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Can a wound like the death of the love of one's life ever heal? Not easily; maybe not ever. "He tried to contain himself," Reverend Wilson says, "but her passing took his last spark, the last bit of his heart." Cash admitted as much. "I don't know hardly what to say tonight about being up here without her," he said at his first public appearance after her death, at the Carter Family Fold country music festival in Hiltons, Va. "The pain is so severe there is no way of describing it."
The pain could be described not in words but in sobs. "One day there was just the two of us sitting there," Stuart recalls, "and he broke down and started crying and said, 'Man, I miss her so bad.' I didn't know what to say, so I held his hand. He loved my wife Connie, who's been a friend to that family for a long time. He grabbed my hand and said, 'Son, cling to her; cling to her; cling to her.' What I saw at that moment is that he would have traded every bit of fame, fortune--everything that Johnny Cash meant to the world--for five minutes with June."
Two weeks before Cash's death, Jones and his wife Nancy paid a visit. "He had just gotten back from the dentist," Jones says. "He had numb lips and all. He stayed seated just about the whole time we were there. But he was in a good mood. He said he was fixing to get up and throw that wheelchair away, and he was going back to work." But to others Cash revealed his resignation. Wilson, who visited Cash at Nashville's Baptist Hospital, says, "He was aware things were closing down for him, and he was at peace. He was ready to go home to God."
So many Cash songs speak of the hereafter as if it were waiting, patiently, urgently, in the next room, as if it were comforting--especially for a man who had wrestled his demons to a draw and learned to walk the line--to think of death not as a psycho killer but as a kindly escort. In September When It Comes, a duet recorded this year with his daughter Rosanne, Cash speak-sings this poignant prophecy: "They will fly me, like an angel,/To a place where I can rest/When this begins, I'll let you know,/September when it comes."
For Cash, September came last week, as Americans coped with a more general mourning. And if some felt shock at the news of Cash's passing, they could segue into celebration over a difficult life made exemplary, an outlaw redeemed by a woman's devotion. Besides, if you believe, the Man in Black is now garbed in white, and the doting husband has eternity to spend with his beloved. In a song she composed on the day of Cash's death, country singer Shelby Lynne imagines a sweet reconciliation--the next act of a beautiful duet on a new stage:
Hey, my darlin' Hey, my sweet I've waited on the day when I knew we would meet Hey, my sun Hey, my moon Today's the day when Johnny met June
--Reported by Jackson Baker/Memphis; Steve Barnes/Dyess, Ark.; Sean Gregory and Jyoti Thottam/New York; Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles; and David E. Thigpen/Chicago