Lisa was married to Patrick, her teen sweetheart, for 34 years before the Dirty Dancing star succumbed to pancreatic cancer on Sept. 14.

Lisa, 54, spoke about Swayze’s passing alongside Elizabeth Edwards at Maria Shriver’s 2009 California Women’s Conference in Long Beach on Tuesday. She revealed that dealing with loss is very new to her. “I thought during the 22 months of my husband’s illness that it gave me all this time to get used to the idea of losing him. I found for myself that when I actually got to this point I said, ‘No no no’… it wasn’t the same at all.”

Lisa credits the support of close friends with keeping her strong.

“I’ve gotten great advice from all my friends and I’m just going with the flow. I just know I have to go through it and it’s going to take as long as it’s going to take.”

Lisa admitted that she “wanted to, at some point, feel like I had the courage to go on and have a good life. And in the first few days after [Patrick's death], I felt like that would almost be a betrayal. That I would be letting him down somehow, and of course everyone’s saying to me, ‘Trust me, this is what he would have wanted.’ And it’s true… in a way, I would be letting him down to not do that.”

Lisa — who co-authored a memoir with Patrick before his passing — said carrying on is hard, but she knows that is what she must do.

“It’s a brutal truth that you have to go on without that person, but unfortunately, that’s what happens in life.”

Lisa will appear on The Oprah Winfrey Show this Friday, Oct. 30.

According to a press statement from Harpo Productions, O has snaggedd Neimi’s “first one-on-one interview since the death of her husband.” The beloved actor died Sept. 14 at age 57 of pancreatic cancer.

Patrick and Lisa met and fell in love when a then-16-year-old Lisa was student at his mother’s dance studio. The pair were married for 34 years. Lisa will promote the book she wrote with Swayze, The Time of My Life.

The beloved screen star lost his battle with the inoperable disease earlier this month, but on the pages of his autobiography, Patrick recalls the day he learned he was suffering from the disease.

“When my doctors at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles said the words ‘pancreatic cancer,’ a single thought popped into my head: I’m a dead man,” Swayze says. “Now, a lot of things go through your head when you get a death sentence handed to you, starting with: ‘Why me?’ It’s hard not to sink into bitterness … For me, that initial shock quickly turned into self-criticism and blame.”

“I just stared at him in shock. I had gone in for a simple gastrointestinal procedure, then all of a sudden — surprise! You could be dead before springtime!” he continued. “Fear sliced through me. What the f*** had just happened? I had been so excited about the upswing my life was on. Now it all seemed like a cruel joke. I couldn’t be dying…I had too much to live for! I just couldn’t face the idea that life as I’d always known it was over, that there was a disease inside me that would grow and mutate and eventually kill me. I didn’t know where I would find the strength to deal with it.”

Defiant until the end, the star — whose filmography includes The Outsiders, Dirty Dancing, and Ghost –admitted he was “not ready to go” and vowed not to stop fighting the cancer “before he was good and ready.”

“So I said to my doctor, ‘Show me where the enemy is and I’ll fight him.’ It was “the most challenging, eye-opening battle I’ve ever had,” he continued.

“Facing your own mortality is the quickest way possible to find out what you’re made of. It strips away all the bullshit and exposes every part of you, your strength, your weaknesses, your sense of self, your soul. It also leads you to confront life’s hardest questions.”

Simon & Schuster audiobook producer Elisa Shokoff worked with Patrick and his wife Lisa Niemi recording his audiobook. She recalls how the actor battle terrible pain to finish the recordings.They would begin at dusk and work late into the night.

“Before, in-between and after recording, it was clear that Patrick was gravely ill and in terrible pain. But when he was actually reading, the weight of his illness seemed to lift and it was easy to forget that he was even sick. From him, a wonderful, kind, cowboy-storyteller emerged, full of life and humor and a heightened compassion. The resulting audiobook is a testament to the great and graceful performer that he was.”

On the pages of his memoir The Time of My Life — available Tues., Sept. 29 — Patrick reveals that the co-stars didn’t get along quite so well when the cameras weren’t rolling.

“We did have a few moments of friction when we were tired or after a long day of shooting. [Grey] seemed particularly emotional, sometimes bursting into tears if someone criticized her,” Swayze says of Grey’s needling mood swings. “Other times, she slipped into silly moods, forcing us to do scenes over and over again when she’d start laughing.”

“I was on overdrive for the whole shoot – staying up all night to do rewrites, squeezing in dance rehearsals, shooting various scenes – and was exhausted a lot of the time,” he recalls. “I didn’t have a whole lot of patience for doing multiple retakes…”

Nonetheless, Jennifer managed to impress Patrick with her performance. He credited her with doing “truly phenomenal job,” adding that “in many ways, she made the movie.”

Swayze went from Broadway dancer to Hollywood star in box-office hits like Dirty Dancing and Ghost. He died on September 14 after a nearly two year battle with pancreatic cancer.

Ashley Hamilton, the son of former DWTS competitor George Hamilton and model Alana Stewart, was the first from the celebrity males to go. Also eliminated was Grammy-winning singer Macy Gray, which took last season’s winning professional Jonathan Roberts out of the competition.

