by Rory Feek
I was shocked. Devastated. No one had ever said anything like that to me before. They’d only seen my side of the story, felt bad for me and bad for the girls. But not Richard. He immediately recognized a deeper wound that someone other than me was carrying around. A pain that I have never had to bear for one day, let alone years at a time. And he was right. Their mother has had to carry those choices on her shoulders for years and carries them still. That’s a burden that I don’t know. Thank God.
Richard and I didn’t write a song that day. We actually have never written one together since then either. But I took something away from that time we spent together that was better than even the greatest of songs. Perspective. He gave me the gift of seeing their mother’s side of our story. And it’s why I am unable to put her at fault. For any of it, really. I feel for her greatly.
She came through Nashville once, a year or so after that day I spent with Richard. She had called a few days before and said she’d be passing through and wanted to see the girls. Her girls. It had been six or seven years since she’d seen or talked to them. I asked Heidi and Hopie if they wanted to see her, and they said yes. So she came and sat in the gazebo at the apartment complex that we lived in at the time and waited with me for the bus to drop the girls off after school. They slowly walked up to her, their Hello Kitty packs on their backs and grade-school books in their hands. She gave them hugs and introduced them to the littler girl who was with her. Their half sister. We hadn’t known about her. In time, their mother would have another child, too, my girls would learn.
They spent the afternoon together, talking. And some of the next day. Playing Putt-Putt golf and having lunch with this stranger who was their mom. Hopie hadn’t seen her since she was eighteen months old, and Heidi was a little over three. They didn’t remember her. And in the end, they said they felt like she was a cousin of mine that they’d heard about but not met. They were glad to see her but didn’t feel anything when she left again. That would turn out to be a good thing, I think.
She made them promises. That they would keep in touch. That she’d send birthday cards and Christmas gifts. But those cards and gifts never came.
She would come again to visit them. Ten years later, after friending Heidi on Myspace. The girls were now eighteen and twenty years old, looking at the stranger who had carried them and loved them when they were little and moved on. It was a good visit. Followed by more promises made and even more of them broken.
It hurt them. It hurts them still, I think. But I have tried to encourage them to see what Richard saw all those years ago. Though their pain is great, their mother’s pain is probably greater. And they understand that.
Like all of us, she is doing the best she can with what she has.
I know she is.
Fifty-Four
JOSEPHINE
In March 2015, I moved to Virginia for another girl. Her name was Josephine.
And it wasn’t just me who moved. So did Joey, Indy, and a bunch of our friends. We didn’t really move there, but we might as well have. We were gone from home for three months, and by the time we got back, I had been through so much—creatively—that I felt like I was coming to Tennessee to visit friends, not moving back to the house and life that were mine. Ours. It was so strange.
We were there to make a movie: Josephine. As we loaded our Suburban and headed east that day in March, we had no idea what “making a movie” meant exactly, but we were about to find out. It would mean scores of sleepless nights, enduring and working through levels of stress that I didn’t even know were possible for the human body. But it was also the single greatest creative endeavor that I’ve ever been a part of. Everything else I’d done before paled in comparison.
And Joey’s role in the film? It was to be the writer and director’s wife. To support her husband. And she loved it. That wasn’t the role I gave her. That was the job she wanted. She loved being in the background for a change. Knowing that for the first time in a long time, it wasn’t really about her or our careers. It was about someone else: Josephine.
The film we were making was the story of a woman who is the wife of a Civil War soldier. She is on a great quest to find the husband she hasn’t heard from in more than a year. She cuts off her hair, puts on his clothes, and joins the army disguised as a man, then fights her way across the country in search of the man she loves. We were there in Virginia for her. To tell her story. To be a part of something we’d never been part of before. Making a film.
I think that period of time that wasn’t about my wife, or about us, was great for both Joey and me. It was about something bigger. Something that took a community to make. Not only did we move there to make the movie, but so did Heidi and Hopie; our bus driver, Russell; our manager (and the cowriter of the film with me), Aaron; and a half dozen or so other friends from our little community. It was not only amazing to have the chance to make a film, but to make it with people I love was even more special. And at that time in my life to boot. The day before I said, “Action!” for the first time, I turned fifty. It was an incredible gift to have the chance to learn something new at that age. I felt like I was young again . . . like when I first arrived in Nashville with a guitar and a dream. What a blessing to start following a brand-new dream when you’re fifty years old.
Joey cooked for the crew and made dinners for the main cast members, who came to the 1830s plantation house where we stayed just before we started shooting. She loved being behind the scenes and doing what she could. Having her come on set with the baby and visit me every day was so grounding. It helped me to keep in mind what was most important, even when my mind was overwhelmed with the task in front of me each day.
We wrapped shooting in mid-May and brought a couple of hard drives full of footage back to our home in Tennessee. I was going to spend the summer editing the movie in the film-editing suite we had built in the milk house on our property. Our hope was that the film would turn into something special and lead somewhere wonderful. That’s still our hope.
