As his terminally ill wife, Joey Feek, nears the end of her battle with cancer, country singer Rory Feek looked back at the night they met, in a bittersweet blog post on Friday, February 5.
In a post paying tribute to his cousin and manager, Aaron Carnahan, Rory writes about the many things that the pair have in common: Both have been married twice, have three children, one of whom has Down syndrome, and both have wives that have been diagnosed with cancer.
Rory, 49, notes that Carnahan’s wife, Jill, made a full recovery; when he called his cousin to tell him about Joey’s diagnosis in May 2014, Aaron broke down. “‘You can’t have this. This is where it has to stop …’ That was the one place where the paralleling of our lives was almost too much for him to bare,” Rory writes.
Joey, 40, made the decision to discontinue treatment after her cancer returned last October, and as she spends her remaining days in her family home in Indiana, Rory is reminiscing about the good times they have shared.
In his post, Rory writes that he prayed to meet someone special after his cousin married Jill, and “not long after that, I was playing a show at the Bluebird Cafe [in Nashville] and a beautiful brown-eyed girl with a boy’s name was in the audience listening.”
The couple married on June 15, 2002, the Carnahans’ fifth wedding anniversary. And Aaron was the best man.
A few years later, Rory remembers driving with Aaron to buy a video camera to make an audition tape for Joey to submit to CMT’s Can You Duet? “That video was how we got on the show and it launched our music career and completely changed our lives,” he admits.
In 2011, they asked Aaron to be their manager, even though he had no experience in the music business. “What we’ve been able to accomplish since Aaron started working with us had been nothing short of amazing,” Rory notes.
“And now, here we are in 2016 and Aaron’s still managing … us … our music … and where life has led us. But mostly I think he’s just doing his best to manage the pain he feels. He wants so desperately to fix this for us, but he knows he can’t,” Rory continues. “I think he’s cried more tears over what is happening right now than all of us put together.”