If you’re a Betty White fan, you’re familiar with that gut-wrenching feeling whenever her name trended on Twitter.
On Friday, just weeks short of the TV icon’s 100th birthday on Jan. 17, that terrible fear came true.
The comedy legend and national treasure “passed away peacefully in her home in Brentwood, California,” said her agent and friend, who confirmed her death to The Daily Beast.
Following the news, Twitter users mourned collectively as the tail end of 2021 got even bleaker.
Ryan Reynolds, who co-starred with White in 2009’s “The Proposal,” was one of the first of her famous friends to pay their respects on social media. He managed to perfectly capture how many of us are feeling about the loss of someone who brought so much joy and laughter into our lives during the span of her 80-year-plus career.
“The world looks different now. She was great at defying expectation,” Reynolds said of White. “She managed to grow very old and somehow, not old enough.”
He wrapped up his short but eloquent tweet by telling White we’ll all miss her very much.
“Now you know the secret,” he concluded.
Although the news of White’s death is very sad, and some of us will be bingeing on cheesecake and multiple episodes of “The Golden Girls” tonight, we don’t think White would’ve wanted you to pour too much of your New Year’s Eve champagne on the curb in her honor. She famously had a booze-fueled friendship with actor Jennifer Love Hewitt, and probably wouldn’t want you to waste any of the precious elixir.
White also loved joking around and having fun, which is probably why she and Reynolds retained a friendship for over a decade. Just watch the two of them in this promotional video for “The Proposal.”
White and Reynolds entertained the public with a playful flirtation for years. Two years ago, he even referred to her as one of his “ex-girlfriends” on Instagram.
But White was able to get one last dig in at Reynolds right before her death in a People interview published this week: She told Reynolds that he finally needed to move on from his crush on her.
“I’ve heard Ryan can’t get over his thing for me,” she quipped to the magazine. “But Robert Redford is The One.”
Reynolds naturally had a snarky response to the interview:
But we think this Twitter user summed up the two actors’ last public sparring match pretty well: