This Life I Live: One Man's Extraordinary, Ordinary Life and the Woman Who Changed It Forever

by Rory Feek

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t a dream that I could make come true for her, no matter how much I tried.

  It was in God’s hands. Not mine.

  Fifty-Seven

  NO MORE

  In mid-October, we had only been back home for a week or so, when the doctors in Atlanta wanted Joey to come back down so they could do some scans to see how her body was responding to the surgery and the first six weeks of chemo and radiation. It was pretty much a formality; they already had the next round of chemo set up. This next one would be stronger and tougher on her. She would lose her hair and be even sicker. It was hard for me to imagine Joey getting much sicker than she’d been or even surviving another round. The first one, along with the surgery, had been so very hard on her.

  We decided that I would stay home and Joey would fly down with her mama. A quick overnight trip, and then they’d be back. They would do the testing that afternoon, then get the results the next morning, and do the next round of chemo in the afternoon before catching a flight home. I kept Indy at the farmhouse with me, and late that evening Joey and I talked on the phone after her scans were done. We were both hopeful and felt almost certain that she would receive good news the next morning and be back home by dinnertime. But it didn’t work out that way.

  My cell phone rang while I was feeding Indy her breakfast. “It’s not good, honey,” Joey said.

  “What’s not good?” I asked. And then there was silence. I could hear her on the other end, trying to fight back the tears, struggling to talk to me. “It’s gonna be okay, Joey,” I reassured her. “Just tell me what’s going on.” Joey sturdied herself and continued. “The cancer has continued to grow. They said that even after the surgery and the chemo and radiation . . . it’s still spreading.”

  Again, time seemed to stand still. I could suddenly hear the sound of the clock ticking on the wall near the kitchen. How could this be? This stuff only happened to other people. But I knew the truth of it. We are the other people, to other people. Joey told me that the doctors still wanted to keep the same plan and start the new chemo that day to see if they could stop it with stronger drugs.

  It took all I had to hang up the phone. To leave her by herself. But I knew it would only be for a little while. “I’m getting in my truck now. I’ll be there shortly . . . I love you.” And I heard her sweet voice say the same to me: “I love you too.”

  Within five minutes, Indy was in her car seat, and we were on the road. A million thoughts raced through my mind on the way down to CTCA in Georgia. We had believed that Joey was going to be better. We just knew it. We weren’t prepared for anything else. I kept trying to figure out why all the treatment hadn’t worked. Did we choose the wrong place or the wrong path to go down?

  There were so many questions running around in my head, but there was one in particular that I couldn’t stop wondering about. Was this new chemo actually going to help? Had Joey asked the doctor that question?

  When I got to the hospital, I almost ran, with Indy in the stroller, to the chemotherapy wing where Joey was getting the new drugs intravenously. She broke down in tears when she saw me, and her mama took Indy for a walk so we could be alone.

  I held her as she sat in the chair and cried. And then I asked her the question I had been thinking about. No, she said she hadn’t thought to ask the doctor that. A minute later I was dialing her doctor’s cell number from Joey’s phone. I walked out in the hallway and asked, “Do you think this is going to help my wife, honestly?” I think the doctor was surprised by my candor.

  “No, I don’t,” she replied.

  “Well, why in the world would you have her take it then—after all she’s been through?” I asked.

  “It might add a little bit more time,” she said.

  “Add more time? More time to what?” I continued.

  “To the six to nine months she has right now,” she said.

  And there it was. The truth.

  In all the time we had been going through this, no one had ever told us that Joey was terminal. Not once. They said that it could be, that it might turn into terminal cancer . . . but never that it was. As my mind raced back over the last few months, I found myself replaying many of the conversations we’d had with all of Joey’s doctors. Had they all been saying the same thing this whole time? Saying it, without saying it? Just being nice to us? If they all knew that and had been telling us that, we totally missed it. Or our sense of hope overrode it all.

  I thanked the doctor for her honesty, then hung up and walked back into Joey’s cubicle. I had tears in my eyes now, and she knew what that meant. I told her what the doctor had said, and we both agreed that the best thing to do was turn off the machine and just go home. As we were still talking, trying to sort out what would come next, the machine that had been administering the new chemo into her bloodstream started beeping, indicating that the bag was completely empty.

  “Well, there goes my hair,” Joey said.

  “That’s okay,” I told her. “You’re going to look beautiful bald.”

  Fifty-Eight

  CRYING AND DRIVING

  I had been cutting the hay in the back field for the last two hours. It felt good to be on the tractor. Farming. Gentleman farming, my friend called it.

  I had been wanting to do this for a long time. Cut hay. And now that we were home, it felt good to be on the tractor, going ’round and ’round on the sixty acres that we had purchased earlier in the year.

  Our friend Danny Smith and his nephew had been cutting it and baling it for us all summer, and we were down to just the field directly behind our farmhouse. We needed it cut for the horses. Not for them to eat but to manage how much it had grown and get the big stuff down.

