by Steve Turner
Cash had always said that he didn't fear death, but he now seemed to yearn for it—not in a morbid way, or even because it promised a relief from the pain. He believed that for a Christian, death was the gateway to eternal life. His sister Joanne remembers the times they spent together in his office, especially after June's death, when they would sit and discuss the Bible. "He would look at me, a couple of times with tears in his eyes, and he would say, I can hardly wait to see heaven, to see the Lord and to see our family.' I know him and I know how real it was to him."
As late as August 14, 2003, he was in the studio working on two songs: a humorous one called "Asthma Coming Down Like the 309" and a song called "1 Corinthians 15:55" about death, based on the verse "Where, 0 death, is your victory? Where, 0 death, is your sting?" And the following week, on August 21, he recorded his last song. It was at the Cash Cabin Studio, with John Carter Cash producing. The song was called "Engine 143," a story song about an engineer running to get to the station on time. He crashes the train, and dies. The song ends with the words, "And the very last words poor Georgie said were, 'Nearer my God to thee . ' " This final song in his legendary catalog was for an album called Unbroken Circle: The Musical Heritage of the Carter Family. Three days later, his emergency trip to the hospital with pancreatitis prohibited him from attending the MTV Awards in New York. Up for six category awards, the video of "Hurt" ultimately only won the award for cinematography. He was released on Tuesday, September 9, and was already making plans to fly to Los Angeles to do more work in Rick Rubin's studio.
On Thursday, September 11, he was taken ill again, this time with respiratory problems brought on by an asthma attack and complicated by his reflux condition. His lungs, which had very little healthy tissue left, began to fail. He was coughing up blood and was in a state of delirium when the ambulance came. "When I got to the hospital he was conscious," says Rosanne. "He wasn't eyes-open-and-sitting-up conscious, but he squeezed my hand. He had come back from death so many times that, as bad as it looked, we were still hoping that he would recover."
It wasn't to be. At 2:00 a.m. the next morning, John R. Cash died. The only people with him were John Carter, Rosanne, and Kathy. Courtney Wilson, his former pastor at First Baptist Church in Hendersonville, who had visited him during his previous stay, observed that though Cash hadn't lost the will to live, he was calm in the face of death. "There was no one else in the room," he says. "We just spent a little time together because I knew he wasn't feeling good, and after we had prayed, we shook hands and it was like two old friends saying good-bye. I might even have had a tear in my eye. I think he was at peace. Well, I know he was. He was really ready to go. Ready to go home to be with God."
The private funeral took place at First Baptist Church on Monday, September 15. It featured some of the same artists who'd performed at June's funeral. Emmylou Harris and Sheryl Crow sang "The Old Rugged Cross" and Bob Dylan's "Every Grain of Sand." Franklin Graham, representing his father Billy, spoke and said that Cash was "a good man who also struggled with many challenges in his life." Kris Kristofferson offered what was perhaps the most memorable description when he referred to Cash as "Abraham Lincoln with a wild side." Larry Gatlin, Marty Stuart, and Randy Scruggs were among the pallbearers of Cash's black coffin with silver handles.
Cash was laid to rest next to June. Close by were the graves of Mother Maybelle, Ezra, and Anita. On his grave marker, beneath his name and the dates of his birth and death, was Psalm 19:14: "Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, 0 Lord, my strength, and my redeemer." Then followed the familiar flourish of his signature.
Obituaries teemed with praise for the man universally regarded as a great artist, a great humanitarian, and a great American. The New York Times said, "His gravely bass-baritone was the vocal bedrock of American country music for more than four decades." To the Village Voice he was, "the most important country artist of the modern era." Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times called him "a standard of integrity and craft that not only helped reshape country music but also served as a standard for any artist of merit in all pop music. People from Bono to Dylan to Springsteen admired this man and his work."
In Britain, the Guardian described him as "a country musician who was too big for country music, and his work as artist, humanitarian, and patron of songs and song writing will endure indefinitely." The Independent saw him as "one of the last great icons of American country music." Time Out said, "If America as a nation could speak . . . it would sound something like Johnny Cash. His voice was America's voice, just as America's voice was his."
The next weeks and months brought a steady stream of tributes: television and radio documentaries, special newspaper sections, prepared statements by everyone from President George W. Bush to Bob Dylan. Cash's image graced the cover of TIME magazine, and in November a televised tribute aired from the Ryman Auditorium, featuring most of his close friends and members of his family. Actor Tim Robbins hosted the show, which included taped appearances from Bono, Billy Graham, Whoopi Goldberg, Dan Rather, and Ray Charles. Particularly moving was a montage of photographs of Cash playing with his children and grandchildren over which was played the last recording he made with Rosanne, a song called "September When It Comes."
So when the shadows lengthen
And burn away the past
They will fly me like an angel
To a place where I can rest.
When this begins, I'll let you in
September when it comes.8.
