Worth Fighting For: Love, Loss, and Moving Forward

by Lisa Niemi Swayze; Lisa Niemi

  And it was working . . .

  The infection was resolving, he was “coming off” his Dilaudid moment caused by his new pump, and Donny had taken him to Cedars to have the excess fluid in his belly drained off, which had started to accumulate for various reasons that are too frustrating to mention. The fluid was drained on a Friday. On Saturday we loaded up the car with all his supplies, our laptops, sweat pants, and flip-flops, to drive out what we now called our “Bat Cave Exit” off our property in Los Angeles.

  But before we got in our GTR (the high-performance car that we had nicknamed “The Beast”), Patrick pulled at the tubing that stuck out of the pain pump pack and snaked its way up and into his port.

  “What am I going to do with this?” he said in an unhappy “I told you so” voice. “I’m not going to walk around with this.”

  “Look!” I said brightly and started to wrap and coil the tube around him, like I was dressing a little boy for school, “You put it in the fanny pack . . . and . . . and then the hose can go up through your shirt . . .”

  It didn’t tuck as easily as I thought it would, but I remained positive, “See? You can hardly see it.” That wasn’t going to stop us from going. No way. We plopped ourselves into the car, Paul pushed open the gate, and we got on the freeway and headed south.

  We were on our way to treat ourselves to a luxurious week at a spa nestled in the hills just north of San Diego where we would recuperate, indulge in being treated, and spend quality time working on Patrick’s book.

  Chapter 17

  OUTRUNNING THE

  AMBULANCE CHASERS

  Standing beside the GTR, aka The Beast,

  holding three-month-old Kuma.

  WHAT WE CALLED the “Bat Cave Exit” off our five-acre property in Los Angeles came about as a way to thwart the paparazzi. We had our main gate that everyone pretty much knew about. When Patrick drove out this gate with Donny, I’d always tell him in a sugary-sweet voice, “Just remember to smile, honey!” because photographers were lying in wait outside. But we eventually found another way of exiting, at the far, opposite end of our property. It was kind of a hassle, and involved driving over a bit of lawn, but it worked, and as far as I was concerned, I was damned if the paparazzi were going to follow us all the time!

  Even when we used the Bat Cave Exit, I remained extra-vigilant, made Patrick duck down out of sight in his seat, and flung my dark hoodie over the top of him. Trust me, he didn’t like doing this. I mean, he doesn’t “run” from anybody. But I was very insistent, and I think it was easier for him to oblige than to refuse me.

  Sure, photographers could take Patrick’s picture, I mean, what’s the big deal? Well, it was a big deal. He was sick, and he was in a life-and-death struggle, and I didn’t want anyone making money off his illness. You know these magazines say it’s “the public’s right to know.” Well, Patrick is not a public servant, and this information is not in the public interest. He’s a movie star. And the “the public’s right to know” defense is just an excuse to use his hardship and deeply personal struggle as crass entertainment. I wasn’t about to make it easy for them to rake in the cash over this horrible and taxing disease.

  People were surprised that we didn’t jump up and counter all the false reports about Patrick during his illness. What they don’t understand is that, if you do that, you’re playing their game. It puts you in the position of always fielding the balls they throw. You might as well be one of them, since you’d be participating in making them more money. They’re calling the shots, getting you to respond to whatever comes into their heads, and gaining critical access that they wouldn’t have otherwise. We were not going to let a tabloid decide for us what we were going to say and not say. Ya know?

  There are so many reasons why it is better not to respond, not the least of which is your dignity. There was one erroneous report in particular that incensed Donny. He couldn’t believe that we weren’t going to do anything about this hurtful article. I had to assure him of what I already knew after being in the public eye so often for so many years, “Trust me, it doesn’t feel good now, but we’re going to take the high road. You’ll see, it may be years from now, but you’ll see that it was the right choice.” And making the right choice for you as a human being doesn’t always give you instant gratification. But in the long run, it matters, to you.

