We all have those special texts we save. For Candace Cameron Bure, it's the last one she received from Bob Saget.
"I'm so scared that I'm gonna pull up his text and then accidentally delete it one day," she told Hoda Kotb while tearing up during the Feb. 3 episode of Today. "Like, it scares me so much because I don't ever want to lose this."
The message was sent just two weeks before the 65-year-old actor was found dead inside a Florida hotel on Jan. 9. As Cameron Bure explained, they had plans to grab dinner but Saget's flight was delayed and they "got into a little tiff," leading them to cancel.
But in true "Bob fashion," she continued, the stand-up comedian wrote her a "pages-long" text the next day apologizing for being cranky.
"He said, 'Oh, now I feel even worse. I was so wrong. You're, like, my favorite person on the Earth, and I acted like Dolly,'" Cameron Bure said while reading Saget's message, in which he referenced his mother. "'I was getting ready to take a late flight, and I was annoyed'….He said, ‘You're one of the few that understands that if I act like Dolly, I'm not the best at my game that day, ha ha.'"
After he "went on and on and on in the text," Cameron Bure added, Saget ended his message with, "'I love you more for the trouble you're giving me if that's even possible.'"
In her reply, Cameron Bure made it clear there were no hard feelings. "I wrote back, 'I love you. I could never be mad at you. Roll my eyes at you, yes, but never mad. And I love that you being Dolly, that made me laugh out loud, I loved your mom,'" she said. "And he just wrote back, ‘I loved you, my mom loved you too.'"
Saget and Cameron Bure played father-daughter duo Danny Tanner and D.J. Tanner on the late ‘80s-early-‘90s sitcom Full House and on the 2016-2020 spinoff Fuller House. And the 45-year-old actress, who first met Saget when she was 10 years old, still remembers the first interaction they had while filming Full House's pilot episode.
"Bob is so tall, you know, he's 6'4," Cameron Bure said. "And I was 10 years old, but he kneeled down to me and got eye to eye with me and he said, 'Hi, I'm Bob,' and, 'I'm going to be your dad. I'm playing your dad, so I want you to feel comfortable,' and, 'We're going to be friends.' And he was just so warm and inviting, and it really kicked off an incredible 35-year friendship."
Like a real parent, Saget was someone Cameron Bure could go to. "He was so emotionally available all the time," she recalled, "and he was really the first person in my life as a man that I saw cry and have those emotions right at the forefront of his conversations. If you were hurting, he would hurt with you. You would see the tears well up in his eyes. Bob is a remarkable person, and I've never had a friendship like the one I've had with him and that's why it makes it so hard."
While Cameron Bure said she "can't believe he's gone forever" and that "it's almost unbearable" for her to think about, she, her former costars and Saget's friends and family are continuing to find ways to honor his legacy. She, her castmates and his loved ones paid tribute to him following his passing and John Stamos, who played Jesse Katsopolis on Full House and Fuller House, gave a moving speech at Saget's memorial service.
"Bob was available and there for everyone that he knew, but Bob was that person that no matter what happened, Bob would drop anything for you in a second, in a heartbeat, and you didn't even have to be his best friend for him to do that," Cameron Bure shared with Today. "I mean, that's how huge his heart was. There are very few friends in life like that, and that is the hardest part of the loss is just that friendship that's unconditional, that it's a lifetime. But I guess our lifetime is, you know, finished on Earth for now."