Vicki Kennedy describes husband's cancer battle

CHICAGO — The widow of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy told Oprah Winfrey in an interview broadcast Wednesday that even as her husband knew he was dying of brain cancer he had been "in training" to make sure he had enough strength to attend President Barack Obama's inauguration.

In the most extensive interview since her husband's death in August, Vicki Kennedy said she wouldn't try to run for her husband's former U.S. Senate seat and described how he battled brain cancer — but she would not talk about the last thing he said to her before dying.

"I think I'll just keep that one to myself," she told Winfrey on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

During the hour-long interview was taped Friday, Kennedy was sometimes joined on stage by her two grown children as well as Ted Kennedy Jr. She described her husband's seizure in May 2008, which led to his diagnosis of the brain cancer that ended his life at the age of 77.

"We went from thinking he had lost his life, to thinking that he'd had a stroke, to thinking that he wouldn't speak to thinking that he was OK, to then finding out that he might have a brain tumor all in the span of about three hours," she said.

She also told Winfrey about how her husband kept working on his book after his diagnosis and even was calling colleagues in the Senate to talk about strategy to push through legislation as he was traveling to Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. to undergo brain surgery.

"It was an inspiration, really, to watch how Teddy grappled with such a grave diagnosis and always looked forward with hope," she said.

After watching a clip of her husband's speech at the Democratic National Convention, Kennedy said her husband, despite being told initially that he had just a few months to live, was determined to survive long enough to see Obama sworn in as president.

"He was in training to be there in January," she said. "He was exercising every single day to be strong enough to be there," and even calculated how many steps he would have to take that day.

During the interview, Winfrey held Ted Kennedy's memoir "True Compass," which was released shortly after Kennedy's death, and read from it a number of times. As of Tuesday, the book was 12th on the New York Times Best Sellers list for nonfiction titles.

Kennedy also adamantly told Winfrey that she had no intention of ever running for the Senate seat that her husband held for nearly a half century when the host mentioned about "talk" that she might run.

"No, no, not for me," she said. "We had Sen. Kennedy in our household."