*NeNe Leakes opens up about her late husband’s final moments before his death in their Atlanta home on Sept. 1.
Gregg Leakes died after a four-year battle with colon cancer at age 66.
“The last five days before his passing was really beautiful,” she tells PEOPLE. “All of his children were there. His best friends were there. Our closest friends were there. We all sat with him around the clock.”
“We talked a lot, and we made peace with what was happening,” she adds.
Leakes revealed in June that Gregg’s cancer had returned. He was previously diagnosed with stage 3 colon cancer in 2018 and was in remission for two years.
READ MORE: NeNe Leakes’ Husband Gregg Dead from Colon Cancer at Age 66
“It’s difficult,” Leakes said in a post update with fans over the summer.
“He’s super small,” she added. “If you’ve ever been around somebody who’s had cancer before, he’s different. He’s different.”
Nene and Gregg married in 1997 and divorced in 2011, but they reconciled and remarried in June 2013.
NeNe shared with PEOPLE Gregg’s last words to her: “I’m not going to leave you. God is going to bless you.”
Adds NeNe: “He said he wanted me to move on with my life.”
For the past four years, NeNe was Gregg’s primary caretaker.
“It was difficult,” says NeNe. “Gregg handled a lot of things in our life. There were some things I didn’t know — some of the simple things. I didn’t even know who the lawn guy was.”
“I was having to ask him questions like that,” she adds. “And he said to me, ‘If you go into my office and look on the wall, I left an envelope taped to the wall.’ And so I went and looked on the wall and there was a manila folder he had stuck to the wall that said, ‘Open this if anything ever happens to me.’ When I opened it up, he had a letter to Brentt (their 22-year-old son) and telling us certain things like, where we needed to pay stuff and who was the accounting person to talk to because we didn’t know anything. And I thought to myself when I looked through all the stuff that he had written and the things that he had left, that that took a lot of strength.”
“I told him I wouldn’t have chosen another husband other than him. I said, ‘I married you twice, crazy man,’ ” recalls NeNe.
NeNe held Gregg’s hand as he made his “transition”.
“He took a deep breath, and then he stopped,” says NeNe. “I thought I would be scared, but I just held him and kissed him.”