SIX WEEKS AFTER CASH'S DEATH, his stepdaughter Rosey was discovered dead in a parked tour bus alongside a bluegrass fiddle player, Jimmy Campbell. She was forty-five years old. Though emergency medical workers found drug paraphernalia on the bus, authorities attributed her death to carbon monoxide poisoning. Hers was the fourth death in the family in seven months. The family began to refer to this dark period as a "season of grief."
In November 2003, as planned, the first copies of the lavish box set that Cash had approved before his death made their way into the market. Unearthed consisted of seventy-seven songs spread over five CDs. Presented with the set was a beautiful book written by Sylvie Simmons that told the back story of the recordings and included a song-by-song explanation by Cash. All of the songs had been recorded during his decade-long relationship with Rick Rubin. Besides the fifteen tracks on the Best of Cash on American CD, none had ever been officially released. The songs ranged from simple acoustic renditions of hymns his mother had taught him as a child to covers of songs by Bob Marley, Neil Young, and Steve Earle. Guests on the album included Joe Strummer (formerly of the Clash), Nick Cave, Tom Petty, and Carl Perkins.
Though some critics thought Rubin had squeezed every last drop of creativity out of Cash and that the recordings lacked consistency, Unearthed, for the most part, received an enthusiastic welcome. Reviewing the collection for the music magazine Mojo, Mat Snow raved, "For those of us who hold that music is the noblest expression of what it is to be human, here is the final installment of a body of work that, almost uniquely, transcends the legend." Steve Volk of Philadelphia Weekly wrote: "Cash was a real flesh and blood man who took on the staggering proportions of myth. The image Unearthed leaves us with is something far humbler, yet no less grand: A sharecropper who dug down into the earth, discovered himself, and discovered us."
In his final decade, Cash had not only produced some of his best work, but he had done some of his best living. Closer than ever to June, he had healed many of his broken relationships and had, by all accounts, become more loving, caring, and forgiving. He had faced death neither with resignation nor with anger but with cheerful fortitude. "I don't understand death," he told Larry Gatlin, "but I'm not afraid of it."
In the end Johnny Cash achieved his aim of living a life that exemplified the power of redemption. He fought the good fight. He ran the race. He kept the faith. "You could look at the last days of his life and say that he died a sad, miserable soul," say
s John Carter. "However, that's not the full picture. Yes, he was sad. Yes, he was alone. But he had purpose, he had belief, and he had a peace in spite of himself that God granted him. I think that is what the grace was in his life and that is where the redemption lay. Even though there was great pain, he didn't live in misery. He was able to keep pressing on."
14
Touched by Grace
EVERYONE WHO KNEW JOHNNY CASH will attest to the fact that he was not an unhappy man. Despite his penchant for black clothing and songs about murder, Cash was an optimistic, loving, kind, and humorous person. Anyone less in love with life would have soon been beaten down by the setbacks he suffered. He delighted in friendships, in knowledge, in family, in music, in nature, and in God. "I can sing songs of death. I've seen a lot of it," he once said. "But I'm obsessed with life."
Yet pain characterized Cash's life—emotionally, physically, and spiritually. It made him the man he was and gave him great compassion for others. The trauma of witnessing the death of his beloved brother Jack was the catalyst for his art. Introspective analysis produced poetry and songs. The humiliation meted out by his father left him insecure and shy, but, as with so many other performers with tyrannical fathers, it gave him the desire for acclaim and the determination to prove his worth.
Cheating on Vivian and shirking his family duties added guilt to his pain. His drugs of choice not only alleviated the pain but also assuaged the guilt. While high, he could behave abominably without remorse. Some drugs, he discovered, could save a man from his sins, not by nullifying them, but by camouflaging them. No wonder he felt they'd been sent to him by God.
The short-term effect of the drugs left behind a tiredness laced with unresolved insecurity and unacknowledged sin. The longer Cash remained under the influence of drugs, the deeper he became mired in regret and insecurity. For years he dealt with this dilemma by taking more drugs and so maintained the downward spiral.
Indescribable physical pain, affecting virtually every part of his body, only added to his affliction. He broke his nose, his upper and lower jaw, a kneecap, a foot, five ribs, a thumb, an ankle, and more than twenty other bones. His heart, duodenum, spleen, stomach, eyes, mouth, toes, and intestines all underwent surgery, and he suffered at different times from tonsillitis, laryngitis, glaucoma, diabetes, compressed vertebrae, asthma, pneumonia, cystic sinusitis, and pancreatitis. In the 1960s, he flirted on numerous occasions with death, usually with the help of amphetamines or alcohol.
By the time Cash reached what would have been his retirement age, he suffered from a multitude of separate problems. No wonder he had such an attraction for painkillers, particularly the synthetic opiate derivative Percodan. Taking them after surgery to facilitate the healing process almost always led to the conclusion that the pills would heal just about anything—if he took enough.
Perhaps Cash's greatest achievement was that he ultimately rose above all the pain. He came to see his trials, physical and mental, not as enemies to be defeated but as tests from God to make him a stronger person. His physical suffering alone would have left many people bitter, but for him it never became a source of doubt or resentment. It was as if instead of asking, "Why me?" he learned to ask, "Why not me?"
