Niemi also recalled a dream she had in which Swayze gave her his blessing to remarry.
Patrick Swayze’s widow, Lisa Niemi said she received a lot of backlash when she found love following her husband’s death.
Appearing on an episode of Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes’ podcast Amy and T.J. in early April, Niemi reflected on how Swayze fans reacted to the news that she and her second husband, Albert DePrisco, tied the knot.
“‘It’s like, ‘How dare you.’ There are some pretty rabid Patrick fans out there who think I’m evil, just don’t like me because I was married to him,” she said.
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Niemi was married to Swayze for over three decades before he passed away in 2009. She met DePrisco three years after Swayze’s passing and admitted that if it happened any sooner, she wouldn’t have been ready.
“There was a lot of flak that came on that, a lot of criticism, and you just learn to deal with it and move on,” she said of fans who disapproved of her moving on. “But it’s like, I was so tempted so many times to say, ‘Hey girlfriend, stand in my shoes, tell me about it. Go ahead, tell me just because I lost my husband that I don’t love him anymore.'”
“How could you say that? Ridiculous,” the 67 year old added.
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When speaking on the subject of grief, she admitted to being thankful when DePrisco — a jeweler — came into her life. The pair were introduced through mutual friends.
“I didn’t realize just how lonely I was until much, much later,” Niemi told Robach and Holmes about life after Swayze’s death. “I’m a ‘buck up kinda girl’. I can take it. This is not loneliness I’m feeling, I’m dealing with grief. It was so wonderful when [DePrisco] came in my life.”
And when DePrisco proposed her first reaction was, “Oh s–t,” because she couldn’t imagine remarrying. However, she felt at ease with the idea of marriage again after seeing Swayze in a dream where she believes he gave her his “blessing.”
“He came up to me and he put his arms around me,” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘I can’t marry Albert now because you’re back.’ and he just looked at me. What his words that came to me were, ‘I know you love me.’ It was like he was letting me know that it didn’t change how we felt about each other in our relationship with each other.”
Niemi went on to say that she still has “a relationship with” Swayze despite him not “physically” being here, adding that the love she developed for DePrisco doesn’t affect her love for Swayze “one bit”.
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Though it’s been more than a decade since his death, Niemi said that “it’s not always easy” to speak about her late husband.
“It brings up memories that are, you know, not all that pleasant,” she revealed. “But I tell you what, I know what these people feel like to fight for somebody they love. And to do it with a disease that has so little resources. It’s like, ‘Yeah, we all got to go at some point but give us a fighting chance.'”
Swayze was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and battled the disease for 22 months before he died at the age of 57.
