Joey Feek, one half of the country/bluegrass music duo Joey + Rory, has passed away, according to her husband’s blog.
The singer, a woman of deep faith, died Friday night at her home in Indiana surrounded by loved ones after battling stage IV cervical cancer. She had been receiving hospice care at the time of her death. She was diagnosed with the disease in 2014, and informed her fans in 2015 that her cancer had spread and that she was discontinuing treatment.
Her spouse and musical partner, Rory Feek, documented her personal struggles and joys as well as the family’s big and little moments on his blog, “This Life I Live — scenes from one man’s extraordinary, ordinary life.” His intent was to share “small vignettes from our lives,” he said — but he also stressed that he felt grateful that his wife’s life, and ultimately her death, “might possibly help or encourage someone else somewhere.”
On February 29, Rory posted a sad update about his wife, writing that Joey, just 40 years old, had been “asleep for days now and her body is shutting down quickly.” Her nurse informed him that his wife only had a few days left to live.
Before his wife lapsed into her last slumber, she called the family together, including their two-year-old daughter Indiana, who was born with Down syndrome and was the pride and joy of their lives.
[lz_ndn video= 30442571]
“Joey gathered her family together around her and she said goodbye to each of them … to her mother and father and her three sisters,” Rory Feek wrote on his blog. “There were lots of tears as she explained to each one how much she loved them and that she was going to be going home soon. That her time here was done and she was going to go to sleep soon.”
He continued: “And then she asked me to bring our baby in. And so … I set our little Indy on Joey’s lap and we all cried with my wife as she told her how much her mama loved her and, ‘You be a big girl for your papa … and that Mama will be watching over you.’ And then she pulled Indiana up and she kissed her.”
Feek wrote on the blog that his wife had no regrets in life.
“One of the last things Joey said before she drifted into the deep sleep she’s been in for days now is, ‘I have no regrets … I can honestly say, that I have done everything I wanted to do and lived the life I always wanted to live.”
The musical duo was nominated for a Grammy earlier this year, and Joey Feek lived to see the couple’s album, a passion project for them called “Hymns That Are Important to Us,” hit the top of the Billboard charts under Top Country Albums last month. The record also topped both Billboard’s Contemporary Christian Album and Christian Video charts.
[lz_third_party includes=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZXxIyjTY1s]
“No one is more surprised that our Hymns record has sold this many copies than Joey and I,” Rory Feek told Billboard. “For the last few months, we’ve been in Indiana, far away from the music business, living and sharing the story of our personal journey through my blog. We haven’t been promoting our careers at all. The only way I can explain the sales of this record is that it’s a byproduct of something bigger: love.”
Joey Feek agreed with her husband.
“When the label called to give us the news I immediately took the phone in to Joey,” Rory Feek said in a press release. “This recording was ‘hers’ from the beginning. This is one that she has always wanted to make, and she’s worked so hard to make it happen, in spite of the difficult circumstances she is facing. As I congratulated her, she responded through tears, ‘No, honey, this is God’s record.'”
Join the Discussion
Comments are currently closed.