PATRICK Swayze’s grieving wife Lisa Niemi has revealed how she left him six years ago when her husband descended into a period of heavy drinking and “very dark thoughts.”
In an interview with Oprah Winfrey — her first since Patrick’s death in September — Niemi says she and Swayze spent most of 2003 living apart from each other.
“He was imploding pretty badly,” Lisa said. “I didn’t think he was going to live through it and I didn’t want to watch that.”
But the couple — who first met in 1970 when Swayze was 18 years old and Niemi, 14 — reconciled and regained their happiness — only to be tested again when the Dirty Dancing star was diagnosed 22 months ago with pancreatic cancer and was told he had three months to live.
“It was mind numbing,” Niemi says. When faced with the devastating information, “You think you’re going to get these terrific illuminations,” she says, but that didn’t happen. “I looked around and I said, ‘This is awful.’”
Niemi also revealed that she’s still struggling to come to terms with Swayze’s death.
“When we first had the diagnosis, I cried in front of him,” she told Winfrey. “I said, ‘This is the one time I’m going to do this…’
“When he looked at me and looked in my eyes, I wanted him to know he was going to be OK, no matter what,” she continued. “Both of us had to deal with this illness, but he’s the one that was going to pay the ultimate price.”
On the day he died, Patrick was “very comfortable,” Niemi said, noting that she was by his side the entire time. “I was afraid to leave his side, and luckily I was so happy I was there,” she told Winfrey.
Since his passing, Lisa said she still feels Patrick around her.
“I feel him here. I feel like he hasn’t left. I can feel every contour of his hand in mine,” she said.
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