She wrote: “Hi sis, it’s me,” she said. “I need to talk to you about something. It’s some bad news, I’m afraid. I have stage four breast cancer.”
Discussing the last time she saw her sister, the actress wrote: “She seemed full of joie de vivre as we chatted happily about our Christmas plans in Los Angeles and about going to Hawaii with her children and grandchildren after that.”
Almost one year after her sister’s passing, Joan opened up about her loss on This Morning. “I miss her terribly,” she said. “Grief is a process. I think I cried for two or three months, then you get over it and accept it in a begrudging way. Then you get angry, like why did this happen to her?”
“There’s no good thing about it, but the way around it is thinking of it like we are just in different places, as if she’s just in LA.”
As well as Jackie, Joan has a half-sister, Natasha Collins Foster, and her brother Bill.