On May 17, 2012, Joey and Rory Feek turned their farm in Pottsville, Tennessee, into a film set. The song was “When I’m Gone,” and the story the video told was simple: Joey had died, she was buried in the grove of sassafras trees in the back field, and Rory was left to go on living in the old farmhouse without her.
On March 8, 2016, that story stopped being make-believe. Joey was buried in the same grove, in the same small family cemetery where they had filmed.
A work tape from a friend
“When I’m Gone” came from Sandy Lawrence, a friend Joey had worked with years earlier at a horse veterinary clinic in Tennessee, back when both women were still dreaming about music careers. Sandy wrote the song while she was caring for her mother, who was dying. It is sung from the point of view of the one who is leaving, telling the people she loves that they will be okay.
Joey later explained what Sandy had been searching for when she wrote it:
“She was watching her mother pass, and she was so badly needing her mother to tell her those words.”
In 2012, while Joey and Rory were choosing songs for their album His and Hers, Rory found Sandy’s rough work tape on his laptop in the studio and played it for Joey. She cried listening to it. Ten minutes later, Joey, Rory, producer Gary Paczosa and pianist Gordon Mote gathered around the piano to find Joey’s key, and by Rory’s account, everyone in the room was in tears again.
The change an hour before filming
A few months later, they lit the big barn on their farm with candles and turned it into a set. The original plan was for Joey and Rory to sing the song together, with Sandy at the piano.
Then, an hour or two before the cameras rolled, the people helping make the video suggested something different. Joey should sing the song to Rory. Rory should be the one left behind.
Rory Feek did not want to do it. He wrote that the idea hit too close to home. He agreed anyway, and years later he summed up why:
“It wasn’t what I wanted… but it’s what the song wanted.”
Around the same time, the couple filmed behind-the-scenes footage for a TV show they were creating. In it, Rory sits in a rocking chair on the upstairs deck and describes the view: Joey’s garden, the back field, and the little cemetery where the people who built their farmhouse are buried. He says it is where he and Joey will be buried someday. Looking out at it, he tears up.
“That view through the screen door, there’s no acting going on.”
When the make-believe began coming true
On February 17, 2014, Joey gave birth to their daughter, Indiana, at home in the farmhouse. A few months later, Joey was diagnosed with cervical cancer. She fought it through surgery and treatment, but by the fall of 2015 the cancer had returned, and she chose to stop treatment.
In late 2015, fans who had followed the couple’s story began buying “When I’m Gone” in an effort to push it up the iTunes chart. In January 2016, Rory wrote a blog post that took its title from the song. Sitting beside his dying wife, he wrote that their make-believe video now seemed to be coming true, and that he was not angry at the irony. Joey and Rory asked that “When I’m Gone” be added to the end of their final album, Hymns That Are Important to Us. Rory explained that it was not a classic hymn, but to them it was one.
Joey Feek died on March 4, 2016. She was 40 years old.
March 8, 2016
Joey had hoped she could come home to the farm on a beautiful day. Rory wrote that she did: the daffodils were blooming and the sky was clear.
The service was held in the barn on the farm. The Isaacs sang “It Is Well With My Soul.” Sandy Lawrence sang “When I’m Gone,” the song she had once written for her own mother.
Afterward, Joey’s simple wooden box was carried on a mule-drawn wagon from the 1800s to the grove of sassafras trees behind the farmhouse, while singers walked alongside singing “Down to the River to Pray.” The family followed behind. Indiana, two years old, rode on her father’s shoulders. Rory Feek later described the woman they buried that day as “the greatest person I have ever known.”
When most of the guests had gone and the light was fading, Rory and Indiana walked back out to the grave together, just the two of them.
Seven years later
On May 17, 2019, exactly seven years after the filming, Rory came across the old behind-the-scenes footage and wrote about it. He said the video had come true, “every word of it,” with one difference. He was not left alone at the farm the way the video imagined. He had Indiana with him.
In the same post, he made the connection plain: Joey’s grave sits in the same spot in the cemetery behind the farmhouse where they had filmed the video a few years before.
The daffodils still ring that little family cemetery, and every March, around the anniversary of the day Joey came home, they bloom again.