'SNL' Co-Creator Dick Ebersol Opens Up About Healing Since a Plane Crash Killed His 14-Year-Old Son

Eighteen years have passed since Dick Ebersol's teen son was killed in a plane crash, now the TV executive is opening up about his darkest days and how his family healed after unthinkable loss.

On the morning of Nov. 28, 2004, Ebersol's private plane landed in Montrose, Colorado, to drop off his wife, Kate & Allie actress Susan Saint James. After a quick stop, the aircraft — which was carrying the couple's two sons Teddy, 14, and Charlie, 21, as well as the pilot and a flight attendant — took off in snowy conditions headed to its next destination.

Just a few hundred feet in the air, the jet went down and skidded on its nose before crashing through a fence and hitting an embankment. Ebersol and Charlie survived with serious injuries, but Teddy and the plane's crew died in the crash.

"I don't think about [the crash] that day," Ebersol, 75, says in the latest issue of PEOPLE. "But I think about Teddy. I still have conversations with him every day."

FROM THE PEOPLE ARCHIVE: NBC Sports Chief Ebersol Survives Jet Crash

In his new memoir, From Saturday Night to Sunday Night, out Sept. 13, along with chronicling his pioneering work creating NBC's Sunday Night Football and co-creating Saturday Night Live, Ebersol has written about the youngest son he adored and lost.

"The advice we could give any family who loses a child is to talk about it," he says. "The more you engage your feelings and share them, the quicker you'll begin to feel a sense of peace."

In the days before the tragedy, Ebersol and Saint James were vacationing in Los Angeles over Thanksgiving with their three sons Charlie, Willie and Teddy, as well as Saint James's son Harmony and daughter Sunshine from a previous marriage.

The actress says she will always be grateful for the final days the family got to spend with Teddy.

"There's so many ways that these things can happen," she says. "You can have an argument the night before, or you're far away or working. It's a whole another experience that we had, because we could just remember the hilarious time that we had in L.A. Everybody has really fond memory of that, and everybody said, "Oh, I love you. See you at Christmas. Goodbye."

On Christmas, just four weeks after his death, as the family opened the gifts Teddy had picked out for them, a bit of the light he always brought to their lives shone through.

There was an "Ash-Hole" ashtray for his dad, who loved cigars; a "Tickets to the Gun Show" T-shirt with arrows pointing at the biceps for Charlie, and a shirt for Willie that read "Good for the Ladies."

"They were hilarious," says Saint James, 75. "It was like he was there."

Adds Willie, now 35: "It was a gentle reminder that Teddy and his humor would be with us long after he left."