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Note: This was originally published May 11, 2009

"I'm happy. I'm ready.”

These are, very probably, Farrah Fawcett's last words, passed in a note to her long-time partner, Ryan O'Neal.

On Sunday, Mother's Day, Farrah Fawcett's 91-year-old father flew from Corpus Christi, Tex., to Los Angeles to see his 62-year-old dying daughter. Days before, her son, Redmond – currently incarcerated for drug charges and parole violation – was allowed to visit his mother, in his prison issue-jumpsuit and shackles. He is reported to have held her and said, “Oh my gosh, oh my gosh,” over and over again, as his father, O'Neal reproved: “Don't rattle your chains!”

The sweet litany, from this troubled delinquent son, sounds like a sigh prized from the world itself, as one of its greatest beauties is being ardently devoured by cancer.

As so many of us prepare for this loss – a tragedy this week's tabloids deemed less poignant than Kirstie Alley's “shameful” 83-pound-weight gain – the online media is showcasing the image that exploded like a bomb in 1976. That is, the 29-year-old Fawcett, posing for what is likely the most iconic pin-up of all time: the ingénue in a red one-piece bathing suit, hand lost in her long, wild mane of frost-tipped golden hair.

In the shot, Fawcett smiles so brightly, one feels confused: Her sleek curves and mermaid hair blaze sex, her lambent green eyes and lips speak to a joyous kind of consent that other, previous pin-ups did not.

Fawcett's poster is best showcased and explicated (in its context and meaning) in 1977's Saturday Night Fever. As John Travolta's Tony Manero is strutting around in his black briefs, getting ready to hit the club, we see the Farrah poster behind him and her raw, exuberant sexuality, her luminescence is the moon he is howling to.

Farrah Fawcett's iconic Seventies swimsuit poster.

The poster, the image, the woman – who shone, still more brightly, on Charlie's Angels – became iconic in every possible manner. Men wanted to nail her and girls wanted to look like her, and one American girl who imitated her hairstyle was attacked by her classmates, in the late 1970s, and doused in sulphuric acid.

Ultimately, Fawcett's image would take the shape of (to name only a few) dolls; a jigsaw puzzle; a board-piece in the Charlie's Angels game; a hairstyle-practice doll; and a rubber eraser top jammed on the end of a pencil.

We all know the story of Fawcett leaving Charlie's Angels at the height of her fame to pursue a career in film. She even cut and flat-ironed her hair, which made her look more striking, but felt like a pointed dismissal of that big Texas shag that made stylist Jose Eber famous and that enticed us all (Ryan O'Neal recently noted that her curls, in the poster, blatantly spell the word sex, an erotic miracle on a par with a painted Madonna's tears). But she did not make a mistake: She was intently following the acting practices and aesthetics of her big decade, noticing that models and jiggling TV-stars were never given important film roles or taken seriously in film, while women like Louise Fletcher, Ellen Burstyn and Sally Field (dowdy, deadly serious) were bringing home gold statuettes.

And so Fawcett, four years after leaving Angels in 1980, made The Burning Bed , a wrenching and critically acclaimed true account of a chronically abused woman in Dansville, Mich., who set her husband on fire while he was sleeping, and drove herself and her children to the police station to confess.

Fawcett would go on to play a number of similarly horrific roles, most notably in Extremities and most memorably in Small Sacrifices and, leaving aside her turn in Cannonball Run (contracted while still an Angel), she always played hard, besieged women.

And, sadly, she became one.

Her marriage to O'Neal, who lured her from husband Lee Majors in 1979, has been an obvious disaster, fraught with drugs and violence, and her personal life, eventually, took an axe to her beauty. Her limbs became frail and knotted; her nose sagged; her eyes lost that sense of blissful engagement. “I know now that I didn't appreciate life,” Fawcett says in the documentary Farrah's Story , that airs this Friday on NBC.

By 1997, Fawcett seemed simply wrecked, as she appeared in Playboy rolling naked in paint; and appeared on Letterman , famously, while jittering and, ultimately, imploding.

Still, she rallied and made a Robert Altman film, Dr. T & the Women in 2000, and continued to work on her art (Fawcett has been a sculptor and painter since her teens) and her craft until cancer struck, two 1/2 years ago, bending, but not breaking the showiest yellow rose of Texas.

The pugilistic Ryan O'Neal, in the presence of his companion's fierce struggle, has finally flourished, as a man, falling, as he said this week, “in love with her all over again.” Using the language of violence, yet changing it, he also says that his profound sense of her is such that he is constantly being “stabbed in the heart.”

He told People magazine, who also bumped Fawcett's story for Alley's vow “to get back into even better shape,” that she can only speak a few words now. That when he stroked her back the other day, she said, “Don't stop.”

Such intimate confidences are almost unbearable. “I'm a private person,” Fawcett told the Los Angeles Times, “I'm shy about people knowing things.”

Unbearable also is the thought of her pain, of mothers and their children losing each other, of love, ineluctably, shaping itself into a knife.

As tough as any Texas outlaw, Fawcett is looking death in the eye and saying: “I'm ready.”

As Ryan O'Neal hangs onto the bag of her lustrous hair, lost to chemotherapy; as her son joins the general population of an L.A. jail, we remember her, and we ask her, improbably, to look homeward, angel.