It’s been 15 years since Patrick Swayze handed away after a battle with pancreatic most cancers, nonetheless you’d be hard-pressed to hunt out anyone whose recollections of the actor and dancer have dimmed (“Nobody locations baby in a nook” stays one of many important iconic traces in all of cinema to at the moment). That could be very true of his partner, Lisa Niemi Swayze, who says he is nonetheless a fixture in her life regardless that she has since found love as soon as extra (she married jeweler Albert DePrisco in 2014). “Just because anybody’s gone doesn’t end your relationship with them,” Lisa talked about on Proper this second last yr. “We spent 34 years collectively, and that’s always going to be a part of my life and who I am.”
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These 34 years—all through which that they had been companions every off the stage and on, often starring in films, performs, and dance items collectively—began when Lisa and Patrick had been a number of kids: The highschool sweethearts met as kids at his mother’s Houston, Texas, dance studio. “We had considerably contentious start on account of he had a type of reputation as a Casanova, I had a reputation as a nasty woman, and we had been presupposed to keep away from each other,” Lisa talked about on a podcast, per People. “[But] I knew that one factor was going to happen between us that was necessary and I had every confidence in every bone that that was going to happen.” Patrick felt the similar means: “I knew she was the smartest chick I’d ever met in my life,” he knowledgeable People in 2007.
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The connection that adopted was a whirlwind: After highschool, every Patrick and Lisa moved to New York Metropolis to examine dance on the Joffrey Ballet—and by 1975, when Lisa was 19 and Patrick was 23, that they had been married. Though everyone knows a few particulars about their intimate marriage ceremony ceremony—Lisa wore a handmade costume for the ceremony that occurred once more in Texas, throughout the yard of her childhood home; a celebration adopted on the dance studio the place their love story began—everyone knows primarily nothing about how Patrick proposed or if he popped the question with a diamond engagement ring. Lisa didnonetheless, placed on a straightforward gold marriage ceremony ceremony band all by means of the entire thing of the couple’s marriage—nonetheless what did she do with it throughout the years after his dying, ahead of her second marriage?
As you’d anticipate, Lisa continued to placed on the gold band for over a yr after his passing. She lastly eradicated it in 2012—and outlined why she felt it was time to take motion in an interview with New York Dwellper the Huffington Submit. “Just a few yr previously or eight months previously, unexpectedly I had this bizarre thought and it didn’t truly make sense to me, nonetheless I had a second as soon as I went, ‘ what this ring says? I’m married to his bodily kind,’” she talked about. “And actually my connection to him, since he has been gone, has been lots deeper than that. And I felt like in a method, for me personally, sporting the ring was lying regarding the depth of our relationship.”
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Though Lisa hasn’t opened up in regards to the place the ring is now, it’s larger than seemingly nonetheless in her possession; the couple did not have children, which pointers out the potential of Lisa passing down the gold band that meant lots to her for thus prolonged. And whereas she now wears the diamond engagement ring her second husband Albert proposed with in December 2013, that doesn’t indicate Patrick is method from her memory—in precise truth, she often posts about him on social. In her newest Instagram put up on August 18, she honored his birthday by sharing a black-and-white {photograph} of the late actor. “Unpacking bins I ran into this lovely pic taken by the inimintable @HerbRitts,” she wrote in her caption. “HAPPY BIRTHDAY within the current day to my pretty, specific man. You’re in my coronary coronary heart perpetually.”