JUDGE Lynn Toler may be most famous as the face of daytime television's Divorce Court, but she's a romantic in real life.
She was married for more than 33 years before announcing the death of her husband, Eric Mumford, on Instagram.
While one might assume that a divorce court judge would have all the answers regarding relationships, Judge Lynn Toler admitted in a September 2012 op-ed for The Huffington Post that her relationship wasn't always perfect.
Eric "Big E" Mumford was Toler's other half for over 33 years.
Eric was born on January 1, 1951, in Ohio.
He met his wife-to-be in 1986 and already had four children from his first marriage.
But Judge Toler took them in as her own, and they added two more kids to their bunch together for a total of six.
They got married in 1989, marking more than three decades together.
She wrote in her op-ed that by the time they'd been married for 19 years: "Big E, and I were off the road and deep in the weeds."
(She always referred to him as Big E, or simply as "E" on social media and in other formats, like her books and on television.)
She described the picture from both of their sides, and it wasn't a pretty one.
But then she launched into how the lessons she'd learned from Divorce Court brought them together again.
She wrote about their communication style and how, over a year and a half, she and "E" had broken down their marriage and rebuilt it to resemble one where they listened to each other and tried to understand better where the other was coming from.
She said: "We no longer act on that right-now feeling without considering long-term consequences."
"We have made a conscious decision to be consciously married."
While a cause of death for Eric Mumford has yet to be released, we know that he died on December 23, 2022.
His wife took to Instagram to share the sad news, writing: "Eric Mumford Big E"
"January 1, 1951 - December 23, 2022."
"I am in a million pieces."
Accompanying the news was a photo of the two, over which she'd added text which reads: "Beautiful man. Inside and out."
Thousands of fans have since left their condolences.
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