Rory Feek recently released a memoir called This Life I Live revealing many secrets about his past and life with Joey. The country singers world was turned upside down in March 2016 when his wife and fellow singer, Joey Feek, passed away from cervical cancer. Just before the release of his new autobiography, Rory took the stage at the Grammy award show to accept an award for best roots gospel album on behalf of their beloved duo, Joey + Rory. During his emotional acceptance speech, he dedicated their first Grammy to his wife and musical partner, Joey. Here’s a look at 9 of the most shocking revelations from Rory Feek’s new book:
9. Slept with his Friends Wife
When Rory was young, he was in the Marines. One weekend he came home on what was called a “weekend pass” and he and some friends went to visit a pal. His friend wasn’t there, but his wife was (and the mother of young boys) so she entertained them for the evening. According to Feek in his memoir, he and his friend’s wife got extremely drunk “and then it happened.” He had a one night stand with the wife of his friend, but it turned into much more than that.
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8. The Next Morning
Not only did Rory sleep with his best friends wife, but they also engaged in a brief relationship. “She told me that we should come clean, that we were in love and should let everybody know it. I was still drunk. Exhausted. Reeling from what had happened the night before. It had felt like love…Maybe it was. I looked up and saw my friend’s wife looking at me like she cared about me. I said, ‘Okay, let’s do it,'” he wrote. The wife and her children moved in with him for six months, but things didn’t work out. “She still loved him. My friend. And so with tears streaming down my face, I took her and those little boys to the airport and watched as they boarded a plane to try and go back and resume the life they had. Meanwhile, mine had been wrecked,” he wrote. Feek claims his friend later forgave him.
HOLLIS BENNETT via People
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7. Once Waited 24 Hours to Take Daughter to Hospital
Feek has two daughters from a previous relationship and he raised them as a single father before he finally met Joey. He didn’t have a lot of money and they didn’t have health insurance. He wrote that his kids knew “being sick wasn’t allowed because we couldn’t afford it. Seriously, I never said it out loud, but the kids knew that was how we lived.” When Heidi was only 5-years-old, she fell on the playground and broke her leg. She didn’t have a fever or swelling so he figured she was okay. When he did take her in and she had an X-ray done, he felt awful. “I looked at the fracture, and tears poured down my face. Partly because I realized how much pain Heidi must have been in for the last twenty-four hours and partly because I hated living that way. Hated that I couldn’t provide better for them,” he wrote. He also wrote that he managed to “skip out on the [hospital] bill.”
Source: CMT
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6. How He Met Joey
The story of how Joey and Rory met actually lies within another story in the memoir. Rory Feek lent money to his sister, Marcy, so she could open up her own store. It was a huge act of generosity that was rewarded with an even bigger gift. Marcy had her fair share of struggles in life as she welcomed her first child when she was only 15-years-old. “I knew no one had ever done anything like that for her. She couldn’t stop crying. I held her as her tears ran down my shirt. It was so, so beautiful,” he wrote. The store wasn’t overly successful, but “something even more beautiful came out of it. Joey.” One of the store’s gimmicks was that it hosted songwriters’ nights, which is how Joey ended up waltzing into Rory’s life. “I think it happened because I wasn’t worrying about my dreams or my girls or finding someone. I was giving. Instead of taking. For the first time, really.”
COURTESY JOEY+RORY
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5. Dating Other People
When Joey and Rory first met each other, they were both in relationships with other people. When they were talking on the phone one time, she told him “she was dating a wonderful guy, up in Indiana, and that they’d been together for a year and a half and she was probably going to marry him. But she wanted to tell me that if things were different, if the timing were better, maybe she and I would be together,” he wrote.
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4. How They Got Together
Despite these other relationships, Joey and Rory went out on a first date at a truck stop. They kept in touch over time until Valentine’s Day came around and Joey called Rory to tell him she had split with her boyfriend. He then asked to meet up with her. “I hung up the phone and called the girl I was dating and told her it was over. God had just moved a mountain, right in front of me. And I was going to see what was on the other side,” he wrote. The two began their relationships right then and there and the rest is history!
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3. They Almost Didn’t Have Children
For the first 10 years of their relationship, Rory said Joey disliked babies so much she wouldn’t even hold them! “In the first 10 years we were married, [Joey] wouldn’t pick up or hold a baby, even if it was one of her sisters’ children,” he wrote. So, when the two got married, there wasn’t any question about whether or not they would have children. Joey had made it clear that she didn’t want to have her own kids, but 10 years into their marriage, she had a change of heart. “[Joey] said she was ready to give God everything. Even the part that scared her the most. Getting pregnant and having a baby,” he wrote, so when he asked her if this meant she changed her mind and wanted to have children, she replied, “No…but even more than that, I want what God wants.”
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2. She Wanted More Children
Even though it took Joey a long time to get to a point in her life where she wanted to become a mother, suffered through a traumatic birth and the news that their first and only child, Indiana, had Down syndrome, Rory said Joey wanted more children. The reason they didn’t expand their family further was because her cancer diagnosis got in the way. He also wrote that if it weren’t for Indiana, Joey would never have fought to live as hard as she did.
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1. Indiana’s Second Birthday
In November, a few months before she died, Rory remembered Joey saying, “I think I’ll be here to see Indiana’s birthday in February,” but neither he or her family believed she would. Regardless of their doubt, Joey fought so hard to see her daughter turn 2 that she actually lived long enough to see Indy “blow out her little ‘2’ candle and rub a paleo cupcake all over her face, laughing and grinning ear to ear,” he wrote. He called the whole thing a “miracle.” She passed away on March 4, 2016.