Ananda Lewis had one special request before her untimely passing.
Shortly after the former MTV VJ died at age 52 following her five-year battle with breast cancer, her sister Lakshmi Emory revealed she fulfilled her final wish: to share one more memory with her 14-year-old son Langston.
“Her wish was to live to his graduation day,” Emory told Entertainment Tonight in a June 12 interview, “and she did exactly that.”
According to Emory, Lewis died hours after Langston—whom she shared with Will Smith’s brother Harry Smith—graduated from middle school. Indeed, the Total Request Live host was her son’s biggest supporter, as she shared many moments of them bonding on social media over the years.
In fact, Lewis offered a glimpse into the annual tradition they started after she homeschooled him as a kid.
“I have read this book to my son on Martin Luther King Jr. Day since he was 3…now he reads it to me,” she captioned the January 2020 Instagram post, which sees a heartwarming video of the duo reading Doreen Rappaport’s children’s book about the late civil rights activist. “I encourage you to read with your children as often as you can and for those who can’t, that’s ok…let us do it for you.”
And similar to Lewis’ final wish, she was surrounded by her family—including Langston—when she died in her Los Angeles home on June 11, per Entertainment Tonight.
Her sister announced her death that same day in a touching Facebook tribute, writing, “She’s free, and in His heavenly arms. Lord rest her soul.”
Lewis first shared that she was diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer in 2020. Four years later, she told CNN that she had opted to not have a double mastectomy and decided to “keep my tumor and try to work it out of my body a different way.”
By that following January, her tumor had metastasized and her cancer had reached stage 4.
“I don’t want to spend one more minute than I have to suffering unnecessarily,” Lewis reflected in her essay published in Essence that same month. “That, for me, is not the quality of life I’m interested in. When it’s time for me to go, I want to be able to look back on my life and say, ‘I did that exactly how I wanted to.’”
