My Journey with Farrah - Alana Stewart [2]
Ultimately, what I loved about Farrah from day one was that there was no BS. What you saw was what you got, and I found that refreshing—an actual down-home girl in Hollywood.
After that dinner, we started up a real friendship. She was working so much in those days that we couldn’t spend a lot of time together, but when we did, we had a ball. Being around her felt like being home in Texas. We used to joke that all we needed were the big pink rollers in our hair. We’d go down to Ryan’s beach house, get massages, manicures, and pedicures, and lie in the sun reading fashion magazines—just two friends forgetting about life for twenty-four hours. We hung out, we ate Tex-Mex, we baked homemade pies. Farrah was always such fun. She embraced life more than anyone I’ve ever known.
Over the years, there was rarely a birthday party or a New Year’s that we didn’t celebrate together. As time went on, Farrah and I became even closer, even as our lives took very different paths. I got married and was busy having babies (Kimberly, Sean, and Ashley), while she had the kind of thriving acting career I had always dreamed about. In 1984 when Rod and I broke up, Farrah and Ryan were there to comfort and support me. In 1986, before her son, Redmond, was born, I threw her baby shower. But through it all, she stayed the same Farrah. She raised her son without a nanny, helping him with his homework and cooking dinner almost every night. As we got older, and Redmond and my sons all struggled with drug and alcohol problems, she and I bonded even more in our pain and concern over our boys. In the beginning of our relationship, Farrah was private and guarded with her emotions; eventually we could talk about anything.
Farrah was the last person I ever thought would get cancer. It never remotely crossed my mind that such a thing would happen. She was always too strong, too healthy, too full of life. I always thought she was one of the most fortunate women I knew.
She had it all—or so it seemed. Life is fragile; it changes in a heartbeat. One day Farrah was fine, the next she was not. Yet through it all, I never heard her question “Why me?” I never saw her act like a victim. She made the decision to fight her cancer and never wavered. It was very hard—sometimes unbearable—to watch my friend suffer, but I was in awe of her ferocious determination. Sometimes I thought it was her stubbornness and sheer willpower that got her through it. Other times I marveled at her heroism in waging war with an enemy who gave no hint as to where it might attack next—or how much it would destroy in its path. We went to Germany together to try to find a cure, a miracle, some hope in the face of hopelessness. And it was there that my friend handed me her camera and asked me to video what she was going through. I had no idea how to use a camera, and she showed me how to press the little RECORD button. So it began.
Over the next two years, there were more trips to Germany for treatments. My life took a backseat to Farrah’s battle with cancer. I would drop everything, leave my family and my dogs and my home, and hop a plane at a moment’s notice if she needed me. I felt like she was also my family, that it was something I had to do and wanted to do, and that I would worry about myself later. We tried, us tough Texas girls, to keep it together, to laugh and retain our sense of humor.
In the beginning, we truly thought there would be a happy ending; she’d find a cure, she’d be healthy again. It seemed not just plausible but probable. But life took an unforeseen turn. As her disease progressed, Farrah could have given up.