Joey Feek Finds Joy in Snowfall After Crying to Husband Over Cancer Battle: 'I Want to Raise Our Baby'

"And then through her tears, she said the words ... the ones I knew she felt, but she had never said before," writes Rory Feek

Photo: Rick Diamond/Getty

Joey Feek has epitomized bravery throughout her struggle with cervical cancer, but there are some harsh realities she struggles to accept.

Weeks after entering hospice with stage-4 cancer, the country singer, 40, was reminded that she won’t be able to raise her daughter Indiana, 21 months, who has Down syndrome.

In an emotional update to his blog This Life I Live on Monday, Rory Feek, 50, shared Joey’s reaction to a photo of Scout, Indiana’s best friend in Pottsville, Tennessee, riding a horse. The little girl has “been in and out of hospitals and surgeries since the day she was born” with Loeys-Dietz syndrome, a connective-tissue disorder that could lead to life-threatening complications. After Rory shared the image signifying Scout’s progress, Joey’s “hands started shaking and she closed her eyes and started sobbing,” Rory wrote.

He continued, “I wasn’t sure what had happened – what the pain was that she was feeling – so I tried to put my arms around her and asked, ‘What’s wrong?’ And then through her tears, she said the words … the ones I knew she felt, but she had never said before … the words that are the hardest, most-difficult part of all that she, and we, are going through: ‘I want to raise our baby,’ she cried, and her tears fell harder … ‘I want to be the one to teach her.'”

The loving husband, with whom Joey entered the country spotlight as singing duo Joey + Rory in 2008, described how he tried to comfort his “inconsolable” wife before they noticed a big surprise outside her childhood home in Alexandria, Indiana, where Joey wants to live out what might be her final days.

“I held her in my arms as she held Scout’s picture to her heart and cried and cried,” Rory penned. “I didn’t know what to do. And then, just like that – over my shoulder, through the window she saw it … snow. It was snowing. Huge white flakes were falling from above.”

Rory said Joey soon lit up with a smile.

“Then a bigger one,” he wrote. “[Joey said], ‘I didn’t think I’d get to see snow again.’ And she looked at me, then raised her eyes up at [the] sky and said, ‘If this is the last snow I ever see, thank you Jesus … thank you.’ Like manna from Heaven. God sent us just what we needed … just when we needed it. He always does.”

Joey went outside to take video of what might be Joey’s last snow. In the background plays the couple’s version of “It Is Well with My Soul,” a song from their set of hymns, out on Valentine’s Day. Rory said part of the proceeds will benefit the Loeys-Dietz Syndrome Foundation in honor of Scout.

“Joey’s album,” Rory wrote of the new music, which might be his wife’s last release. “The one she’s always wanted to make – filled with the hymns she grew up with. We recorded it in a studio in Nashville early in the summer – just after recovering from her first big surgery in Chicago. And then she did her vocals where she could … in hotel rooms, our house, wherever and whenever she felt up to singing.”

He later added, “I think she wants to capture this music so we can take it home with us. All of us. And have it forever.”