Lisa Niemi is opening up about the grief that came with the loss of her husband, beloved actor Patrick Swazye, calling the paralyzing pain of sorrow “an animal all of its own.”

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.