On June 30, I got an email informing us that our friend Joyce Morey had passed away after battling cancer for 25 years. It also happened to be the same day I was working on a song with a client who had lost his baby a year ago at birth. The heaviness of everything was so thick and overwhelming that I was choking back tears throughout the day. So later that night, I wrote “Toll the Bell”
A lot of us never really consider our mortality and the fragility of the life we have been given. So many of us live as if we have all the time in the world. But as I’ve gotten older, I have watched more and more people that I love die. And it is a sobering reminder that our time on this earth is limited.
I remember one of the first conversations I ever had with Joyce Morey after I first moved to California. At the time I was going through a lot of health issues as well as financial problems from the lawsuit. I asked her why after all these years she wasn’t bitter or angry at God. Her eyes started to well up with tears and she replied, “I don’t know why we suffer or go through pain, I just know that above all things, God is good.” She hugged me and told me to not be discouraged because of what I was going through and to always remember that God loved me.
Over the next few years, I held out hope that Joyce would be healed. I believed that God would take away her cancer. I prayed for it. But he never did. Yet I’ve realized the greater miracle was not the healing, but her faith in God’s goodness and kind heart. That even though the pain and the sickness were grueling and ugly, her soul maintained a beauty and a wholeness that seemed otherworldly. The last time I ever saw Joyce was at church just a few weeks before her passing. She was frail and thin, but hugging and greeting everyone. I asked her how she was doing and she said, “my body is broken, but my soul is joyful.”
Last Saturday was Joyce’s memorial service. Everyone who spoke at the service spoke of her courage, her joy and how she loved those around her with abandon.
After the service, I took baby Joe up to Joyce’s photo to pay our respects and say goodbye to a great woman who reminded me to always have courage no matter what the trial. After both of us stared at the photo for a few seconds, Joseph waved his hand and whispered “bye bye.” I burst into tears.
Baby Joe says goodbye to the stars and moon every night with the assurance that they will be there the next evening. He said bye bye to auntie Joyce with a childlike confidence that we would see her again.
And we will.