  As I circled the field, I watched the house for Joey. She knew what this meant to me. She always knew important things like that, and any other time she would have come outside and watched me, made sure I knew that she was seeing me, and waved. I would have waved back, and this moment would be complete. I have always believed that great moments aren’t really great moments unless they’re shared. It’s as though they need to be acknowledged to be real or something. But she didn’t come out and wave, or even come to the window. I just kept going ’round and ’round, and each time the tractor faced the farmhouse, I would look for her.

  She was in bed. I knew that. Her sister Julie and her children had come to visit, along with some more of Joey’s family. They all had heard the news—that there was no more the doctors could do. Not really. The hospital would be glad to keep pumping her full of poison with hopes that it would turn it around, but it wasn’t going to make a difference. We were beat. And they, and now we, knew it.

  Then, finally, I saw her. My eyes aren’t so good anymore, but I could see that it was her. And she had Indiana in her arms. They came out onto the back porch, then walked down and across the yard toward the horse corral. I smiled big and waved with all I had. She sees me! She came out! I thought. And I waved more. But she didn’t wave back. I squinted as the tractor chugged closer.

  Autumn. It was Joey’s thirteen-year-old niece Autumn, not Joey. Autumn had Indy and was looking at the horses. I pulled my arm down and pulled my cowboy hat down over my eyes a bit more and let the breeze come across my face. And as I turned the corner and headed away from the house, I cried. Not like I had before. This time was different. It was a loud, ugly cry. The kind you don’t let out with anyone around. The RPMs of the engine drowned out my sorrow so no one could hear, and I let the blades cut the grass and the truth cut through to my heart.

  My wife is dying. She’s not going to be here to wave to me. I will be alone. Again. With a baby. Again.

  A few minutes later I felt a vibration in my overalls pocket. I knew what it was, so I rounded the corner near the horse paddock with the tractor and pulled the clutch and the lever that disengages the PTO and stops the haybine. I slid the reminder away on my phone, climbed down from the New Holland, and trod through the freshly cut grass toward
the house.

  Five minutes later I whispered to Joey, “She’s going to be calling in a minute. Can you wake up and be on this call with me?” She said she could, so I helped her sit up. I sat the phone down between us on the bed while I sat in the rocking chair and pulled my laptop open as the call came in. We put it on speakerphone, and Dr. Kelly Manahan proceeded to give us more details of the scan from the past week.

  About more tumors, all around the abdomen area. About two-inch margins and why another surgery wasn’t an option. And she told us that cervical cancer is very painful. In the end it is. I had mentioned to her that my mother’s pain wasn’t too bad when she passed away last year. The doctor explained that this type of cancer is different from what my mother had and why it would be more painful. We needed to stay on top of the pain, she said. That Joey would mostly be sleeping. That medicine was the best way to keep the pain away.

  We asked about reprieves and if Joey would get to feel good for a few weeks or months. She said “maybe” with her voice, but I could hear “probably not” in the breath between her words. Joey heard it too. She always had a strong sense of truth and ability to read between the lines. I took notes as the doctor talked. I wanted to make sure I understood how to care for my wife. And how to make sure she had everything she needed. I asked about hospice and getting a hospital bed at the house right away so she could sit up and change positions more easily.

  The doctor didn’t give us any good news. But she did give us good information, and that was what we needed at the time. When the call was over, Joey said, “I feel relieved in a way. To know there is no hope.” She and I talked about everything the doctor had said, and I promised her I would make sure she wouldn’t have to feel a lot of pain.

  I won’t let my wife be hurt anymore. She’s been through too much already.

  As she laid back down, I knelt beside her, tucking her in. She talked about her anniversary and engagement rings . . . that she wanted our older daughters to have them. And she talked about her life insurance policy and how maybe she could give each of the girls a big chunk to help them get started with their lives. I said that might be nice. Then tears filled her eyes, and she started trying to talk about me moving on when she was gone and finding someone else. I stopped her and said, “No, I don’t want to talk about that.”

  She said, “It’s okay, honey. You’re still young. You can find someone else and fall in love again.”

  My tears were falling again now, and though I knew she needed to say those things, I didn’t want to hear them.

  Not now. Not ever.

  Fifty-Nine

  INDIANA HOME

  I don’t do Facebook. I don’t really know how. I can get on it and see things, but I don’t really know how to navigate it or what the pages are or what they do. Honestly, I don’t really want to.

  But I knew enough about Facebook that morning in January 2016 to know that we were all over it again. People had reposted the blogs I had written. Joey’s story and mine. Individuals, news organizations, US Magazine, People.com, and many others. Folks took images of Joey and put captions on them that said “Pray for Joey” or something else beautiful. Creations to share.

  I sat at the Gaithers’ coffee shop in Joey’s hometown of Alexandria, Indiana, and thought deeply about what was happening with the story we were sharing and where we were. How kind people the world over had been to us and how something so terrible had turned into something . . . well, beautiful.

  Joey had decided to come home to Indiana once we realized that the doctors and hospitals had done all they could. It was only going to be for a few days. Enough time to tell her sisters and mama how much she loved them. To see the old farmhouse that she had grown up in one more time and to say good-bye to the people and town and state that bore her. But a few days turned into a few weeks, then longer. We had been there for three months, and Joey was still doing pretty well, overall. Thinner and weaker, but good . . . depending on the day.

