Hillbilly Heart (31 page)

Spirit Mountain

I
T’S NOT EASY TO
lose a parent, to suffer the permanent absence of a loved one, and to simultaneously experience your own climb up the ladder of mortality. I learned that my dad had cancer at the same time I was finishing the pilot for
Hannah Montana.
He called and wanted me to come visit him. He had something he wanted to tell me in person.

Needless to say I cried the whole way there.

It was not the first time I had confronted death. In one of my craziest moves ever, I arranged for Tish’s deceased father, Glenmore, to be reburied on our property. I realize this seems as nuts as George Jones taking his lawn mower to the liquor store. It was also a complete surprise to Tish.

Glenmore and his wife were the angels who adopted my wife when she was a baby. Theirs was one the greatest love stories I ever heard. They met on a Wednesday, got married on a Friday, and never spent a day without each other. They never missed one of Tish’s dance recitals or a game where she was on the sidelines as a cheerleader. For some reason, though, Tish’s grandmother hated Glenmore. Tish said they couldn’t be in the same room together.

However, after Glenmore died of cancer (Tish was eighteen and pregnant with Brandi, who was named Brandi Glen after him), he
was buried next to his mother-in-law. It wasn’t enough that she tortured him when they were alive. Now she’d do it for eternity. Tish was so bothered by it she couldn’t bring herself to visit his grave.

After a few years, I had an idea that I thought would help Tish. I’d exhumed Glenmore and rebury him up on Spirit Mountain. I wanted it to be a surprise for Tish. We were heading into Christmastime, and one day when Tish and I were up on Spirit Mountain I said, “Wouldn’t it be great if Glenmore had been buried here?”

She nodded wistfully and said, “If he was, I could bring him flowers.”

To me, she was really saying it might ease a lot of other things going on, some of the wounds she carried from the past, if he was here.

And that led me to Mammy, who was keeper of the will. I asked what she thought of moving Glenmore.

“It’s a great idea,” she said. “It’s one of the craziest ideas I’ve heard, too. Can you really make that happen?”

Once I get behind an idea, I feel like I can move mountains to make it happen. Having a good lawyer also helps. My lawyer drew up papers, had Loretta sign all the proper forms, and then got my land approved as a state-registered cemetery, officially known as the Cyrus Family Cemetery.

So now Glenmore had his passport to come to Tennessee. On Christmas Eve, I rented a backhoe and a neighbor helped me dig the hole. Early the next morning, before anyone in my family was awake, Glenmore arrived at the gate in the back of a hearse. Since I knew about what time he was expected, I was up waiting on him.

It was beautiful. I was laughing to myself as I saw him through the security camera. Here comes Glenmore, I thought. I also wondered if I was crazy. It was the crack of dawn. Everybody was asleep. I bundled up and led the hearse up the hill and we got him all buried. I put a bunch of those red Christmas flowers on his freshly covered grave. I got it all beautiful and even dug up a little Christmas tree from the woods and put it nearby.

When I got back to the house, Tish was waking up. Knowing the
kids were going to sleep for another hour or two, if not longer, I told her that Santa Claus had a surprise for her.

“Walk outside and let me show you something,” I said.

“What are you up to?” she asked.

She knew my favorite part about Christmas was planning a surprise.

“Just come out with me,” I insisted. “And dress warm.”

Tish is not an especially outdoorsy person, so going outside in the cold on Christmas morning was not her ideal way of starting the day. I think she figured that I’d bought her a new car. Even then, she was reluctant to brave the cold. But I got her to bundle up and walk with me. Sure enough, as we started across the field, she asked, “Why do we have to walk out here on Christmas morning?”

“Because it’s Christmas morning,” I said. “It’s beautiful. It’s just me and you, a couple of kids from Kentucky out here in this incredible land, on this incredibly beautiful morning.”

By this time she knew something was up. She thought I was taking her to the teepee. But we passed the teepee and rounded the corner. Then, after a few steps, she stopped. She saw the large rock on which I’d painted,
I AM HERE NOW
, a reference to a song off my
Trail of Tears
album that she loved,
GLENMORE FINLEY
1922–1986.

