Songfacts®:

• Frontman Dave Mustaine told Artistdirect.com that he wrote this song for his wife. He explained: "My wife said, 'You've never written a song for me.' I was like, 'Yeah, I did.' She responded, 'No you didn't!' I told her, 'I did. You just don't like Megadeth, so you don't know [Laughs].' She likes listening to Country music and more of the toned-down kind of stuff. I said, 'Okay, I'll do a new one.' I wrote this song for her. The second half is different. It's like any other Megadeth song that has two halves. There's a '…' in the middle of that song for a reason. It's like 'Holy Wars…The Punishment Is Due.' Everyone calls that song, 'Holy Wars,' but it's really 'Holy Wars…The Punishment Due.' It's funny when people just scream, 'Holy Wars!' [For] the second part of 'The Hardest Part of Letting Go…Sealed with a Kiss' I was reading Edgar Allan Poe's collection of short stories. I like Poe. I think that he's got some really incredible climaxes in his stories. One of my favorite writers growing up was Aesop because at the end of every story, no matter how scary it was, there was a moral. Some of those stories are really scary when you're just a little kid! That saying—What's the moral to the story—came up because of that. What's the punch line? I loved the way that Aesop did that, so much so, that I did that at the very end of a song called 'Bad Omen' The song was really intense but, at the end, it turned around. It said that if you participate in this Satanic orgy going on, you're mind will be helpless and no one will be able to save you. There are a lot of different things that I write about, and 'Sealed with a Kiss' is the part from the Poe story."
• Artist Direct asked Mustaine what his wife thought of the song. He replied: "I loved that song so much. When I heard it, I was so happy that I'd finally written a song like this. I was like, 'Oh my God, how did I do this?' I'd been trying so hard to write an emotional song like this, and the closest I ever came to it was 'In My Darkest Hour' or 'a Tout Le Monde.' Those two are really good songs, but they're nothing like this one. When I would listen to it, I was just so content! Then I played it for my wife, and I knew she didn't like it. I've been with her forever, and I knew she didn't like it. She didn't like the part where I said I was going to bury the person in the wall. That was a little bit of a misstep on my part [Laughs]. I told her, 'That part's not about you; the first half is about you!' It's like any of the other songs that I've written that have two parts. We could go back to 'Holy Wars…The Punishment Due.' The first part of it is about my antics - I got myself into trouble over in Antrim in Northern Island. The second half is about The Punisher comic book."