Rita Wilson Reveals What She Asked of Tom Hanks After Cancer Diagnosis

When Rita Wilson was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015, she didn’t know if she was going to survive.

The diagnosis led Wilson to have a very difficult and honest conversation with her husband of now 28 years, Tom Hanks. During that conversation, Wilson had two important requests for Hanks.

During a conversation with Demi Moore at the Sound of a Woman: Rita Wilson in Conversation event on Tuesday, Wilson revealed what those two requests were.

She first explained that if she were to pass away, she didn’t want her husband to move on too quickly.

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“I said to Tom, I’m like, ‘OK, if, if something happens and I go first, I just have two requests. And one is that you should be sad for a very, very long time,’” the 69-year-old said.

The next request she had was that if cancer were to take her life, she didn’t want a traditional, sad funeral. Rather, she wanted her husband to throw her a “party.”

“I want it to be a celebration of life,” Wilson recalled. “I want it to be about people telling stories and joy and remembering me in that way.”

“And I think people, a lot of people want that, you know?” she said. “I think there’s room for that.”

Wilson’s breast cancer was determined to be invasive and ultimately led her to undergo a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery.

Wilson is both an actress and a singer, and revealed to Moore that her song “Throw Me a Party, which was released in 2019, was inspired by that heart-to-heart conversation that she had with her husband after she was first diagnosed.

“The song … it came out of this, this story I’ve told before, but if you haven’t heard it, it was, when you get the diagnosis, and you’re like, ‘I don’t know, I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but I hope I’m still here, you know, in a few years,’” she explained.