14 DAY TRIAL // In September 2009, actor Patrick Swayze passed away from pancreatic cancer. He was only 57 years old and he left behind his wife of 34 years, Lisa Niemi. Until now, she has rarely spoken out about life with Patrick and what it was like to lose him, but she’s now opening up about his battle with alcoholism in a brand-new interview cited by the Daily Mail.
As fans would know, Patrick went to rehab in 2006, which is precisely when his alcoholism got so bad that she even got to a point where she was afraid for her life, Lisa reveals. Life with him was nothing short of a nightmare and, no matter what she kept telling him, he wouldn’t understand and / or accept he needed help. In the end, all it took was for her to move out of the house temporarily for the actor to see he couldn’t keep on living like that.
“For me the worst thing about him was the drinking. He had a different personality when he drank that much. He was the nicest man on the planet unless he’d had a drink. People or animals could have got hurt when he was like that. It’s not good to be around anyone like that,” Lisa says of Patrick’s drinking. One night, she escaped the house while he was asleep, saying she wouldn’t have even dreamed of making a run for it with him awake. “Because he’d shoot the tires off the car. I didn’t want to take any chances,” Mrs. Niemi explains.
After rehab, though, Swayze became the man she fell in love with all over again – but a second shock came when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and he was told he did not have more than a couple of years left, half a year at worst. During that time, Lisa rediscovered “the best of who he was,” she says. “We told each other we loved each other over and over again. I never left the room without telling him. It still didn’t feel like enough,” she goes on to add.
Patrick Swayze’s battle and, up to a point, determination to survive pancreatic cancer despite the odds is seen as a beautiful act of courage. Lisa Niemi stood by him throughout the entire ordeal, and both documented it in the memoirs “Time of My Life,” in which Swayze speaks of his journey from desperation and fear to courage and, eventually, acceptance.