  But does it hurt? Yes, it does. Hey, look, women are devastated when photos of them looking fat are printed . . . Need I say more?

  We always had to be very careful what we did say in the press about Patrick’s illness. I tended to be too open and “tell it like it is.” And our team always pulled me back. And very early in this situation, I saw that the people guiding us were absolutely right. If we gave too much information, it would backfire on us. It gave the media a foot in the door, it led to further questions, further speculation, further demands for answers. And after you gave all of that information, it still could be interpreted however that press entity chose to do so. Which would lead to further questions . . .

  There were also leaks from within our trusted circle. Friends of friends, friends of family who were “just checking in” with his mom or brother, or God knows who else. It’s terrible, but unfortunately we aren’t the first ones to have been betrayed in this way. We had to warn family members not to share any information with anyone they wouldn’t trust with their life, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. And in a funny way, this was particularly hard for my mother-in-law, Patsy, who is very open and can be very talkative. We’d have to remind her and remind her, “Don’t give any interviews to these people on the phone. Just say ‘no comment’ and hang up.” “I do! I do, do that!” she retorted. We’d roll our eyes when we’d read another report quoting her, but couldn’t help but chuckle. I mean, although I’d get ticked off at her, I couldn’t help but be charmed. “Patsy,” I’d say, “when you say, ‘Leave him alone; this is heartbreaking; he doesn’t deserve this; I know he’s going to fight; I just don’t want him to suffer,’ you are giving an interview.” She’d sigh a little helplessly, “Oh . . . I just don’t know how to get them off the phone!” That Texas-bred lady was just too polite to hang up on them.

  There also appeared to be leaks back on the set of The Beast. And when one person asked me what was the matter with spreading some of Patrick’s “good news” to counter all the negative things printed, I had to say, as kindly as I could, “It would be nice to make that choice for ourselves. It’s his life, and my life. We’d like to decide our destiny, not someone else. No matter how well-intentioned.”

  Wow, I sound like I’m already in my tabloid tirade. I was saving it for later, but I guess the time has come now. Hah!

  —

  AS THEY say, a picture is worth a thousand words. And there were photographers gunning for Patrick. Donny and I got pretty good at spotting them on the streets outside our gate. They were pretty clever at where they’d position themselves, sometimes in several places. Donny in particular became good at drawing them out and making them miserable. If you haven’t figured it out, the Swayzes are not pushovers. They don’t take things lying down, and though Donny has a heart of gold, he’s no exception to the Swayze rule.

  It’s impossible to talk about dealing with the paparazzi without focusing on Donny. He was the star of the show!

  Some of the things he did were . . . He got all of them to follow him on a wild goose chase into a park where he then revealed himself, busting all the paparazzi following him, at which point they got back into their cars, disgusted, and drove off. He drove his van onto Foothill Boulevard and spontaneously pulled right in front of a paparazzo’s car, totally blocking his view of our street, and sat staring at him, like, “Tell me to move. I dare you.” He’d run interference by driving out ahead of us, sometimes propping up a blanket with a hat in the passenger seat as a Patrick decoy. An avid cyclist, Donny would scope out where they were parked on his rides, peering into one vehicle and coming back to describe how
it was outfitted with a camera on a tripod, and so on. We were also told how these vehicles have generators that will keep the air-conditioning going on those long, hot summer days . . . I was wondering how they managed that.

  In one of the last confrontations, Donny spotted a car with very dark windows parked on Foothill, close to the entrance to the freeway. He pulled his bike over to stare into the windows, but they were so dark, he couldn’t see anything. So he rode back to the house, got our mega-bright Coleman Powermate flashlight, and rode back over and shone the beam right into the interior of the front seat. There he saw a man sitting. And the man was staring at Donny with . . . hatred. Slowly, grimly, the man turned the key and drove off.

