In India and Tibet, some lama's meditate for years next to the funeral pyres of the dead being burned. It is to remind them of how fleeting this life is and to focus on what we cannot see, instead of the material world.

Farrah Fawcett is my burning funeral pyre. She had it all. She was beautiful, married a movie star, was a movie star, made a lot of money, had the baby she always wanted, lived in Hollywood. Then she watched it all collapse in drugs, demons and cancer. Ask not for whom the bell tolls...it tolls for me too.

"What makes this one so compelling is that it tells a different, starker tale: Death comes for us all, even the Beautiful People. I admire Fawcett's bravery not just for battling cancer for three years, but for refusing to fade away quietly and allow those iconic 30-year-old photos to be our most indelible memories of her." Kate Harding, Salon Broadsheet, 5/15/09.

Fawcett herself is poignant. The themes that run through her lifestory are profound: love, heroin, family betrayals, beauty, ambition, fame. Maybe not Shakespearean in nature but certainly soap opera-ish. She was a nice Catholic girl from Corpus Christi, Texas who was either blessed or cursed with extraordinary good looks, depending on your perspective.

In 1976, when I was 16, she was at the top of her game. She was cast as Jill Munroe in Charlies Angels and it made her a star. At the same time she released a poster of herself in a red swimsuit which remains the best-selling poster of all time. She was the IT girl. She would soon be divorcing first husband Lee Majors and taking up with Ryan O'Neal, a child of Hollywood, a major movie star in 1979. They made a beautiful couple.

She quit Charlies Angels after only one year, to chase her ambition to be an award-winning actress. And during the eighties and nineties, she acted in big-screen movies and in off-broadway plays and always had her picture in one of the magazines: People, Enquire, Vanity Fair. She had her baby at the age of 38 with Ryan, whom she never married and who already had 3 children from two previous marriages, Tatum O'Neal being his oldest child. [Tatum still holds the record of being the youngest person ever to win an Academy Award at the age of 9]. Ryan wasn't sentimental about his youngest child: "I gave her the boy," he stated once in an interview to show how magnanimous he was in co-parenting with Fawcett. They had it "all" it appeared.

Tatum already struggled with heroin addiction by the time her half-brother, Fawcetts son Redmond, was born. 18 years later, he would join her in the same struggle. At this writing, both Tatum and Redmond are in various stages of legal grapplings that include jail and/or rehab [again].

In 1995 Farrah finally relented and posed nude at the age of 48 for Playboy. In 1997 Fawcett turned 50, broke up with O'Neal and returned to the pages of Playboy, which became a best-selling issue. That was also the year she showed up for her interview on David Letterman appearing disoriented. She showed up in life after both good and bad plastic surgery. The next year she was beaten by her boyfriend, moviemaker James Orr, who was prosecuted and convicted. Ironically, she had starred in the 1984 movie The Burning Bed and won an Emmy for her role as a battered wife. The project is noted as being the first TV movie to provide a nationwide 800 number that offered help for others in the situation, in this case victims of domestic abuse.

After O'Neal was diagnosed with leukemia in 2001, they reconciled, visiting their heroin-addicted son in rehab and moving in together when she got her diagnosis of intestinal cancer in 2006, just as O'Neals leukemia went into remission. It's been a rocky road ever since (or even more?), being diagnosed with colorectal cancer 3 months after the doctors pronounced her cancer-free. [Don't even get me started on THAT scam]. The cancer went on to metastasize to her liver. Her older sister Diane died from lung cancer in 2001.

Ryan O'Neal at the age of 67 defies his age to battle the law, being arrested for assaulting his son Griffin in 2007 and possessing methamphetamine in 2008 - he was sentenced to 18 months in a drug rehabilitation program. In Tatums autobiography she alleges physical and emotional abuse from her father, much of which she attributes to drug use.

O'Neal and Farrah's best friend Alana Stewart [of George Hamilton, Rod Stewart fame] are her stalwart companions on this final leg of her journey. Her son visited her for 3 hours on a pass from jail, she was unaware he was incarcerated. She's lived a full life, she's lived a dramatic life. And she is gracious at this juncture. O'Neal said she wrote him a note which read, "I've lived a full and wonderful life. I've loved and been loved. I'm happy. I'm ready."

Hey Farrah, thanks for the memories.