In addition to the eliminations, Dancing paid tribute to Patrick Swayze. The late actor — who died of pancreatic cancer last week — was a supporter of the program and even visited DWTS during its first season.

Several of the show’s professionals recreated some of Swayze’s most memorable numbers for the touching tribute.

“We’re honored and privileged to be able to do that for him, his family, and all of his fans,” Derek Hough said.

Professional Maksim Chmerkovskiy added, “I wish we could also do a Michael Jackson tribute.”

The Dirty Dancing star died last week after a nearly two year battle with the disease. Shortly after, Somers came under fire for comments she made about Swayze in an interview with Toronto’s National Post.


“They took this beautiful man and they basically put poison in him,” Somers told National Post columnist Shinan Govani. “Why couldn’t they have built him up nutritionally and gotten rid of the toxins in his body?”

Somers – who used holistic methods to treat her breast cancer in 2001 – responded to incident on her website Monday.

“In a casual conversation at a private party (with someone who never identified himself as a reporter) at the Toronto Film Festival last week, I was asked about this beloved actor. It was never my intention to make an official statement about his passing,” Suzanne wrote. “I was not informed or aware I was being interviewed. I would never have been so insensitive as to offer a public statement so close to his untimely passing. I sincerely apologize if my comment has caused any additional pain to his family during this difficult time. I send my deepest condolences for their loss.”

The public rebuttal hasn’t stopped Whoopi from taking Suzanne to task over her remarks.

“In case she doesn’t know, Patrick did everything and went everywhere to try and stay healthy as long as he could,” The View co-host said of her Ghost co-star on Wednesday. “That he’s been gone a week and this statement came out is bad timing and bad taste and Suzanne, you know better,” Whoopi continued. “And I’m not sure that’s not what you meant to do, but you should have thought about it”

The Dirty Dancing actor – who lost his battle against pancreatic cancer last week – always wanted children with his wife of 33 years, Lisa Niemi, but the couple was devastated when she suffered a miscarriage three months into her pregnancy. Following the miscarriage, the couple continued trying to conceive, but Lisa never got pregnant again.

“I couldn’t wait to become a dad, to have a child with this woman I loved so dearly. And I wanted to be the best father I could be – the kind of father my dad had been to me,” Patrick writes in his memoir, The Time Of My Life, on sale Sept. 29. “I felt completely crushed with grief. We wanted to try again, but the loss had been so devastating that we just couldn’t do it right away. We figured we had plenty more years ahead of us. Eventually, we did start trying again hoping Lisa would get pregnant. But she never did.”

Swayze, 57, died on September 14 after a nearly two year battle against pancreatic cancer, likely brought on by years of cigarette smoking.

The former Three’s Company star gave her opinion on the Ghost star’s death while speaking at a party for Tom Ford’s movie, A Single Man, at the Toronto Film Festival last Thursday. In a new interview with Toronto National Post columnist Shinan Govani , Suzanne — who has a book coming out on cancer — said:

“They took this beautiful man and they basically put poison in him. Why couldn’t they have built him up nutritionally and gotten rid of the toxins in his body?”

In 2001, the Thighmaster frontwoman revealed she was battling breast cancer. After having surgery to remove the lump followed by radiation treatment, she refused chemotherapy against the advice of her doctors in favor of alternative treatment.

“I hate to be this controversial,” she continued. “I’m a singer-dancer-comedienne. But we have an epidemic going on, and I have to say it.”

Swayze lost his battle with pancreatic cancer on Monday, but he’ll be best remembered for his breakout role as Catskills resort dance teacher Johnny Castle in Dirty Dancing, a low-budget 1987 film that would become a cult classic.

The town of Lake Lure will remember Swaye during a memorial service at 7 p.m. Saturday at Firefly Cove, a housing development that was Camp Chimney Rock when Dancing was filmed. Many of the film’s outdoor scenes were filmed there, as was Johnny’s cabin.

Visitors who attend the public service will be asked to make a donation to the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network.

Once voted PEOPLE Magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive,” Patrick Swayze could have had his pick of girls — but there was only one that he ever wanted. From the moment Swayze, then 19, saw Lisa Niemi, 16, in his mother’s dance class, he knew she was the one for him.

“All these girls were studying with my mum and I used to go and check them out in their leotards – it was like being in a candy store,” he recalled later. “She didn’t buy any of my nonsense. We spent half our dates in total silence as she wouldn’t talk to me if she thought I was putting on an act.”

In 1975, the sweethearts tied the knot in the backyard of Lisa’s Houston home.

“How grateful I am that you chose to love me,” the actor wrote, according to ABC’s Good Morning America, which played an audio clip of the actor reading from his memoir on Wednesday.

“I know that because of you, I’ve found my spirit. I saw the man I wanted to be. You are my woman, my lover, my mate and my lady. I loved you forever, I love you now and I will love you forever more.”

Patrick was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer in January 2008 and underwent chemotherapy, all the while continuing a grueling work schedule, playing FBI agent Charles Barker in the A&E drama The Beast.

Patrick & Lisa’s book, The Time Of My Life, is due out Sept. 29 from Simon & Schuster.