Ricky Nelson was a beloved singer the world over, who felt his loss immensely when he was gone. But most of all his loss was felt by his daughter, Tracy Nelson.
Tracy Nelson was born to an immensely talented family in 1963. She was born in Santa Monica, California to Ricky Nelson, and his wife, Kristin Harmon. She was their eldest child, the first of four.
Born into a family of entertainers, she found herself in the limelight from the tender age of 5 years old. She starred alongside Lucille Ball in the movie “Yours, Mine, and Ours.” After completing high school and attending college for a couple of years, she made her debut in Hollywood by starring in “Square Pegs.”
However, her father’s death when he was just 45 years old, caused great trauma to her and her family. The singer’s death was a freak accident, where a heater in an airplane caused a fire killing all passengers except the pilot.
Soon after, Tracy had to hear rumors of her father’s use of cocaine and other allegations of him having caused the accident. At the time, her brother Sam was 13 years old and her maternal uncle actor Mark Harmon, and his wife, actress Pam Dawber filed a petition for his custody.
Harmon claimed that his sister Kristin was dependent on drugs and hence could not parent the 13-year-old boy. The trial received a lot of media attention, Harmon withdrew his petition after a while.
But Mark Harmon still retained visitation rights so he could meet the teenager and see whether he was well taken care of. This was when Harmon developed a close relationship with his niece Tracy as well.
“I would like Mark to teach Remi how to swim,” Tracy said about her uncle, hoping he teaches her daughter to swim as well.
As for the children’s relationship with their mother, it improved before she passed away in 2018. Sam said in an interview, “As you get older, things that were important aren’t important anymore. Problems aren’t problems anymore. You work through them, or you don’t.”
Tracy Nelson started to make a name for herself in Hollywood. She appeared in a lot of television series including “Glitter,” “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” “St. Elsewhere,” “The Love Boat,” and “Family Ties.”
Tracy had to take a break from her career but when she restarted it in 1989, she went on to appear in projects such as “A League of Their Own” and “Melrose Place.”
During her break from her career, she was battling cancer.
Her cancer diagnosis came as a complete surprise. In 1987, when Tracy was recording the show “Father Dowling Mysteries,” she always felt tired and looked it too. It came to a point where even the makeup artist was unable to conceal her eyeshadows.
And in December of the same year, the actress decided to see a doctor because of a dream she had had. “My father called me on the phone and said, I know you miss me, but it’s not time for you to die. You have to go see a doctor,” the actress recalled the strange dream.
Upon inquiry, doctors found a tumor in her chest the size of a grapefruit. It was confirmed to be stage 2 Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. She underwent a 7-hour surgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center Los Angeles. Her spleen, a portion of her liver, and samples of her lymph nodes got removed.
“I was like a human biology project,” Tracy muses of her surgery. The surgery left a scar that was 15-inches long, spanning from her ribcage to her pelvic area. After the surgery, she still had bi-weekly chemotherapy appointments. She had lost a tremendous amount of weight, all her hair, and felt hopeless.
At the time, Tracy was married to William Moses. Her husband’s father was also suffering from cancer so he had to deal with two close loved ones battling the potentially deadly disease.
While undergoing treatment for her cancer, Tracy was also playing her roles on various shows including “Father Dowling Mysteries,” “Perry Mason,” and “Melrose Place.”
Tracy Nelson held on to life and was determined to get better. One of the things that made her hold on was her determination to become a mother. She had to still wait two years to get back to a healthy weight and condition to be able to conceive.
She recalls her pregnancy, “I was stunned. It was a relief on the one hand, but terrifying on the other, I wondered whether my baby would be all right.” She would worry whether the radiation she was exposed to during her cancer treatment would have an impact on the baby.
Thankfully, her worries ended up being baseless as she gave birth to a perfectly healthy little girl on August 11, 1992, named Remington Elizabeth. She weighed 7 pounds and 11 ounces.
But just a week after giving birth, Tracy started hemorrhaging from her uterus. She panicked thinking she would not survive and her dream of seeing her child grow up would remain unfulfilled.
However, doctors successfully stopped the bleeding in time. Tracy received four days of treatment after which she was cleared to be able to go home. But her health was never fully fine even after that, with side effects from radiation treatment creeping through.
In 2005, Tracy got diagnosed with thyroid cancer and had to go through the entire ordeal again. Five years after that, she received a diagnosis of breast cancer which resulted in her opting for a bilateral mastectomy and a total reconstruction.
With so much experience with cancer on a first-hand basis, she has been a vocal advocate for cancer research and serves as a spokesperson for The Lymphoma Research Foundation of America.
Perhaps, were it not for Ricky Nelson appearing in her dream, she might not be here. But Tracy Nelson has really put up a brave fight to stay alive.
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