  We were now living in a house by a pond, across from Bill and Gloria Gaither. A place where Gloria’s mother and father had lived and died. And now it was our turn. Joey’s turn. There was a large picture window at the foot of Joey’s bed, where she could watch the black and the white swans swim across the icy water and the young deer that she named Daisy stand by the bird feeder, eating corn left for her daily by Bill and his staff. It was a heavenly way to die, if you must. And Joey and I were thankful for it. There wasn’t a day that we didn’t pinch ourselves for all God had done for us. How precious the time with Joey’s family had been. How thankful we all were for the chance to still be together for Christmas and New Year’s. The doctors in Indiana were sure that Joey wouldn’t make it to Thanksgiving. But she had proved them all wrong and seemed to have found a way to pull the battery out of Old Father Time’s clock.

  She decided not to return to Tennessee, partly because she was loving being with her family there in Indiana. But also, I think, because she wanted to do this here. Away from our home and our life. To die separate from where we lived. I would rather have been at home, but I didn’t mind. I wanted what she wanted. That’s all I ever wanted. Down deep. To see my wife happy, like this, at a time when time was running through our fingers like sand. I couldn’t have asked for more. Neither could Joey.

  Winter was upon us, and though it was terrible, it wasn’t so bad. We were together. We had today, and that was enough.

  Sixty

  SAYING GOOD-BYE

  I didn’t want to do it. Not ever. I still don’t.

  But there are times when you have to. You have no choice. Like when Mom loaded us up in her old clunker and moved us from Kansas to Michigan. I didn’t want things to change, but they had to. Nothing I could do was going to stop it, so I had to learn to accept it. And so it was with this. Joey and I had been blessed with not only more time together than we thought we might get but also with better time than we ever dreamed was possible. And now that time was about to come to an end.

  Joey had called it, back in early November. “I think I’ll be here to see Indiana’s birthday in February,” she said to the roomful of teary-eyed friends who had come up on a bus with our driver, Russell, to tell her good-bye. She was on a high dose of morphine and was slurring her words. After she excused herself and went back into her room to lie down, I felt I should apologize. They could see for themselves now that Joey was nearing the end, and it was heartbreaking to experience. Probably even more heart-wrenching to hear her say that she thought she’d be here another three months. I didn’t believe her. None of us did, really. It was the medicine talking, I thought. But it wasn’t.

  It was Joey talking. That’s the kind of resolve my wife has. Like I said, when Joey says something, she means it. She never makes a promise that she doesn’t follow through on. And I think this was just another one of those promises. But to me, it was a miracle.

  It was now late February, and Joey was still here to sing “Happy Birthday” to our little girl as we all watched her blow out her little “2” candle and rub a paleo cupcake all over her face, laughing and grinning ear to ear. And Joey was here to read our names on the list of nominations that had recently come out for the Grammy Awards. And she was also here to hear the news that our Hymns album had been released to much acclaim, and sales numbers had made it the number-one album in America on all charts. She was even here to share a platter full of sushi with me on Valentine’s Day as we kissed and said sweet nothings to each other. I got to lie down beside her for a little while and put my arms around her—something that we had not had the opportunity to do in months and months. All we could have hoped for and more had happened in the few months since finding out that the cancer had returned and deciding to embrace the end and not run, not hide from it.

  Everything, except for the healing. Except for the miracle. Joey had never stopped believing that it was possible, and she believed it still, right up until then. Her hope was unflappable. When the tumors had grown so large inside her th
at they were bursting and a terrible discharge was pouring out of her body, she claimed that maybe, just maybe, God was popping them, getting the cancer out. It didn’t matter what it was, Joey saw the best in it. The hope in it.

  But now, finally, that hope was gone. The day before, we had been rejoicing in all that God had done during this time. How He had been using her story to encourage others and how the new album, filled with the hymns she had grown up with and loved, was doing so well and how the only reason for it was Him. God was going to get all the glory because He was the only way to explain all that was happening. “Isn’t it amazing?” I asked her that evening, holding her hand in mine.

  She looked at me and said, “Yes . . . so amazing.” And then she asked, “Do you think He’s going to heal me?”

  I didn’t want to answer that. But I had to. I couldn’t lie to her, not after all she’d been through. “No, honey . . . I don’t think He is.”

  “I didn’t think so.” And she smiled the softest, kindest smile. “That’s okay,” she said. “I got to experience everything I wanted to. I was here for our baby’s birthday. I’m ready now.” And then my wife stopped living.

  She didn’t die that day, but she quit living. She was still breathing air, and, physically, nothing had changed. Not really. But in another way, everything had. She was ready to go home. To be with her brother, Justin. And to hurt no more. She was tired of hurting.

  It was late evening, and Joey’s sister Jody, who had become her full-time nurse, was at her son Cody’s ball game with the rest of the family. It was just Joey and me. She took my hand and looked me in the eye. “I need you to help me,” she said. “Promise me that you will? Promise me, honey . . . I can’t do this anymore.”