It felt so good to be back home. Joey and Indy had made a couple of trips back to Tennessee in April and early May to get some seeds started in the garden, and we were excited to start digging in the dirt and really spending the summertime enjoying the baby and our lives together at the farm. We had no idea that this would be our last summer together.
Fifty-Five
SOMETHING WORSE
She was sick and tired of being sick and tired.
While in Virginia, and even before that, Joey had been feeling bad. Not terrible, just nauseous at times. She was having some trouble with her bowels, and no matter what she did, it just didn’t seem to go away. She wasn’t worried about it, though; or if she was, she never let it show. She just kept trying new things to help with what she thought was an intestinal bug or virus. Diet, essential oils, supplements . . . natural things. Joey was always for finding a natural way to heal the body before going to see doctors or taking medicine. It’s just who she was, and I love her for it. She knew what a big business the pharmaceutical world is and that there are many things we can do ourselves to turn our health problems around without prescription drugs, and she loved the challenge and discipline of trying to figure it out.
But what was happening to her wasn’t getting any better. She went to see a doctor in April, and he tested all of her blood levels and said they were normal. So she kept cooking and cleaning and being a mama and living a regular life. I was worried about her and told her so. But she’d just smile that smile that said everything’s gonna be fine, and I wanted to believe her, but something inside me wasn’t so sure.
A few weeks after we came home from Virginia, I took Joey to see a GI doctor at Vanderbilt. He did a colonoscopy, and the baby and I sat in the recovery room with Joey awaiting the results. Joey was playing with Indiana on her lap when the doctor came in. The look on his face was one of concern. We really weren’t prepared for what he told us, that there seemed to be a mass on part of her colon, and h
e recommended she get full scans done and go back and see her oncologist. When we got home that night, as Joey and Indy slept, I googled some of the words the doctor had said that afternoon. Sigmoid colon. Four-centimeter mass. I held my breath and typed cervical cancer return statistics and hit enter. I didn’t like what it said, so I closed my laptop and started praying.
I didn’t tell Joey that the numbers weren’t good. I couldn’t. Besides, we weren’t sure that it actually was cancer. Within a day or two, though, we would be. I still remember Joey and me being on the phone with her oncologist, Dr. Wheelock, as he explained what he saw on the scans. And as he told us about the chemo and radiation regimen that he recommended, we listened, but neither of us really believed it. I’m not one to beat around the bush, so I just asked him, “John, should we be worried?” He said, “Yes. You should be very worried.”
Just as summer was about to begin, it was over. We knew it was. There would be no gardening or baby chicks or editing the movie or anything else for a while. This was going to be our life. Fighting for her life was going to be our life.
Ultimately, we decided on Cancer Treatment Centers of America, in Zion, Illinois, outside Chicago, to get treatment for the cancer that had returned. We loved their holistic approach, that they incorporated so much more in their treatments. Most of all, faith. They believed in the power of God and embraced it. We needed that. We needed doctors and staff around us who would not only provide the finest health care for Joey but also pray for her.
Another reason we chose CTCA is they wanted to do surgery. To try to remove it. All the other places didn’t. They just wanted to do chemo and radiation and see what would happen. We understood enough about Joey’s condition to know that if the mass wasn’t removed, we had little chance of stopping it from growing.
The morning of the surgery—to remove the mass and a few organs that we would learn were filled with cancer—Joey and I lay in a hotel bed with Indy beside us. We held hands, and we prayed. We prayed with all we had. That God would let this surgery go well and that the doctors could get it all . . . and that Indiana could get to grow up with a mama. That was the part that was the hardest for us to swallow. It would be for anyone. How could God give her this precious gift, then take it all away? There weren’t enough tissues to handle our tears that morning. But still, we both had faith. We believed He could heal Joey, with or without the surgery. We knew it. And we also knew that we were not here in this place, going through this, by accident.
She looked at me and said, “This is the day the Lord has made.”
And it was.
It was a hard, hard day that He had made. With many harder ones to follow.
Fifty-Six
SURGERY AND MORE
The surgery took almost ten hours.
I waited and I paced and I prayed and I drank black coffee ’til I was sick with worry. Finally the doctor came out and sat beside me on a padded chair in the waiting room. “It went well,” he said. “I think we got most of it.” He told me how they’d found more cancer than they thought, and they had to remove her bladder, among other things. She was in recovery and would be for the next few hours. He was still talking when I jumped ahead.
“Will she be okay?” I asked.
“I hope so,” the doctor answered.
That wasn’t the answer I wanted. So then I asked, “Do you think it will come back?”
“Yes,” he answered. “I’m sorry.”
What? What was he talking about? Why had she just gone through all of this . . . ten hours of surgery . . . and God knows how much pain . . . if it was going to come back?
He explained that this was a radical approach—that they and we had chosen this plan for trying to get out all the cancer and stopping it in its tracks—and it either would work or it wouldn’t. And if it didn’t work, at least her body had been “reset” to where it had been before the cancer came back, and her quality of life would be better.
