"When and if the end comes, no one will approach it better than you," said Larry King to Tammy Faye Messner during a live television interview Thursday night.

Friday morning, the end arrived -- Tammy Faye lost her long and courageous battle with inoperable cancer. She was 65.

A Christian singer, evangelist, entrepreneur, talk show host, reality show star, and former wife of disgraced televengalist Jim Bakker, Tammy Faye was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1996. She defied all medical predictions after her disease spread to her lungs in 2004, and she lived on with an inspiring amount of grace and dignity. Weighing only 65 pounds and battling almost constant pain, she spoke with Larry King just days ago -- with both her trademark make-up and a smile on her face -- and she talked openly and candidly about her death. She didn't know when her time would come. But she was ready.

The end has come for Tammy Faye. Surely, no one approached it quite like her.

June passed away in April, she was 82. She was one of Canada's most celebrated authors and social advocates. She helped the homeless, dealt with issues of racism and injustice. She did much volunteer work.

In 2004, June was diagnosed with inoperable cancer and refused to undergo treatments.

I came across a last interview with her that I thought was very moving. She talks about her life, her marriage, and the fact that her cancer is terminal.

What an amazing woman.

I wrote on June 29 about the serious health condition of Opera singer Beverly Sills. At the time, Sills -- sick with cancer -- was in a Manhattan hospital, gravely ill, with her daughter by her side. I didn't name her cancer because I didn't know of her specific condition. Now, as I've just learned of her death, I know more about her illness.

Sills, described in this news story as "the Brooklyn-born opera diva who was a global icon of can-do American culture with her dazzling voice, bubbly personality and management moxie in the arts world," died on Monday of inoperable lung cancer at the age of 78. She died at her Manhattan home with her family and doctor by her side. She was a non-smoker.

Sills' illness was revealed just last month.

There's so much more to life than money. At the same time, the daily grind definitely depends some on this coveted staple. For one man, whose life did depend on money, it could have been everything. But it wasn't.

Think about this:

Wayne Schenk won $1 million in the New York lottery on January 12 after purchasing a $5 scratch-off ticket. His jackpot win came just five weeks after his diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer was delivered. His one wish: to receive a lump sum so he could receive specialized treatment for his advanced disease.

Lottery officials claim they were sympathetic but just couldn't give him a lump sum. The best they could do was issue him $50,000 annual installments for 20 years.

Schenk, 51, only survived for a little more than one year. He died on April 23 at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Syracuse. At the time of his death, he had received just $34,000.

So money isn't everything. But could it have been?

In a Phase III trial involving 878 lung cancer patients, the drug bevacizumab, known as Avastin, increased the overall survival rate to 35 percent when combined with the chemotherapy drugs paclitaxel and carboplatin. Patients who were given paclitaxel and carboplatin without Avastin had a 15 percent chance of responding to treatment.

Two months ago, the Food and Drug Administration approved Avastin as a first-line treatment for patients with inoperable, locally advanced, recurrent or metastatic non-squamous, non-small cell lung cancer. Avastin works by stopping the formation of blood vessels that feed oxygen and nutrients needed for tumor growth. Because the drug is a targeted therapy, in that it leaves healthy tissue alone while going after cancer cells, some of the traditional side-effects from conventional chemotherapy, such as hair loss, nausea, or vomiting, are avoided.

According to Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center at UT Southwestern Chief of Hematology/Oncology's Dr. Joan Schiller, "Twenty years ago, we thought no treatment could help patients with advanced lung cancer. Ten years ago, we found that chemotherapy could improve survival of these patients. Now, we are finding out that this very unique drug called Avastin can also help improve survival even more. Avastin is the first of this very exciting family of drugs to be approved for lung cancer, and there are several other drugs of this type under development which may prove to work even better."

Grammy award winning country musician Freddy Fender died Saturday, just days after he had returned home from the hospital, seriously ill from treatment for lung cancer and a blood infection.

Fender's wife, Vangie Huerta, announced in August that her husband, at the age of 69, was suffering from inoperable cancer and that he was hoping for a miracle. But his cancer spread, and his health declined. Yet his spirits remained high -- and he recently told one newspaper reporter, "I'm one year away from 70 and I've had a good run."

Fender's career began when he returned from service in the Marine Corps in the late 1950s and created his stage name from a brand of guitar -- Fender. Success did not arrive for some time -- and not until after Fender experimented with a rock-country-Latin sound, served time for marijuana possession, and worked for a period of time as a mechanic did fame hit.

Born Baldemar Huerta in 1937, Fender is know for his hits Before the Next Teardrop Falls, Wasted Days and Wasted Nights and You'll Lose a Good Thing. In 1999, Fender received his own Hollywood Walk of Fame star, and he won his third and last Grammy in 2002.

Despite fame, Fender lived a hard life. He spoke openly about his battles with drug and alcohol abuse. He struggled with diabetes and Hepatitis C. And he received a kidney transplant in 2002 and a liver transplant in 2004.

Fender, who passed away at his Corpus Christi home surrounded by family, is survived by his wife and four children.

After diagnosing Freddy Fender with lung cancer, the doctors told him there is nothing they can do for him. At the beginning of the year, he went in for an operation to remove the upper left lobe of his lung due to a fungal infection when the surgeons found two large tumors. A PET scan revealed nine smaller tumors in his pleura - membranes covering the lungs and lining the chest cavity.

Grammy award-winning musician Fender, known for Hispanic/pop, country western and blues, became famous for hits like Before The Next Teardrop Falls, You'll Lose A Good Thing, and Wasted Days and Wasted Nights.

According to his bio, in 1960, Wasted Days and Wasted Nights proved to be prophetic. Fender and his bass player were arrested and sent to prison for possession of two marijuana cigarettes. Three years later, Fender went to New Orleans, where he spent the next five years developing his talent in rhythm & blues and Cajun funk.

Fender had a role in Robert Redford's film the Milagro Beanfield War and you can hear his voice in national radio and television campaigns for McDonald's and Miller Lite.

Caller-Times Cassandra Hinojosa quotes Fender in her news article as saying, "I feel very comfortable in my life. I'm one year away from 70 and I've had a good run. I really believe I'm OK. In my mind and in my heart, I feel OK. I cannot complain that I haven't lived long enough, but I'd like to live longer."

In September, with his wife Vangie Huerta at his side, he will visit the Cancer Treatment Centers of America at Southwestern Regional Medical Center to consider available treatments.

David Letterman recently introduced Fender to his Late Show audience as "one of the greatest voices in all of music."

Sheila Kaye had been smoking for years when they found the tumor in her lung. As a long-time smoker, her lungs were in such bad shape that the diagnosis became inoperable lung cancer. The only remedy the doctor could try was cryosurgery, a procedure that freezes a tumor. With a special probe, the tumor is brought down to -190°C, and within three to six months it disintegrates. BBC News has the feature on Kaye's lung cancer recovery here.

In other lung cancer news, Vanderbilt University in Nashville researchers have discovered a protein that might be a significant key to the development of almost 75 percent of non-small cell lung cancer, the most common form of lung cancer. In studying the lung cancer tissue of 46 lung cancer patients, they found the protein barely present or missing altogether in 77 percent of the samples. Using mice, they found when they restored the protein, tumor growth slowed. The key proteins are called type 2 receptors for Transforming Growth Factor-b, or TGF-b.