“You didn’t?” she said, as tears began to fill her eyes.

“Yes, ma’am, I did,” I replied, grinning like a mischievous little boy.

“I can’t believe it,” she said before wrapping her arms around me. “I mean you’re crazy. I love you. But you’re crazy. Did you have him—”

“I did,” I said.

“When?” she asked.

“He drove over this morning,” I said.

“He drove?”

“Well, he didn’t,” I said. “But I saw him at the gate… and they opened up…”

She laughed. “This is really pretty crazy.”

“I don’t know,” I said with a shrug. “If you ask me”—and I looked around—“this is kind of what Heaven’s supposed to be like, right?”

She wrapped her arms around me and planted a big kiss on my lips. “Right.”

Cletis is buried a little bit down the hill from Glenmore. He got sick in late 1997 from smoking and died from COPD—chronic obstructive pulmonary disease—or emphysema. That was not a good way to go, but at least the years he spent living in Tennessee were happy ones.

After we moved to the farm, Cletis and my mom took over my log cabin on Snead Road. I had already given them that place when we moved into the big A-frame, and Kebo got our boyhood home at 2317 Long Street. By then, Ruthie had become famous in her own right. All my fans knew Ruthie. Some days she had a hundred people from all over the world lined up in front of her house, waiting to see her.

My aunt Mary was lonely after her first husband passed away and she loved it when people came to her trailer. She remarried a wonderful man who I called Uncle Marlin, and both of them enjoyed the company of fans. She built a shrine to me and would send pictures of people standing in her trailer next to posters of me. I’d see ’em with their arm around a cardboard cutout, holding a bag of Fritos. It was hilarious.

But you know, God bless her and all those folks. People need company. I’m all for anyone feeling a little less lonely.

Cletis, in his retirement years, became very comfortable. He sat out by the pool, under a shade tree that he liked a lot. There were two ponds stocked with the hugest catfish ever. He never cast a line. He only liked to throw them corn. Every morning and every evening he went out there and fed them. He would take Miley and the kids down there and let them feed the fish. He was a great grandfather.

I admired Cletis as much as any man I ever met. He could’ve
turned his back on me real quick. If someone had been as mean and disrespectful as I had been, I would’ve said eventually enough of this shit. But he stayed with me. After I’d made it, I thanked him. I said, “You didn’t have to love me. But you did anyway.”

Another thing about Cletis. With all due respect to my dad, he was the hardest-working man I knew. After the railroad laid him off, he worked nonstop on other things, like driving or loading trucks. If he wasn’t doing that, he was in the driveway fixing my piece-of-shit car, my minibike, his truck, or the neighbor’s car. He was always busy, always fixing something.

People from all over Flatwoods would bring him their cars. I swear he was the greatest mechanic in the area. He never charged anyone. He liked to fix things. In some ways, he even fixed me and my broken family.

I was standing by his bed in Centennial Hospital when he took his last breath. He was sitting there, gasping for air. I remember reaching out and taking hold of his hand. He was in a great deal of pain. It was not a comforting sight. And then he left us. Everyone was brokenhearted but relieved after it was over. I’m sure that included Cletis. If ever there was a man who was ready to go, it was him. That disease was doing some ugly stuff to him, and it was worse because he knew what was going on. Cletis suffered.

If he had any comfort, it was that he knew where he was going to rest after he passed. He and my mom had picked their spot up on Spirit Mountain. They had begun to prepare it long before he was hospitalized. Cletis knew there was a big buck that liked to hang out in that area, and to this day, around sunset, that buck will hang around his headstone, as if he’s come to watch over a kindred spirit.

My mom goes up there several times a day to pull out the weeds and keep it manicured. If there’s bird poop on the marble, she cleans it off. She gets a great deal of comfort when she goes on top of that hill. Just like me. Both of us love that place.