  With a kind of secret glee Donny confided to Patrick and me that he hoped one of them would come over to confront him. He had one sentence prepared, and he would use all his amazing acting talent and his expertise at playing lots of tough guys to say, “Just to let you know, you’re messing with my family, and I’m not afraid to go to prison.” When he told us that, we laughed and laughed, and the thought of it kept me chuckling for weeks.

  Of course this whole situation was emotionally tough on him also, as well as the rest of the family. And when he went into his usual, local grocery store and saw his brother on the front of a tabloid magazine that was saying something awful about him once again, Donny went to each checkout line, picked up all the magazines, and turned them all backward in their slots. He didn’t say a word, just went and did it, then he just checked out his items and left. What’s pretty damn incredible is that when he went into the store again, the magazines were gone. Donny could only surmise that they took them down out of respect for him and his brother. It was either that, or they saw him coming and started running around saying, “There’s that crazy Swayze again. Quick! Take all the magazines out before he sees them!”

  Donny’s my hero! So many people would just let themselves be pushed around. I know that my solutions were to make Patrick duck down in the passenger seat and weave in and out of the back streets and try to be clever about parking spaces. It was so “girlie” of me . . . Donny faced it head on. And I loved him for that. He’s someone you’d want on your side, damn it! He set an example for me in life. And I learned a good lesson from him.

  —

  MAY 2009 was one of those months that Patrick was being killed off more than usual by the press. Starting early on May 8, they reported that he had a lung removed and felt he had “done all he could”!

  LUNG REMOVAL SURGERY . . . in a heartbreaking decision Patrick Swayze turned down a last-ditch effort to prolong his life by removing a lung . . . after months of painful treatments and fighting so hard just to get up in the mornings, he felt he had done all he could.

  And then on the ninth:

  GOODBYE PATRICK SWAYZE . . . started to say goodbye to family and friends as he prepares for death following the spreading of his pancreatic cancer.

  And on May seventeenth:

  PATRICK SWAYZE PANCREATIC CANCER UPDATE . . . refused potentially life-saving operation . . . lung infection didn’t respond to treatment . . . a long, painful recovery was not how he wanted to spend his last days.

  May nineteenth:

  PATRICK’S LOVING GOODBYE . . . unable to speak because of sores in his mouth and throat caused by his chemotherapy treatments. Patrick communicates with his wife of more than 30 years, Lisa Niemi, and brother Donny by pointing or writing notes . . . note to him (Donny) to please look after Lisa.

  WOW. AND you have to figure that if these reports showed up in one place, they were copied by five to thirty-five other tabloid entities around the entire world. That’s a lot of wrong press. And then . . . May 20 and 22:

  SWAYZE’S STILL ALIVE . . . ! Patrick Swayze did not die yesterday, despite a Florida radio station reporting otherwise . . . Twitter tries, fails to kill Patrick Swayze on Wednesday!

  It was after the reports that Patrick had actually died that we decided to release a response. It was too much! This time we would put out a photo. We were in New Mexico having a nice time with a few friends, one of them a wonderful photographer. Patrick asked him if he would take some photos of us.

  “I would love to,” Brian responded with enthusiasm.

  So, Patrick put on his cowboy hat and we went outside with the dogs pushing their way in front of the lens to get in on the action. We picked a couple of photos and sent them out. We figured a picture of him alive would be all that was needed at this point. The only thing that was missing was, we should have had Patrick holding up a newspaper like a kidnap victim with the day’s date on it: May 23, 2009. Proof of life!

