What Did Lisa Niemi Swayze Do With Her Wedding Ring From Patrick Swayze?

It’s been 15 years since Patrick Swayze passed away after a battle with pancreatic cancer, but you’d be hard-pressed to find someone whose memories of the actor and dancer have dimmed (“Nobody puts baby in a corner” remains one of the most iconic lines in all of cinema to this day). This is especially true of his wife, Lisa Niemi Swayze, who says he is still a fixture in her life even though she has since found love again (she married jeweler Albert DePrisco in 2014). “Just because somebody’s gone doesn’t end your relationship with them,” Lisa said on Today last year. “We spent 34 years together, and that’s always going to be a part of my life and who I am.” 

Those 34 years—during which they were partners both off the stage and on, regularly starring in films, plays, and dance sets together—began when Lisa and Patrick were a couple of kids: The high school sweethearts met as teenagers at his mother’s Houston, Texas, dance studio. “We had a little contentious start because he had a kind of reputation as a Casanova, I had a reputation as a bad girl, and we were supposed to stay away from each other,” Lisa said on a podcast, per People. “[But] I knew that something was going to happen between us that was significant and I had every confidence in every bone that that was going to happen.” Patrick felt the same way: “I knew she was the smartest chick I’d ever met in my life,” he told People in 2007.

The relationship that followed was a whirlwind: After high school, both Patrick and Lisa moved to New York City to study dance at the Joffrey Ballet—and by 1975, when Lisa was 19 and Patrick was 23, they were married. Though we know a few details about their intimate wedding—Lisa wore a handmade dress for the ceremony that took place back in Texas, in the backyard of her childhood home; a party followed at the dance studio where their love story began—we know essentially nothing about how Patrick proposed or if he popped the question with a diamond engagement ring. Lisa did, however, wear a simple gold wedding band throughout the entirety of the couple’s marriage—but what did she do with it in the years after his death, ahead of her second marriage?

As you’d expect, Lisa continued to wear the gold band for over a year after his passing. She finally removed it in 2012—and explained why she felt it was time to do so in an interview with New York Live, per the Huffington Post. “About a year ago or eight months ago, all of a sudden I had this bizarre thought and it didn't really make sense to me, but I had a moment when I went, ‘You know what this ring says? I'm married to his physical form,’” she said. “And actually my connection to him, since he has been gone, has been much deeper than that. And I felt like in a way, for me personally, wearing the ring was lying about the depth of our relationship.”

Though Lisa hasn’t opened up about where the ring is now, it’s more than likely still in her possession; the couple did not have children, which rules out the possibility of Lisa passing down the gold band that meant so much to her for so long. And while she now wears the diamond engagement ring her second husband Albert proposed with in December 2013, that doesn’t mean Patrick is far from her memory—in fact, she regularly posts about him on social. In her most recent Instagram post on August 18, she honored his birthday by sharing a black-and-white photo of the late actor. “Unpacking boxes I ran into this gorgeous pic taken by the inimintable @HerbRitts,” she wrote in her caption. “HAPPY BIRTHDAY today to my beautiful, special man. You're in my heart forever.”