Watch Now: The Stars of Desperate Housewives Who Just Won't Die!

Exclusive! We talked with Andrea Bowen and Kathryn Joosten from the ABC hit show

In just two short months the women of Wisteria Lane will be missing from our television screens, but not without some shocking final episodes! Yes, even more shocking than last week's episode.

We sat down with two of our favorite Desperate Housewives stars who have managed to escape the many tragedies that plagued the street over the past eight seasons, and they revealed to us the secret to surviving a TV drama and what's ahead for Wisteria Lane...

"Every time I turned around I was getting killed!" jokes Kathryn Joosten. After being killed off on many shows including The West Wing, General Hospital and Scrubs, Joosten has survived eight years without the Grim Reaper knocking on her Wisteria Lane door…until now. (Cue the dramatic music please!)

Joosten, who has been battling lung cancer off and on for the past 10 years, says she was excited to spread awareness through her character Karen McCluskey this season. "It's no secret that I do have lung cancer and have had it for quite a while," Joosten tells us. "I think that'd be a terrific idea, an opportunity to really get some public awareness, some discussion, maybe some information. The public is so phenomenally ignorant about lung cancer."

There was only one requirement Joosten had for creator Marc Cherry to mimic her real-life experiences: Keep it real. She explains, "When he approached me about it and said, ‘Can we do this?' I said, ‘Yes, provided that you keep it honest. If you try to jazz it up with some kind of soap opera story crap, I won't do it, I just simply will not do the lines. And so it has to be honest, it has to be straightforward.'"

When Joosten first joined the cast eight years ago, she made a pact with Cherry. "When I got the job at Wisteria Lane I said to Marc, ‘I'll do this but you've got to promise me that you wont kill me off!' And so he said publicly that he wouldn't. He said many times after that that he had lived to regret it but it was a promise," she laughs.

Andrea Bowen, who first joined the show when she was 13 (at the time of the pilot), describes the "bittersweet" ending of the show: "It's been almost a third of my life so it's very sad; it's like the family is falling apart." Even though her character has survived all the twists and turns of the plot, the 22-year-old actress explains how nerve-racking it was every time a script would arrive. "Everyone who wasn't a housewife would kind of read the script with like one eye closed because we were so nervous that we were going to be the ones who died."

Luckily for Bowen, there was one rule she knew creator Marc Cherry wouldn't break. Bowen reveals, "I kind of had a little bit of assurance. They won't kill a kid; they can't do that." Maybe not, but worse things have happened on Wisteria Lane…

Watch our full interviews above to learn more about Kathryn's death pact and Andrea's hidden love!