Joey Feek Cancer Update: Rory Shares New Photo, Says Joey Is ‘Keeping Our Girls Close To Her Heart’

Joey Feek is keeping her girls close to her heart as she continues to battle terminal cancer.

On Sunday, February 7, Rory Feek, Joey’s husband and the other half of the Grammy-nominated duo Joey+Rory, shared a photo on Facebook showing Joey wearing a silver necklace with three pendants hanging from it. One pendant read her 23-month-old daughter’s name, Indiana, while the other two were engraved with her step-daughters’ names — Heidi and Hopie. Rory captioned the photo by writing: “…keeping our girls close to her heart.”

As the Inquisitrpreviously reported, Joey Feek was diagnosed with stage four cervical cancerin May, 2014, three months after giving birth to her daughter, Indiana (Indy). She later underwent a radical hysterectomy and several rounds of chemotherapy. However, despite the intense treatments, Joey’s cancer returned and started to spread, and in October, 2015, she told her doctors she wanted to stop treatment. Joey then returned home in hospice care so she could spend the remainder of her days with her friends and family.

Since then, Rory has been documenting Joey’s cancer battle on his blog, This Life I Live. Most recently, Rory shared a post about Joey’s favorite pastime — gardening. According to Rory, Joey has always loved to garden, and even though she is confined to her hospice bed, she is still sowing her seeds.

“Back home in Tennessee, she plants a big garden every spring behind our farmhouse,” Rory wrote. “By mid-January each year, she’s ordering seeds online or going to the Farmers Coop to stock-pile some of her favorites. She’ll spend hours looking through catalogs and searching online for just the right ones.”

“In years past, it’s not unusual for me to walk in the house and find our kitchen table completely filled with seed packets, potting soil and egg cartons… and Joey grinning ear-to-ear, truly in her element,” Rory continued, adding that Joey has been asking him and the rest of her family to save their egg shells so she can use them to prepare the seeds inside.

“Joey likes to plant some of seedlings in clear divided-containers she gets from the store, but her first choice is to use natural containers that the good Lord has provided,” Rory wrote. “So about two weeks ago, she had Jody, Julie and I start saving the shells from our eggs at breakfast each day. Then last week, after she sent us to the store for potting soil, she started her seeds.”

Sadly, Joey knows she doesn’t have much more time, and she is spending what time she does have preparing Rory for life after she’s gone, and that includes him learning how to grow her garden.

“I often sit beside her as she talks to me about the garden and tries to teach me the things I will need to know. Like how to tell when the watermelon are ripe and how many weeks apart to stagger planting the sweet corn,” Rory continued. “I take notes in my laptop, but I don’t really want to know. Not really. I just want her to be able to be in the garden – this year and twenty more after it. I want her to be able to weed and water and hoe and harvest, and to be able to can and freeze the fruit of her labor and feel the pride that she’s felt in the past at knowing that ‘these sweet potatoes and beans and tomatoes are from our land’ … from her hands. That’s what I really want.”

Joey’s doctors didn’t expect her to live through the holidays, but she did, and now her goal is to be here for the release of her and Rory’s final album, Hymns That Are Important To Us, Indy’s second birthday, and the Grammy Awards, for which Joey+Rory is nominated for duo of the year.