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In one of the toughest questions anyone could face, Ryan O'Neal is asked if he is prepared to let Farrah Fawcett go. The leading man who made his name when he lost the on-screen love of his life in the 1970 tearjerker Love Story says he is.
"Semi-prepared to let her go," he amended while speaking to Meredith Vieira, in an interview that aired on Thursday's Today show. "I let her go weeks ago and weeks ago, but she came back," O'Neal, 68, said of the fluctuating condition of the terminally ill, bed-ridden actress.
"I keep promising to take her to Italy," he says in a lighter moment. "She said, 'I'll drive.' "
A heartbroken O'Neal also admits there are times Fawcett is suffering so much that that he wishes she would simply go to sleep, but then he realizes that decision is not left to him. "Why did it have to take my girl?" he says of her cancer.
In the two-hour documentary Farrah's Story, to air on NBC Friday, Fawcett, 62, says that the three words she thought she would never hear were "malignant," "tumor" and "anal." Then came a fourth word, she says. That was "reccurrence."
She also says, "Cancer is a disease that is mysterious, headstrong and makes its own rules. And mine, to this date, is incurable. I know that everyone will die eventually, but I do not want to die of this disease. I want to stay alive. So I say to God, because it is, after all, in his hands. It is seriously time for a miracle."
