by Rory Feek
Something in Pamela’s eyes showed concern for Indiana’s eyes. And there was more. Joey’s body wasn’t following through the way it should. The placenta wasn’t passing, and it had been a good while. Pamela was very concerned. She came and got me and told me that she wanted to call an ambulance to transport Joey to the hospital. I asked if it was serious and if Joey was going to be okay, and she said yes, it could be, but all should be fine if we could act fast.
Twenty minutes later Joey was strapped onto a stretcher that was being wheeled out the front door of our farmhouse. I walked beside her and talked with her and told her everything was going to be okay. She just smiled up at me, sure that it would be too. Pamela rode in the back of the ambulance with Joey and the paramedics, and our older girls and I followed behind them in our SUV. It was such a mad rush to get out of the house, we hadn’t found the baby’s car seat, so I held Indiana in my arms as Heidi drove. She was barely a half-hour old.
When we got to the hospital, I walked the halls with Indy in my arms, looking for my wife’s room. When I finally found it, a nurse told me I needed to wait outside. They were working on her and would let me know soon how it was going. Minutes later I was still outside Joey’s room but sitting on the floor now, the baby still in my arms, and sobbing. I could hear Joey screaming in pain at the top of her lungs. I kept thinking, They’re hurting her! Don’t they realize that? I was getting angry. Finally, I couldn’t wait any longer, and I handed the baby to the girls and burst through the door into the hospital room. I ran to my wife’s side, and someone handed me a mask to put on. I held Joey’s hand and stroked her face as she cried and screamed. It was terrible.
The doctor who was on duty was having to do a D&C, and evidently there had been no time for anesthesia. At least that’s what I heard, and what it sounded like. Joey was in terrible pain, and she was scared, and so was I. Finally, after what seemed like forever, the ordeal was over. The doctor said the surgery had been a success and Joey was resting, or trying to.
I stayed by her side as nurse after nurse came in, taking Joey’s vital signs and making sure she was okay. I could see them glancing over at Indiana in my arms. At some point the doctor came in the room and asked me if I could come outside and speak with her. I thought she was going to talk with me about them possibly doing a blood transfusion because Joey had lost so much in the surgery. But, instead, the doctor said, “Mr. Feek, I think there’s a strong possibility that your baby has Down syndrome.” I thought I was in the twilight zone.
At first I didn’t respond. I just stared at her. Did I just hear what I think I heard? Finally I said, “What makes you say that?” The doctor explained that she was concerned about the shape of Indiana’s eyes, the extra skin in the back of her neck, and the single line across the palm of her hand, among other things. All those signs pointed to Down syndrome, she said, and she thought we should have her genetically tested in the coming days.
I was still in shock. Everything had turned so quickly, from a perfect pregnancy and by-the-book home birth, to Joey being in emergency surgery and our baby possibly having Down syndrome. It was almost too much for me to take in. Too much to process.
When I got back in the room, I held our baby and looked at her. Really looked at her. Looking for the things the doctor had mentioned. I could see that she was right about some of them, but I still couldn’t wrap my mind around the possibility of that really being the case. That our child could have Down syndrome.
Not only had we never done any testing while Joey was pregnant, we had no real doctor appointments or scans at all. We didn’t need to. We chose a different path. Complete faith. We didn’t want to know if it was a boy or a girl, and we wouldn’t have wanted to know if the baby had Downs or anything else. Though we never actually considered that our child would be anything less than perfect, it honestly wouldn’t have mattered if we had known. We would have believed that the baby we have is the baby we’re supposed to have. But that doesn’t change the fact that it came as quite a shock to me, and I knew it would be for Joey too. I had no idea how I was going to tell her.
She slept a long time after the surgery. She so needed the rest. When she woke, I was still by her side. I put the baby in her arms, and she was so glad to see her and hold her again. And while she stroked Indy’s soft dark hair, I explained what the doctor had told me. Joey listened and hardly looked up. She just stared at Indiana and took it all in. When I finished talking, all she said was, “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” And she was. That was all Joey felt. All that I felt. I think it was important to her, and to me, to stay in the moment. Not to let our fears or concerns run away with us. We just stayed there. In the magic of God giving us the most beautiful little baby girl that we’d ever seen. And that was enough.
A day later Joey got to come home. It had been a difficult twenty-four hours for my wife, and what she needed more than anything was to be home. To once again be in the shelter of the farmhouse we loved and the life we knew. To just be a family. And though there had been complications and we had no idea what they meant or what was in store for us or Indiana, we were excited and thankful. So thankful that God had blessed us with a healthy child and that Joey could have her at home, naturally. That meant so much to her.
Fifty
FAME TO FARM
We had decided to take time off. A whole year: 2014. To let the applause die down and do nothing but be together and raise our baby. And write about it.
We were hoping that by springtime we would have much more than vegetable seeds planted firmly in the ground that was ours. We wanted to dig in too. To be a bigger part of the land and have that little piece of earth be a bigger part of us. We thought we were going to spend the year homesteading. Joey and me and the baby. And I was going to blog about it.