  —

  WE WERE always focused first on Patrick’s getting better. The photographers, the less than honorable people, the false and negative tabloid reports seemed like something that was always scratching at our door, hovering in the unsafe world that lay outside our gate. It was as though the tabloids appointed themselves to take up the gauntlet and represent us out in the world. Without any true information. Of course, they didn’t care what we thought about that. You know . . . Patrick and I were, and are, pretty hardy folks. But reading that your husband is “saying his last farewell” and “final good-byes” as he “comes to the end” . . . Even if it’s not true, it can’t help but affect you. I tried so hard to be positive, but then there would be a report splashed in my face saying your husband is going to DIE! Even if he wasn’t sick, if someone was saying to me several times a month that the one I love best in the entire world is going to die . . . don’t you think that after a while, it would turn into a kind of insidious torture? To all appearances, I handled it pretty well. I even convinced myself that I wasn’t affected by all these false, negative reports. But then . . . I’d be having a pretty good day, and by the afternoon, I’d suddenly find myself getting mad, depressed, argumentative, and ending up dissolved in tears. Seemingly for no reason! I looked back at the day to see if something had triggered it all and what would I find? A terrible, negative tabloid report. They affected me far more than I ever imagined. I hate to admit that. I really hate to admit that, and reserve the right to take back what I just said. It’s a matter of my own personal pride that they not “get to me.” But okay, yeah they did.

  But whatcha gonna do? You can’t fight ’em. Not unless you want to spend a lot of money. And again, do you want to spend that much more time letting them rule your life?

  If I was feeling this hurt, sadness, and angst, what was happening to the one who had the most to lose? He seemed to take it in stride, but I know it made it harder for him. At one point after reading a negative report that he was once again on his last legs, Patrick closed the article and mused sardonically . . .

  “I guess they figure that one of these days they’re gonna get it right.”

  Donny and I imagined that these reporters were sitting in their rooms, at their desks, doing just enough research on pancreatic cancer to make a halfway educated guess about what might be happening in Patrick’s life. We joked how it seemed like some of these reporters showed up for work, put their feet up on the desk with their first cup of coffee in their hands, and said to themselves, “What kind of sh*t can I make up today?” But how terrible is it that a press entity’s reports that are picked up all over the world are saying that you are dying, going to die, or are dead already?

  “It’s emotional cruelty.” We finally put that in a statement we released. And when I saw it in black and white print, I thought it looked a tad dramatic. “Emotional cruelty . . .” But the awful truth is, tabloid reports eat through your soul like a worm. And even though I was walking around, functioning, and laughing, I felt it eating its way through, mottling my heart, eating the coating around my veins and killing me.

  So, yes, “emotional cruelty” is a fairly accurate way of describing it.

  There’s a wonderful saying used in twelve-step programs, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.”

  We were unable to change how the tabloids reported things. Our calling them on their emotionally cruel reporting wouldn’t have changed anything then. And my calling them on it probably won’t change anything now. But maybe . . . just maybe . . . people who read this will see them for who they are and understand the lack of integrity in their reporting. And they will remember.

  I saw a man from the National Enquirer (just one of the tabloids I had a problem with) on The View. This was when they had submitted themselves for a Pulitzer Prize for their breaking the news of Senator John Edwards’s illicit affair. This guy sat in front of Whoopi, Barbara, Sherri, and Elizabeth and bragged about the stellar reporting at the Enquirer. How thorough they are and how much they check their facts. Okay. If I made a list of all the headlines from this and other tabloids, along with the gist of the article written, you would see just how inaccurate the reporting is. And I’d probably take great delight in going on a rant and busting a few of these papers. But I’m not going to. Because the truth is, in the long run it won’t matter. And certainly by the time we get to the end of this story, it won’t matter at all.

  So, back to the high road!

  —

  BUT WAIT, we are on a higher road. We are winding our way into the mountains north of San Diego, having ejected ourselves from our Bat Cave Exit and successfully thwarted the paparazzi. We turn on to a quiet private road, rumble over an old wood bridge, and pull up to our destination spa.

  Chapter 18

  RALLIES AGAIN

  On our trail ride with friends.

  MOMENTS ARE LIKE jewels to me. I gather them into my arms . . .

  And each of those jewels gives me the confidence to stand up and look death straight in the face and say, “No one is going anywhere today.” Now, at the moment I say that and celebrate this victory, I back down in humility. Because I know how fragile this life is. How I ultimately can’t control the outcome. But you know what? Still, all those moments, all those jewels, are just as special. And that makes me a very rich lady.