her own unborn child. She calls Michael “such a talented actor and a beautiful person” and, in what might be the most moving line in the passage, describes him as James’ “greatest work.”

“This was the true ending of The Sopranos,” she concludes. “Jim had been the sun that we all revolved around; he had been the center. With him, the entire experience was now laid to rest.”

It’s a sentiment that echoes what David Chase himself has said about Gandolfini. In a CBS News retrospective marking the show’s 25th anniversary in 2024, Chase recalled being transfixed by his lead actor from the start. “He’s incredible. Well, the whole thing’s about his face and about his eyes, actually. There’s something about his eyes that — it was otherworldly.”

The Wedding He Didn’t Show Up To

The memoir doesn’t only look back at Gandolfini through grief. There’s also a story that’s equal parts puzzling and, in hindsight, telling.

When Sigler married her then-manager Abraxas “AJ” Discala in July 2003 — she was 22, he was 32 — Gandolfini was a no-show. No explanation. No warning. Nothing.

“Jim didn’t show up. No indication, no warning. I can’t say for certain why. He’s not here, so I can’t ask him,” she writes. “But Jim had always shown up for me. The Jim I knew wouldn’t have just skipped my wedding without a word or an excuse. Part of me wonders if maybe he didn’t want it for me.”

She notes that Gandolfini had, not long before, shown up for her in a completely different way — he and Michael attended her run as Belle in Beauty and the Beast on Broadway. The wedding absence, then, wasn’t about distance or disinterest. It was something else.

When Sigler returned to the Sopranos set for her first table read as a married woman, she expected at least a smile or two. Instead: silence. Then Gandolfini let out a single, audible “ooof.”

“It was clear: none of them were happy about this for me,” she writes. “It would take me two long years to understand why.”

She and Discala separated in September 2005. Sigler has since described the relationship as one she needed to escape. “I felt like such a failure all the time,” she told Us Weekly last month, “but I understood I was not going to survive much longer if I stayed in that marriage.” She later married former MLB infielder Cutter Dykstra in 2016; they have two sons together.

Gandolfini’s instinct — whatever it was — turned out to be right. And the fact that she can see it that way now, and write about it with such clarity, says a lot about how much she’s processed in the years since.

Elsewhere in the memoir, Sigler describes Gandolfini as a scene partner unlike any other. “Jim was the type of scene partner where it felt like he was there and his only intention was to make me as good as I could be,” she recalled in a 2023 interview with Michael Rosenbaum’s Inside of You podcast. “Every time I worked with him, I felt like his sole purpose was… ‘I’m going to help you give your best f—ing take, Jamie.’”

“He was larger than life,” she writes in the book. “His energy filled the room. Sometimes I think he hated that power. But it was just part of him. He was magnetic — so big, so beautiful. His presence took up space in the most brilliant way. Jim was humble and present. He cared.”

And So It Is…A Memoir of Acceptance and Hope is available now.