Teddi Mellencamp Shares Her Father’s Heartfelt Preparations for Her Future Amid Her Cancer Battle in Indiana

Teddi Mellencamp revealed that her father, rocker John Mellencamp, has begun making plans for her burial as she continues her battle with cancer.

Just days after announcing her diagnosis has progressed to stage 4, the 43-year-old former star of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills shared a somber conversation she had with her father, the 73-year-old singer of “Jack and Diane,” on the latest episode of her podcast, Two T’s In A Pod.

“Yesterday, my dad called me 11 times in a row. Eventually, I answered and said, ‘I’m in the bath. Let me live a little.’ He then proceeded to ask, ‘I just want to make sure you’re going to be in our group family mausoleum,’” Teddi recalled.

Teddi asked her father about the mausoleum’s capacity for her three children—Slate, 12, Cruz, 10, and Dove, 5—whom she shares with her estranged husband, Edwin Arroyave, from whom she filed for divorce in November 2024, prior to her diagnosis.

“He said, ‘Well, there’s going to be the top five, and then we’re going to have little areas around it where everyone will be buried,’” Teddi recounted.

When she inquired if a decision needed to be made immediately, Teddi stated that her father replied, “You’re doing your will right now, so you may as well include it.”

Seemingly accepting her father’s wishes, she told her co-host, Tamra Judge, that she would need to travel to Indiana to visit her grave. She humorously suggested she would have “hot girls never die” engraved on the tombstone.

In a health update from March, Teddi mentioned that additional tumors had been discovered in her brain and lungs.

“I have three more tumors in my brain and two on my lungs. These are all a direct result of my melanoma,” she disclosed on Instagram on March 6. Over the past two years, she had undergone removal of 17 different melanoma spots.

This update came nearly a month after she announced on February 12 that doctors had identified multiple tumors on her brain following complaints of “severe and debilitating headaches” for several weeks. During her treatment, four large tumors were removed instead of the initially planned two.