I still didn’t understand. You don’t talk about “quality of life” to someone whose wife is going to live. How can this be? I thought. It’s just a setback. She has to get better.
In the prep room before her surgery, Joey had sung to me. To Indiana and me. The old hymn “I Need Thee Every Hour.” The same song she had sung a year before, facing the same fears in a different city with a different surgical team. And again this time, as her tears fell and made the words hard to understand, the song comforted her. And me. Hymns always did. It’s why she and I later that summer made an album filled with nothing but hymns. Tracking the musicians in Nashville and recording her vocals in hotel rooms whenever she was up for singing. And then filming a TV special in September, when the chemo and radiation had zapped the cancer and all of her energy and she could barely stand. She wanted to make that record. It was important to her. To sing those songs and have them recorded for Indiana and for our older girls and for the whole world to hear. They had helped her and were helping her now. Maybe they could help others.
What that doctor had said in the waiting room after Joey’s surgery rocked me. For the next few days I walked around like a zombie, trying to process what was happening. The truth of it. Joey and I had never considered that she might not make it through all this, not really. And I wasn’t ready to start thinking that way now. Neither was she.
It would be nearly ten days before we would go home, and Joey would start the recovery process at the farmhouse. By the time she started making a comeback, she was barely over a hundred pounds. The surgery and the stress of it all had taken its toll. She slept and slept, and when she was awake, she didn’t have the energy to get out of bed or do much of anything. Weeds took over the garden. Joey’s mama and neighbors filed in by the dozens to help. To do what they could. Make dinners, weed, and pick the tomatoes. Anything we needed.
Finally Joey began improving, and her smile and spirit started to return. Just in time for the next phase. Six weeks of chemo and radiation. This time we chose to go to the Cancer Treatment Center in Atlanta. Actually, an hour south of Atlanta, in the small town of Newnan. It was closer, only four hours away, and we could probably come home on a weekend or two. That would be something for her to look forward to. Me too.
At first we stayed in a hotel. For two weeks we lived out of suitcases, and Indy spent her afternoons in the pool with her papa while her mama slept or sat on a chair in the shade, watching her baby, but not having the energy to do much with her. Joey had radiation every day and chemo once a week for this round, and it was again taking its toll on her. She was spent.
I tried to keep life as normal as possible for her and lay beside her in the evenings after Indy went to sleep, and we would talk about our lives before all this happened. About all our adventures on the road playing music and about the things she wanted to do in the future. The cows she wanted to raise for beef and the strawberries she wanted to pick with Indiana. Reliving the past and dreaming about the future somehow seemed to help. It helped us forget that we weren’t living the life we wanted and that it might be this way for a while.
After a few weeks the hospital moved us into a house. A beautiful split-level home only a couple of miles from the treatment center. That made things easier. It felt like a home, even if it wasn’t ours. Indy was growing and learning sign language by that time, and her little personality was starting to show itself. She would find a way to make her mama smile, even on the hardest of days. Again and again, Indiana would provide joy and perspective that we had a hard time finding on our own. She was so sweet and so fun, and the daily work of caring for her needs took my mind off the things that I had no answers for . . . like what tomorrow held. Routine things like changing diapers and getting Indy down for her nap time always helped get our minds off the harder things—the pain and suffering Joey was going through.
We made a few trips home during that time. Twice, I think. One was to play a weekend of sold-out shows at our farmhouse concert hall. I always told Joey we could cancel them at any time, but she lo
oked forward to those ninety minutes. To being on the stage and letting the music and lyrics take her far away from where she’d been all summer and where we’d be heading back on Sunday afternoon.
The other trip back home was for her fortieth birthday. I had gotten Joey a horse. Two of them, actually. Since having a horse of her own named Velvet when she was a little girl, Joey had always wanted another one—but the timing was never right. Joey had always said we weren’t home enough and we didn’t have a good place to keep one or a million other good reasons not to make it happen. I couldn’t wait any longer. Now was gonna have to be the time. Now or never, I thought. Some wonderful friends in Texas gave me the horses for Joey, and they sent them in a trailer with their trainer, Chico. We had a party for Joey in the front yard. It was a beautiful day, and quite a few of Joey’s friends and family were there. She loved the blue and red roans when our friend Cowboy Jack led them out into the front yard. “They’re perfect, honey,” Joey said. “They’re just perfect.” She even got up on one of them, Blue Moon, and we took a few pictures. But something inside her knew it would be a long, long time, if ever, before she would be able to ride again.
The horses were a dream come true for her. But Joey had bigger dreams to deal with now. And they had to do with living. Just being able to wake up and see her baby smile and hold her husband’s hand. That was what she was dreaming of now. And through the twenty-five rounds of radiation and the weeks of chemo, she never lost hope. She kept believing that she would get better.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t a dream that I could make come true for her, no matter how much I tried.
