OK Magazine
Cher is offering some insight into how her good pal and fellow superstar Tina Turner spent her final years.
Two days after the “Proud Mary” singer passed away at age 83, the mother-of-two shared a few details during a Thursday, May 25, appearance on MSNBC’s The Beat with Ari Melber.
When Turner died, her rep revealed she was secretly battling a “long illness,” but the star’s health woes were nothing new to her inner circle.
“I know everybody’s really sad, but the truth is … She fought this sickness for such a long time and she was so strong, as you would think she would be,” explained Cher, 77. “But towards the end, she told me once, she said, ‘I’m really ready. I just don’t want to put up with this anymore.’ She didn’t want to do it anymore.”
“I started going to visit her because I thought, ‘I need to put this time into this friendship so she knows that we haven’t forgotten her.’ So we kind of all took turns going and spending time with her. And it made her happy,” the music icon recalled. “And someone said, ‘When you two laugh together, it is the funniest thing,’ because we both have such distinct laughs. She was really happy.”
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On one occasion, Turner started off the with low energy, but the girls wound up spending “five hours laughing like crazy,” Cher noted.
“She was having a good time in spite of the fact that she was really sick and not wanting people to know about it,” she said. “But she had her dialysis machine in her house. So that’s how she was doing it.”
As OK! reported, Turner’s rep confirmed her passing on Wednesday, May 24.
“Tina Turner, the ‘Queen of Rock’n Roll’ has died peacefully today at the age of 83 after a long illness in her home in Küsnacht near Zurich, Switzerland. With her, the world loses a music legend and a role model,” the message read.
One day later, it was revealed the Grammy winner died of natural causes.
