The daytime world (and, indeed, the entire entertainment world) lost a giant when Days of Our Lives‘ Bill Hayes passed away back in January of this year at the age of 98. Shortly after his passing in real life, the Horton house burned down and the show gave Doug and Julie a touching episode as they walked down Memory Lane and looked back on the Horton family.
And at the end of episode, the show paid tribute, “In loving memory” of Bill Hayes with a quote from Hamlet: “Good night, sweet prince; and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” Hayes who was a legend of stage and screen, passed away just last month, though we likely won’t see a farewell to Doug until sometime in the summer when the show’s shooting schedule catches up with real life.
Thanks to the show’s advanced shooting schedule, though, Doug is still very much alive in Salem and will be until his funeral in the fall. These days, though, he understandably doesn’t show up on our screens very often, as Hayes’ health had declined towards the end of his life, and he only made sporadic appearances on Days of Our Lives. So while Doug’s final farewell won’t be until November, the day we’ve long dreaded is finally here as Hayes’ final episode is airing today, July 11th.
The weekly preview gave us a taste of how emotional these last scenes will be, and they did not disappoint. As Doug and Julie talked about how short a time Chad and Abigail had together, they looked back on their life and their love, with Julie proclaiming that “The first time I looked in your eyes, I was lost.”The weight of those scenes hit hard as Bill and Susan Seaforth Hayes’ love shone through every scene they filmed together. As Seaforth Hayes has shared, her husband’s health was on the decline for some time, and while they may not have known when he would pass, each scene they shot for Days of Our Lives was likely all the more precious for it.
In fact, she told TV Insider that she felt fairly sure that that would be their final moments on screen together, saying, “I knew it that day and that was four weeks before he died. And the last few shows that he did, he was completely blind. So there! In show business, you rise to the occasion or you never get to have another occasion. And he always did.”
Seaforth Hayes spoke with Harvey Brownstone a short while back and spoke a bit about her love, her marriage and how important Days has become. She shared a clip on the Instagram account she and Bill shared, writing, ” I have no axe to grind, just my experience of a lifetime in show business, which is like no other business, as the song says… and a long, happy marriage.”
Within the interview herself, she explains that, “My marriage was the most important thing in my life. During Billy’s decline, Billy was the most important thing in my life. And since we have a large family, I inherited more than 45 people that I can call granddaughter, grandson, son, uncle, all of that. Now I don’t have him in the house. I have them scattered all over the United States and I have the show right there in Burbank, only three miles away from our house. The show has become very important to me in the last few months, mainly because I have been treated so beautifully by my coworkers and I want to do them pro and I want to do the show proud.”
One thing we are absolutely sure of is that as Days of Our Lives and Julie say farewell to Doug in the coming months, Seaforth Hayes will not just do the show proud, she’ll both break our hearts and help us heal in the process.
