Subscribe
Ryan O’Neal gave his first interview since losing his long-time love, Farrah Fawcett, on June 25, 2009 after a lengthy battle with anal cancer. Sitting down with the Today show’s Meredith Vieira, O’Neal revealed: "[Doctors] thought that she would live just another couple of hours, and she lived a couple of days. So I had a bed put in the room for me. And I just lay by her side. She wouldn’t — move on. She wouldn’t pass."
He described the scene as she lay dying: "[Farrah] just looked at us with a slight smile and then all the machines flat lined. She was gone… "[In her final moments], I said I’d see her soon, and I see her every day. I write to her in my journal."
Their son, Redmond, wasn’t able to be by her side when she died since he is currently in jail on drug possession charges but he was granted permission to attend her funeral. O’Neal talked about Redmond’s last phone call with his ailing mother: "I think it was about regret. And the horror of not being able to see her again, and the promise of a good life, one she would be proud of. He has a wonderful plan in mind to restore order in his life. And he will, with my help… Redmond says it’s harder to grieve, but I told him to be patient. And when he got out, we’d grieve together."
He’s been trying to cope as best he can during these past few weeks and he’s relying on what he’s learned from this tragic experience to get him through it: "I’m using what she taught me to survive, to go on. I have launched into this massive job of answering the mail that has come in for her over the last few weeks. Hundreds and hundreds of letters of pain and sorrow and hope. I’m answering every one of them. That’s my life now."