Paulina Porizkova, 56, celebrated what would’ve been her late husband Ric Ocasek’s 78th birthday with a tribute on Instagram on Wednesday March 23. Along with a family photo of The Cars singer with their sons, Paulina penned an emotional caption showing how much she misses him since he’d died in September 2019 at age 75. She swore that she and their sons would always keep their memories of him with them. “You’ll be forever missed. Forever imprinted on our hearts,” she wrote.
The model wrote about how if Ric had been alive to celebrate his latest birthday, he had a go-to joke that he probably would’ve said. She also included the hashtags “Last Vacation” and “True Love Never Dies,” as a further tribute to him. “You’d be 78 today, but say you were 39 ‘again,'” she wrote. “We will celebrate you today. You’re forever loved.”
In the years since Ric’s death, Paulina has opened up about her relationship with The Cars frontman, and she’s explained various dynamics in their marriage. The pair were going through a divorce at the time of his death, and she ultimately found out that he had taken her out of his will. After years of battling to reach a settlement with his estate, she reached an agreement in October 2021. She’d explained that she knew “exactly how much I’m owed under New York law…and I am getting it. The estate is settling with me,” in an interview with Los Angeles Magazine’s The Originals podcast.
In interviews after his death, Paulina also revealed why the couple was getting a divorce and how Ric had made her feel “invisible” while their marriage was ending. “We had been together for my entire life, since I was 19, and suddenly he seemed not to find me attractive anymore,” she told StyleLikeU in November 2021. “I realized that I wanted my partner, my husband, to listen to me, so that he could see that I’m no longer just the hot model that he had married.”
Since Ric’s death in 2019, Paulina did have a brief romance with Academy Award-winning writer Aaron Sorkin. The pair went public in April 2021, but they split up in July. Despite the split, the model was still complimentary to The West Wing writer, calling him “brilliant and witty and funny and sexy” in a post about their breakup.