Kristoff St John neil yr jp gallery
Credit: John Paschal/JPI

Mia St. John shared sad news on November 5.

It was the last thing that she wanted to have to do. But on November 5, Mia St. John — the first wife of the late, great Kristoff St. John (Neil, The Young and the Restless) — felt that his fans would want to know that their family had suffered another loss.

“My heart is breaking with this news,” she tweeted. “Our beloved [dog] Rocco passed away. The St. John family is heartbroken, as well as Brando,” his four-legged sidekick.

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With every word that Mia typed, the bond that she shared with Rocco became more evident; her pain, more tangible. “I lost my best friend,” she wrote, “my only comfort in this horrific path of our lives.”

If there is any silver lining amid the dark cloud of so much pain, Mia seemed to have found it. “Now you, too, are with Daddy,” she told Rocco.

A boxing champ, Mia was married from 1991-95 to the Daytime Emmy winner, with whom she had two children, son Julian and daughter Paris. Julian, who had fought a long battle with mental illness, took his own life in 2014 while undergoing inpatient treatment for schizophrenia.

Afterwards, his father was never quite the same. “At first he seemed OK, almost as if nothing happened,” castmate Eric Braeden (Victor) told Extra in the wake of his friend’s passing in 2019, “and I thought, ‘He’s suppressing something — deeply.’

“Then, slowly but surely, I think he began to succumb under the weight of that,” he added. “So he lived a kind of a double life in the sense that he suppressed all that enormous pain and anger with the institution where Julian was when he died. Yet when he came to work, [the impression he gave was that] the show must go on.”

Our hearts go out to the St. John family. While we’re all thoroughly depressed, maybe we can distract ourselves with the below photo gallery of characters — including Neil, of course — that can never, ever be recast.