Remember June 1, 2000, when Swayze made an emergency landing in his Cessna 414a? He was flying from California to New Mexico to try to save Rancho Bizarro from raging wildfires. A month earlier, while Lisa was flying, the plane had started to lose pressurization (a situation can lead to hypoxia and death, as happened to golfer Payne Stewart). The plane had been serviced (a sticky residue on the outflow valve that was a result of the couple smoking in the cockpit was to blame). But Swayze decided to fly the plane a low altitude, thinking he was playing it safe. He remembers putting the plane on autopilot — and then waking up a couple hundred feet above the ground in Arizona. A mechanical issue, the return of the sticky residue, and the fact that Swayze’s three-pack-a-day lungs weren’t functioning at peak performance led to a crisis. He wasn’t getting enough oxygen. In fact, he shouldn’t have woken up. Since he’d had the autopilot on, he should have just stayed in the air until he ran out of fuel, then crashed. But somehow the autopilot was hit off during the flight, and, Swayze writes, “Air traffic control radar showed that between Needles and my landing in Prescott Valley, I almost hit the ground eleven times. I flew between 6,500 and 11,500 feet, narrowly missing the mountains. And my route looked like a strand of spaghetti, looping around with no purpose for about forty-five minutes. Fortunately, as I approached Prescott Valley, my plane had gently drifted lower until there was enough oxygen in the air to revive me.”
Swayze knew he had cheated death many times — surviving that flight, motorcycle accidents, horse accidents (including one that broke both his legs while filming 1998’s Letters From a Killer), that night on the ledge with David Carradine. But his final battle with pancreatic cancer was the biggest challenge. He describes his fight from the moment he felt his first symptom to the moment his mother, Patsy, found out about his diagnosis from a National Enquirer reporter who showed up at her door (he hadn’t yet told her because she was having eye surgery and needed to keep her eyes dry for a few weeks after it, so no crying), through to his struggle to film his final performance, the A&E drama series The Beast, while undergoing chemotherapy. Before he and Lisa left for that shoot in Chicago, they renewed their wedding vows: “We have ridden into the sunset on a white stallion, countless times. We’ve tasted the dust in the birthplaces of religions. Yet you still take me breath away. I’m still not complete until I look in your eyes,” his concluded. “You are my woman, my lover, my mate and my lady. I’ve loved you forever, I love you now and I will love you forevermore.”
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