He took great comfort from the Old Testament book of Job and wrote a thesis on it to help his understanding. Job was a rich farmer who worshiped God, but the devil argued that Job's trust was in direct proportion to the lack of challenges in his life. Were Job to face sickness, loss, poverty, and destruction, he would moderate his faith. In order to prove the devil wrong, God allowed Job a period of severe testing, during which even his closest friends turned on him, convincing him that he brought the evil upon himself through his own wrongdoing.
Of course Cash took solace from this story. Job stuck to his beliefs even when all the evidence appeared to contradict them. Like Job, Johnny trusted in a loving God even when completely engulfed by pain. "I never questioned God," Cash said in 2002. "I never doubted God. I can't understand people saying they get angry with God. I walked with God all the way through this. That's why I didn't fear. I never feared anything. Not at all. I can honestly say that."
His emotional wounds could have made Cash an introvert, but instead of isolating himself he spent his entire life reaching out to others. He treasured his quiet times and the solitude of fishing, walking, or losing himself in books, but he spent the bulk of his time in the company of friends, family, and fans. Lacking love from his father made him determined to be someone who gave it in abundance.
Cash's suffering made him acutely aware of the suffering of others. At his funeral service and later at the tribute concert, artist after artist told how he had bought them food, paid for accommodations, donated guitars, or even clothed them when they fell on hard times. He used his music to raise money for prisoners, AIDS patients, orphans, drug addicts, alcoholics, autistic children, the illiterate, and countless other disadvantaged people. He said, "As I got to studying the Bible more, I found it part of my religion, not only an obligation but a privilege, to perform for people in bondage, especially those behind bars."
He spoke most often of his spiritual pain. A battle waged within him, he said, between his divinely inspired desire to do right and his natural inclination to do wrong, between serving God and serving himself. He understood only too well what the apostle Paul meant when he wrote, "We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do" (Romans 7:14-15).
His weakness bothered him. Why couldn't he defeat his temptations once and for all and live a consistent and placid life? Surely not every Christian was tempted as frequently as he was and with such uneven results. "I fight the beast in me every day," he once said. "I've won a few rounds with God's help."
Not everyone could identify with Cash's spiritual battle. Those immersed in the rock-'n'-roll lifestyle saw temptation as an opportunity rather than an obstacle and thought that excess led to the "palace of wisdom," as the poet William Blake put it, rather than to the gates of hell. But Cash held tightly to the orthodox Christian position. He believed that although he was redeemed, maybe even because he was redeemed, he was subject to spiritual attack. He believed in a devil who posed as an angel of light.
The Rev. Jack Shaw, a pastor whom Cash took on the road with him in the 1990s to keep an eye on his spiritual condition, says that Cash expected to be subject to greater tests of faith because of the uniqueness of his gift and his frankness when discussing spiritual issues in public. "They say that you get shot at the most when you are closest to the target," he says. "They never let up on Johnny. He was always fighting temptation, but I believe that he had a powerful anointing on his life. He also had a compassionate heart, especially for those who were hurting."
Yet Cash's Christian outlook never became self-righteous. He had too much in common with the drug addict, the alcoholic, the vandal, the thief, and the adulterer to ever want to disassociate himself from them. In his eyes the only difference between him and them was that he was forgiven. "I used to have regrets," he once said, "but then I forgave myself. When God forgave me, I figured I'd better do it too."
When Larry Gatlin found himself in a drug rehabilitation center in California in 1984 Cash was one of his first visitors. He didn't come to reprimand or chastise him; he came to show that he cared. "He never did preach to people," says Gatlin. "He shared his faith and his shortcomings with the whole world. John and June's lives were a book. They were open for everyone to see. They weren't perfect, but they were forgiven, and that was the message they shared."
In 1974, perhaps mindful of some of his own early zealousness, he wrote a song admonishing those who prided themselves on their own righteousness and ignored the rest of the world.
Come heed me my brothers, come heed one and all
Don't brag about standing or you'll surely fall
You're shining your light and shine it you shoul
d
But you're so heavenly minded you're no earthly good.
("No Earthly Good")1
Pain was a necessary part of his growth. Without it he would not have been the Johnny Cash we know. He took comfort from the apostle Paul's story of the unspecified "thorn in the flesh." Paul pleaded three times for this suffering to end but said that God told him, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9). In other words, the weakness produced by the pain was necessary in order for God to reveal his power and forgiveness. "That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong" (1 Corinthians 12:10).
Cash seemed to understand this. The times of his greatest suffering were paradoxically the times of his greatest spiritual strength. When on top of the world he tended to trust in his own invincibility. He said himself that during the 1960s he thought he was indestructible, that he could do anything he wanted to his body without any adverse consequences. It was only as his frailties emerged that he developed humility, caution, and concern.
In his final years, as Cash was gradually stripped of everything—his sight, his mobility, his strength, his looks and, finally, his wife—he became more confident than ever in the object of his faith. "I think that after June died he was different," says Kelly Hancock. "He became even more compassionate towards people. He was kinder. He was more thoughtful. He worried about people. He took everyone in a bit closer and he treasured everyone."
