Rita Wilson shares Tom Hanks request amid cancer battle

When it comes to love, Rita Wilson has some conditions.

The actress and country music singer, who battled breast cancer more than a decade ago, opened up about how the health scare impacted her relationship with longtime husband Tom Hanks.

In 2015, Wilson, then 58, revealed that she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had undergone a bilateral mastectomy and reconstruction.

During an appearance at 92NY on Tuesday, April 28, for her upcoming “Sound of a Woman” album, Wilson told friend and interviewer Demi Moore about the emotional request she had for Hanks if she didn’t survive her cancer journey, according to People magazine.

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

As for the other request, Wilson said that she wanted her loved ones to throw a party in her honor after her death.

“I want it to be a celebration of life,” Wilson said, per People. “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? I think there’s room for that.”

This isn’t the first time Wilson has gotten candid on her health struggles.

In 2019, four years after her breast cancer diagnosis, Wilson opened up about how her cancer experience influenced her music, inspiring the optimistic track “Throw Me a Party.”

“Songs comes from many places, and this one came from questioning what I wanted to have happen after I died,” Wilson wrote on Instagram at the time. “When you go through a crisis, so many things cross your mind. Instead of avoiding those thoughts, we wrote a song!”

Contributing: Hannah Yasharoff, Ann Oldenburg and Maria Puente, USA TODAY