I hadn’t been writing songs for a while. A year or more. I had been busy. We all had. Making a TV show at home: The Joey + Rory Show. From 2012 until the beginning of 2014, we made fifty-two episodes. The show was a way to make and share our music with the world. And to do it our way. From our farmhouse to theirs. To millions of living rooms across the country every Friday night. It was an idea that I had come up with, and we had somehow pulled it off—with the help of some friends here in Nashville, who would bring their film skills, and some other friends in Texas, who had the financial resources to make it happen. The show was a huge success and later would go into syndication; it’s still playing in reruns, even now. Our hope was that it wouldn’t be just a television show about today. It was our own little Andy Griffith Show set to music. Something that could be around awhile. Maybe even after we were gone.
But for me, it was more than that. Much more. Going from farm to fame wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. And it had taken its toll on my wife by 2011. I wanted to find a way to make my wife’s dreams come true while, at the same time, give her the ability to wake up and water her garden and feed her chickens every day. It was my effort to have it all. And we did, with the TV show. Or pretty darn close to it. But even more than that, it was another way for me to capture that time in our lives and keep it forever. All of our music and all of our music videos were directly or indirectly about our lives. Filmed here at home, using what we had as a backdrop for the story we were telling. It was important to me to capture our lives on film. I knew these moments wouldn’t last forever, but then again . . . maybe they could. And so, in making our television show, I wanted a part of each episode to be about what was going on in our lives—what parts of the world we had traveled to, or the homemade soap Joey was making with the neighbor lady. I captured it all, including our community. My sister Marcy and the restaurant, our neighbors, and our handyman, Thomas. They are all still here. Forever sealed in time in episodes of our TV show. And so are Joey and I and our girls. Those moments in time have stopped and will last forever.
But for now, the show was over. I had decided to take a break from it. To walk away and welcome something else. Our baby. And a simpler life. Joey wante
d it too. She was ready. And the time was upon us.
My wife encouraged me to start writing about our lives in a different way than I had before. With a blog. To continue capturing our lives and the moments I wanted us to remember, but doing it with my pen, mostly, and some pictures. So I figured out how to create a blog, and I titled it “This Life I Live.” I launched it online and started telling our story as it was happening, sharing it with whoever happened to stumble upon it. At the same time, I started filming our lives even more than usual. I filmed every day, not for a TV show or a music video. But for us. For some reason—that I wouldn’t come to understand for two more years—I felt that writing the blog and filming our lives in detail that year was important.
I had no earthly idea how very important it would be. To me. To Joey. And to the whole world.
Fifty-One
TURN, TURN, TURN
The baby was here, and spring had sprung. New life was everywhere. And my wife was beyond excited about it. So was I.
In what seemed like the blink of an eye, Joey had gone from not wanting babies to thinking maybe we should have more of them. And that was blowing my mind! We had quite a few conversations about it. She was seriously considering it if God would let it happen. She loved having Indiana that much. And it was clear that being a mama was what she was born to do.
But we wanted to be responsible, so we made an appointment to visit with Dr. Marchman—the doctor who had helped her in the hospital a few weeks ago after the complications from the home birth. Joey liked her and decided to start seeing her. Joey’s hope was to get back on birth control, only for a short while, while we continued thinking and praying about the possibility of having another baby. She felt like maybe she should have more, but she wanted to be sure . . . and even more so, to take it to God in prayer.
By the time Joey came out of her appointment, her prayer had been answered.
As Joey walked toward the truck, she looked a little dazed. I had driven down the street to pick up two coffees for us, and the baby was asleep in the backseat as Joey opened her door and sat down. “The doctor says there’s a small mass on my cervix,” she said. “She is worried that it might be cancer.”
I tried to process what she had just said but couldn’t really. It was too foreign. Too strange. We had a brand-new, beautiful baby in the car with us, and we were thinking of having more. “I’m sure it’s nothing, honey,” I told her. And I reached for her hand and put it in mine, the way I had done thousands of times. And Joey smiled, and so did I. Both wanting to believe it. Needing to believe it.
The doctor had done a biopsy, and in a few days she said she would call us to let us know the results. So Joey and I went on with life as normal, not giving it much more thought until the next day when Joey woke up from her nap and had a voice message on her phone. It wasn’t from Dr. Marchman; it was from a cancer oncologist wanting to set up an appointment for Joey to come in for a consultation. Joey immediately called her doctor, who said she wanted to talk to us in person.
When we got to Dr. Marchman’s office and sat with her, she was mortified to learn that the oncologist had called us before giving her the chance to explain the results. And then she broke down crying. It was surreal. We didn’t know her, really, and here we were in her office, trying to help her keep it together. “It’s okay,” Joey said to her. “Just tell us. It’s okay.”
“I’m so sorry,” the doctor said as she wiped her tears. “It’s cancer.” And through her tears she proceeded to tell us that the biopsy had come back positive and that Joey had something called squamous cell carcinoma. Cervical cancer. She explained that we would need to see a cancer specialist in Nashville, who would help us decide the best path to take—whether chemo or radiation or surgery or all three.
