The last time Melissa Gilbert spent time with her TV dad was just a week before his death.
Michael Landon, the “Bonanza” actor who starred as beloved patriarch Charles Ingalls on “Little House on the Prairie,” died three months after publicly announcing his pancreatic cancer diagnosis in 1991. He was 54.
Gilbert, who played “Half Pint” Laura Ingalls in the series, is teaming up with the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN). The nonprofit aims to fund research, provide patient/caregiver support, and advocate for increased federal research funding for those affected by the disease.
“His daughter Leslie Landon Matthews, someone who has been a very dear friend of mine for 50 years, called me because she wanted me to know [his diagnosis] before it hit the press,” Gilbert told Fox News Digital. “Her dad was going to do a press conference, and she didn’t want me to just hear about it. So she called and told me . . . I was gutted.”
“My first thought was, ‘This is horrible – I’m going to lose a mentor and father figure,’” the 60-year-old recalled. “I’d already lost my own father to suicide when I was 11. I was staring down the barrel of losing another important male influence in my life. It really shook me.”
“Like everyone else, I sort of watched from a distance because I didn’t want to intrude,” said Gilbert. “But then a while later, I made the decision that I really had to go see him. And this was much later on in his pancreatic cancer journey. I ended up going and spending time with him. And it turned out to be just a week before he died.”
In November – Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month – Gilbert’s lifestyle brand, Modern Prairie, is launching a special collection featuring purple, the official color of pancreatic cancer awareness. All proceeds from the collection will support PanCAN.
Memories of Gilbert’s last meeting with Landon have been vivid in her mind.
“It was very hard,” she admitted. “I had been running from the grieving process my whole life and trying to avoid it. But it was really important for me to go and have that goodbye time, which I didn’t have with my father. . . . This was a chance to gift myself with that goodbye and say to him all the things I needed to say.”
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Gilbert described the meeting as “really hard and painful,” but one that she said was blessed “with a lot of humor.”
“There were always funny moments with Michael,” she said. “Even as sick as he was, he still maintained his incredible sense of humor. I remember my son Dakota was about two at the time, and one of Michael’s horses bit him on the finger. I didn’t want Mike to know until we knew how bad it was. It turned out it was nothing.”
“I went in the room to sit with Mike, and he said, ‘Did one of the horses bite the kid?’” Gilbert continued. “I said, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t want you to know that. He said, ‘Well, is he OK?’ I said, ‘Yeah, he’s fine.’ He said, ‘Thank God it wasn’t worse. I would feel awful.’ And then he said, ‘Wait a minute, I’m dying from pancreatic cancer. How could I feel any worse?’”
“It made me laugh,” said Gilbert. “But it also broke my heart a little bit, knowing that this incredible person, who was able to find humor . . . was no longer going to be around to help me do that.”
The actress described Landon as a fighter, someone who was “trying everything” to combat the disease.
“He was trying conventional treatments, he was trying holistic and Eastern treatments, he was doing everything he possibly could to fight it,” Gilbert explained. “It was one of the reasons why I wasn’t able to see him sooner. He was always in a hospital, a treatment center, or a holistic medicine center. He even talked about doing coffee enemas. He was constantly searching, trying and fighting. It wasn’t until very close to the end that everybody realized that it was the end . . . nothing worked.”
WATCH: ‘LITTLE HOUSE’ STAR MICHAEL LANDON WAS STUBBORN ABOUT HIS HEALTH: DAUGHTER
According to PanCAN, pancreatic cancer is the third leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States. It has a five-year survival rate of 13%. It noted that there is no standard early-detection test, and there are few effective treatment options.
The actress said she was “non-functional for quite a while” after Landon died.
“I remember drinking a lot of vanilla malts for some reason,” said Gilbert. “I don’t know why that sticks in my brain. My family surrounded me and kept me going. I had a small child at home to take care of. Seeing this gorgeous boy, my son Dakota . . . was my light at the end of the tunnel. There was sorrow, grief and depression taking care of him, but he brought a lot of sunshine into my life.”
“I remember my sister coming over every day just to hang out,” said Gilbert. “My friends were really helpful – it helped a lot to talk about Michael, to talk about who he was and how he impacted my life. It was a very difficult and sad time. . . . [But] I promised I would allow myself to grieve and not deny my feelings this time around. And I did, but it was hard.”
“It also helped me a lot to dedicate myself towards helping Michael Landon’s family get through this too, to support them in their grief,” she pointed out. “It got me out of my head . . . the pain softened and eventually became easier to deal with.”
It wouldn’t be the last time Gilbert would lose a loved one to the disease.
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Her friend, Patrick Swayze, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2008. He died a year later at age 57.
“I remember hearing about his diagnosis and thinking, ‘Oh my God, he’s going to die,’” Gilbert admitted. “I know Buddy said, ‘I’m going to beat it. I’m going to get through this.’ I watched him battle and battle . . . the time he was able to squeeze out of that diagnosis was nothing short of miraculous. I think so much of that was because treatments had changed a bit. . . . It may not have spread as far as Michael’s did at that point. But I do think the journey is different for everyone.”
“I’m so grateful that he had his family and his extraordinary wife, Lisa, there to support him through all of this,” said Gilbert. “I tried to keep my distance because I didn’t want to be intrusive.
“At one point, I was the president of the Screen Actors Guild. There was a glitch with his insurance, and he was being denied coverage for a treatment. He called me, and I was able to make a phone call and clear the log jam so that he could get the treatment that he needed. For me, that was an incredible sense of accomplishment of being able to do something for Buddy.”
“It was the thing that I couldn’t do for Michael Landon,” she said quietly. “I felt like I was able to pick up my sword and go to battle for Buddy Swayze. . . . When he did pass, there was incredible sorrow . . . it was a feeling of, ‘There goes another good one. Damn it, this horrible disease.’ I had this feeling of, ‘I have to do something. I’m going to fight.’”
Gilbert said she’s grateful to create a special collection that would not only honor “two powerful physical specimens of men,” but all the many others across the country who are fighting the illness.
“They both said, ‘I’m going to beat it,’” said Gilbert. “And it’s really important for people to understand that supporting one cancer research benefits all the others. As research develops, as treatments and cures are developed, it can eventually be applied to other cancers. . . . Pancreatic cancer is a horrible thing to experience, but we can detect things earlier as research grows.”
“Make no mistake, all cancers are cruel,” she said. “But the survival rate for pancreatic cancer is abysmal. And the reason for that is that it’s so hard to detect, and it goes fast. This cancer is particularly bad because it is so sneaky. . . . But I’m still going to fight.”
