Hip Hop Movement

Before the holidays, Ellen DeGeneres broke down in tears as she paid tribute to Stephen "tWitch" Boss.

The first thing she said was, "I just wanted to say the past 11 days have been incredibly challenging for everyone." Everyone is suffering and attempting to understand it, but we can never understand it.

The DJ for the Ellen DeGeneres Show, judge for So You Think You Can Dance, and competitor, who died by himself on December 13, she said, "is to laugh and embrace each other and play games and dance and sing" and "to do the things he liked to do," noting that the holidays are already difficult.

"I know it seems hard — it feels impossible," she said, "but that's how we commemorate him." Additionally, she asked people to "tell one other that they love each other, let others know that we are here for them, and check in on others."

DeGeneres continued by stating that it wasn't a joyful Christmas and that Boss was "pure light." "If you knew him, you knew that," she remarked. Even if you didn't know him, you could still tell.

In her closing remarks, she urged everyone to "respect him, think about him, and send love to one another."

DeGeneres was visibly moved as she began this, her first time speaking about Boss on camera. She made a statement shortly after his passing in which she described him as "pure love and light" and "family," adding that she was "heartbroken." She expressed her love to Weslie, Maddox, and Zaia Boss, the couple's three kids, and to Boss's wife, dancer Allison Holker Boss.

In the days that followed, DeGeneres flooded her page with adorable images of the two of them working together, both on the previous talk show for which he served as producer and elsewhere, including the spinoff Ellen's Game of Games.

When DeGeneres hired the choreographer to teach her a dance routine, they both met. In 2014, she asked him to appear as a guest DJ on the discussion program, which led to a regular position. After 19 seasons, the program was cancelled in May.

Holker Boss posted a selfie with her deceased spouse earlier this week and captioned it, "My heart aches."

On December 13, Boss was discovered dead in a hotel room in Encino, California, shocking both his followers and those in and out of Hollywood. According to his grandpa, the family was "totally distraught" and had "no sign that anything was out of the norm." Oh, if only I could FT to paradise, his mother said in a social media post beside an old screenshot of the two of them FaceTiming.