We left her office that day in a daze. Silently riding home. Not really sure what to feel. Again, I reached for her hand and said what I believed to be true: That everything was going to be okay. That I was sure they had caught it early and it would be something that would probably just be a small bump in the road. Things would be back to normal in no time.
“No more babies,” Joey said, as a tear rolled down her cheek. I just smiled and told her that we already had the greatest baby. And that she was enough. And I knew she was. Indiana was a gift that neither of us ever expected to have . . . how could we be disappointed not to have more?
God had answered our prayer.
When we got home, we knelt down in front of the couch, with our baby in Joey’s arms, and prayed again. This time for God to be with us through whatever was headed our way. To be with Joey as we met with more doctors and learned more about the cancer that was in her body and how to get rid of it. To be with me as I walked with her. And to be with our baby as we raised her. Prayer has a way of comforting a heart. Of making fear subside and hope rise. At least for us it always has.
That was in May 2014, and our garden would have to wait. All the plans we had to homestead and dig deeper roots in our soil were put on hold for a while. Instead, we would spend the summer in meetings with oncologists and radiologists and surgeons. Taking PET scans and CT scans and learning more than we ever wanted to know about cancer.
And Joey would go through another surgery—this time a radical hysterectomy—and spend weeks recovering at home before she would find herself in the garden and spending time with the baby chicks that she loved so much.
By late July, Joey’s health was being restored, and so was our hope. And our little Indiana had provided so much joy through it all. She is what Joey lived for. My wife fell more and more in love with being a mama every day. And more in love with her baby. It was easy to see, even within the first couple of months, that Indy had personality and was filled with so much love. And that love overflowed, spilling into every room of our farmhouse and every part of our lives.
That fall and first Christmas with Indy was magical for us. Though we’d had a scary moment, it had made us stronger and helped us put our lives in perspective even more. We savored our time together, those moments we got to spend. And though the surgery and recovery time weren’t easy for Joey, she had gotten through it, and it was all behind her.
At least we thought it was.
Fifty-Two
UPS AND DOWNS
I don’t know why God gave us a child with Down syndrome.
I guess it could just be random. The luck of the draw. Maybe our chances were greater because Joey was in her late thirties when Indy was born. But I doubt it’s that. I know it’s not. We have the baby we have because God wanted us to have her. I don’t mean that in a “God’s got a plan” sort of way. I mean it in a “He knew we needed this child” way. Or, at least, He knew that I did.
I have a feeling—I’ve had it for a while now—that Indiana is here to teach me something. To teach me everything. She’s going to be different from our two older girls. And that difference is, more than likely, exactly what I need, so I can learn what I don’t know. So I can grow in the ways that I need to grow. I have no doubt that Indiana is going to show me how to get over myself. How to just be. And to be comfortable with who I am. Something that is still hard for me at fifty-one. She’s going to teach me what unconditional love is. What it really is. Not the version that I want it to be.
I might be wrong about these things, but I doubt it. More than likely, she will teach me things I don’t have any idea yet that I even need to learn. Important things. She will teach all of us. Just because she’s different. Her extra chromosome will be the thing that changes our DNA. What we’re made of and what’s down deep inside.
Fifty-Three
HURT PEOPLE HURT PEOPLE
H urt people hurt people. I heard that phrase at a church service in Nashville in the latter part of the nineties. I thought it was catchy, but I didn’t really understand it at the time. Not until later that year, when I came to realize what that line really meant. And what it means still. Those four words have probably helped me not to hold grudges more than a
nything else.
I was spending most of my time writing songs in those days. Telling stories, doing what I loved most to do. On one particular day I was writing with a legendary songwriter named Richard Leigh. He was twenty or so years my senior and had written some of the country music classics of my childhood—“Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” and “The Greatest Man I Never Knew,” to name a couple. By then, I was writing for Harlan Howard and had turned the garage building behind their publishing company into my office and writing room. Richard was a kind man. Handsome, with a warm smile and a gentle spirit. I liked him immediately.
We spent most of that morning together not writing a song. Instead, just talking. Mostly him asking questions and me answering them. I think he was trying to get to know me. What I was about. Who I was, really.
“Where did you grow up?” he asked. “How many kids do you have?” And the list of questions went on and on. I told him all about how I’d moved to Nashville with my two girls in ’94, then had to move back to Texas, then finally came to Nashville to stay in the fall of 1995. He asked lots of questions about them. About my daughters. “Where’s their mother?” he asked. “Do they ever get to see her?” And a hundred others. I could tell where he was going with his questioning, or at least I thought I could. I explained to him that the girls’ mother lived in Florida somewhere, and we really didn’t ever hear from her.
“That’s terrible,” he finally said. “It’s so, so very sad.”
“No,” I told him. “It’s okay. We have a good life. The girls and I.”
“I’m not talking about you,” he said. “I’m talking about their mother. How incredibly difficult it must be to wake up every day and carry the burden of leaving them.”
