Diane Sawyer on Last Day on 'Good Morning America'

Dec. 11, 2009— -- "Good Morning America."

With that, we were off and running at 7:01 in the morning on Jan. 18, 1999. Charlie and Diane, side by side.

Our first story that morning, a rare F4 tornado hits Jackson, Tenn.

And what I learned from you in 11 years of searching through the waters of Katrina and the wreckage of the tsunami in Southeast Asia, is that ... if we are together, we can bear more.

All told, together we circled the globe 14 times, more than 350,000 miles in 11 years, questioning world leaders.

In Iran, an angry mob yelling "Death to America" at me.

And, then, unexpectedly, one of the screaming women looked me in the face and said, "I love you."

We traveled to the Mideast together during the war in Iraq, and on the noisy MedEvac plane carrying some of the wounded. We learned that life cannot be stopped. And on we went to find stories of the women in Afghanistan and the icebergs in Finland.

In South Africa, the girls at Oprah's school school taught us the song Bambilayla, which you sing in the poorest parts in the slum. It means "hold on."

There were songs from the living, and a message to us from the dying.

Beloved professor Randy Pausch, stricken with pancreatic cancer, and writing "The Last Lecture" that would fill us with love, even for the toughest days we get to spend on earth.

Charlie and I together became parents of the first live morning broadcast of babies being born.