Life is hard and then you die, and we’re all going to get there. Most of us push it away in our heads (I certainly do), and yet sometimes it seeps through anyway. And now 62 year-old Farrah Fawcett has decided to become an agent of one of these intrusions. A cancer sufferer since ’06 and apparently not far from the end, she and producer/friend Alana Stewart have shot a two-hour video diary that will be broadcast on NBC on Friday, 5.15, from 9 to 11 pm. It’s called Farrah’s Story.

I’m not very plugged in with network TV publicists, but I’m going to try to get hold of a screener before I leave for France on Monday. I’m not looking forward to all of the calls I’m going to have to make and all the blah-blah I’ll have to deal with, but it’ll be worth it. I can’t say I’m looking forward to watching it, but I want to see it.

“As much as I would have liked to have kept my cancer private,” Fawcett has said in a 5.7 piece by People‘s Champ Clark, “I now realize that I have a certain responsibility to those who are fighting their own fights and may be able to benefit from learning about mine.”

Primarily shot by Stewart and narrated by Fawcett, the doc tracks her experience with cancer treatments in the U.S. and Germany over the last two or three years, and how she’s coped and dealt with it on various levels. The doc includes appearances by Fawcett’s longtime partner Ryan O’Neal, her Charlie’s Angels co-stars Jaclyn Smith and Kate Jackson, her father Jim Fawcett and her doctors.

“Another visitor has been Fawcett and O’Neal’s son Redmond, who’s [now] behind bars for a drug-related probation violation,” writes Clark. “On April 25 he was allowed three hours at home with his mother to say what might be his final goodbye. In his jail-issued jumpsuit and in shackles, Redmond is seen in the NBC documentary climbing into his sleeping mother’s bed and crying. ‘Oh my gosh, my gosh,’ he says as he hugs the frail figure next to him. ‘Oh, my gosh.'”