Oprah Winfrey had readied herself for "the call" in 2019.
She had just been to visit Tina Turner at a hospital in Switzerland, where the music legend told her she was tired and ready 'to leave this earth'.
"I left the hospital thinking that would be my last time seeing her," Winfrey wrote in an essay honouring her friend on Oprah Daily.
"I was on alert for a full year afterward, waiting to get 'the call' from her devoted husband, Erwin. Instead there were calls with news of improvements, new treatments, therapies, doctors. There were setbacks and stabilisation. I even received an invite to celebrate her 80th birthday, then her 82nd."
Turner had a series of medical emergencies in recent years, including a stroke and intestinal cancer. In 2017, her husband Erwin Bach donated a kidney when she went into kidney failure.
'The call' Winfrey was dreading didn't come for another four years, until Winfrey's friend Gayle King's phone blew up with the news.
Turner died on May 24, 2023, following a long illness, at the age of 83.
"The words stunned me into immediate tears," Winfrey wrote.