Patti Smith Recalls Last Memories of Robert Mapplethorpe Being a ‘Blessing’

Patti Smith opened up about how her last memories with Robert Mapplethorpe were like a “blessing.”

During the Thursday, Jan. 8 episode of the All There Is with Anderson Cooper podcast, the singer-songwriter and poet reflected on her final moments with the photographer, who was her lover, friend and confidant.

According to Smith, 79, Mapplethorpe’s death at the age of 42 in 1989 from AIDS, was the first in a “string of losses” she was about to endure.

“He was only 42,” she recalled, noting that her “greatest accomplishments” came in her late 50s and 60s, as a writer. “Robert, he had so much work, so many visions, so much to do, so much capability.”

Smith said that she mourns what he didn’t get to achieve.

“I feel the pain of incompletion,” she said. “I could imagine what he would have done.”

Smith then recalled meeting Mapplethorpe at 20 when she was looking for a place to stay and going to someone’s old apartment. The person who opened the door told her to ask his roommate if they knew where the people who had moved out lived.

“I open the door and there’s this boy. He’s lying on this little white iron bed asleep with all these shepherd boy curls and just, I was just looking at him and he — it’s like he sensed that someone was there and opened his eyes and smiled,” she recalled.

Smith said that their “whole life was built on that smile,” which ended up being a full-circle moment for her in his final moments.

The “Because the Night” musician recalled that Mapplethorpe was “suffering” the last time she saw him alive.

“It was inhuman what he was suffering at the end of his life,” said Smith. “And I spent a day with him and he was able to calm. He didn’t cough so much.”

She continued, “We were alone. And he said, ‘Patti, I’m dying.’ I knew I was never gonna see him again.”

Smith noted that she had to return to Detroit and he was going to travel to Boston for a new treatment.

Smith waited as he fell asleep and when she was almost to the elevator, she “wanted to look at him one more time.”

“I went back and he was still sleeping, and I stood there and I swear to you, he opened his eyes and smiled,” she said. “So my first and last image of Robert was that welcoming smile and everything else in between.”

For Smith, it was “this symmetry.” “It was like a blessing,” she said.

Smith’s most recent book Bread of Angels’, was released on Nov. 4 last year, which was Mapplethorpe’s birthday and the anniversary of her husband Fred Smith’s death.

Mapplethorpe had taken photos for her 2010 memoir Just Kids and her 1975 LP Horses.

“It took a decade to write this book, grappling with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime,” Smith told PEOPLE at the time. “I’m hoping that people will find something they need.”