I have it in my will that within twenty-four hours of my death I must be cremated and returned to dust. The kids won’t have to hassle
with anything. They won’t have to worry about where to put me. They’ll take me up to Spirit Mountain and sprinkle me over this pile of stuff I’ve found out in the field—arrowheads, tomahawks, and even a piece of a meteorite that I picked up one day while I was playing with the kids when they were little.

I’ve already placed a marble bust of an Indian chief in the center of that pile. I brought that bust home from Arizona years ago after I made the video for “In the Heart of a Woman.” It never fit properly in the house, and then one day it hit me. “It’s going to be my grave marker.” Yes, indeed. And I put it on my four-wheeler, rode it up the mountain, set it down amid all the rocks and bones the kids and I had found over the years. I knew for certain that was the spot that would be my home for eternity.

I know that when I’m spread over the ground up there I’ll be returned to the best days of my life: the days when I rode horses and and dirt bikes with the kids, turned rocks into treasures, roasted marshmallows and wieners by the fire, watched a mother hawk teach its babies to fly, saw a herd of deer run across the field, and stared up at the Big Dipper.

I think about death more than most people, but I don’t know what it means other than life ends and another journey begins. I do believe in a heaven and hell. I believe in a soul. And I believe life is about doing good works on earth. I think we’re supposed to live for the light. What’s the light? The light is goodness. Try to be a good person. Try to help out. The Bible says, “As you sow, so shall you reap.”

My dad really took that to heart. Helping people was the essence of his life, and nothing made him happier than when we started the Billy Ray Cyrus Foundation. We set one goal for ourselves: to help the underdog. My dad loved having the funds that I could generate with benefit concerts. When he heard the Boy’s Home in Ashland had burned down, he got involved and we were able to rebuild it.

Likewise, when a little boy from Paducah was paralyzed in a car wreck, we got him a specially equipped van and a computer pad for his wheelchair so he could go to school. Such efforts made it easy to
call on friends such as Dolly Parton, who performed at our second benefit. In 1999, I played a show in Arkansas the night before a tornado wiped out the little town of Mulhall, Oklahoma. One of the strongest on record, it literally erased the small town.

Instead of going home, I called my dad and asked if we could get the wheels up on the foundation. We had created it to help people in eastern Kentucky, but I wanted to head to Mulhall and clean out every Walmart on the way. My dad gave me the green light.

My bus pulled into the little town around noon the day after the tornado. I had never seen anything like the destruction the town’s residents were facing. They were in shock. Every square inch of space on my bus was packed with food and water and diapers.

Kids ran over. Their parents and other adults were happy that someone cared. And if my dad’s years of public service taught me anything, it’s the importance of showing up and showing you care. You figure out the rest.

My dad was proud of me. I was even prouder of him. He taught me that we were all put here for a reason: to give back to our fellow man. We both shared a passion for helping others. I think as far as accomplishments go, the Billy Ray Cyrus Charities Foundation was one of the most significant.

Cut to summer 2004. I was playing Renfro Valley, Kentucky, and my dad showed up with his best friend, a man named Woody. He and Woody rode horses in Kentucky. My dad was robust and aging gracefully. But something about him looked off. He was pale and moving slowly, like he was uncomfortable, and he seemed like he’d lost some weight.

“A little under the weather,” he said. “I think a copperhead might’ve bit me one day when I was out riding.”

“Wouldn’t you know if you got bit by a snake?” I asked.

“I go through them woods,” he replied. “It’s tough to say. Something else might’ve got me. Maybe a spider. I don’t know.”

A little more than a year later I went to his house in Cave Run. He and my stepmom had a little cabin out in the woods of the Daniel
Boone National Forest. As I said earlier, he wanted to talk to me in person, and I knew it wasn’t good. I knew I was going to get the truth about my dad’s health, not another snakebite story.

When I flew out from California, I found him in bed—although the man I saw there bore very little resemblance to my dad. Propped up on his pillows, he looked me in the eye and told me that he had been diagnosed with mesothelioma, a rare but virulent form of the disease that’s caused by exposure to asbestos. It’s like lung cancer but worse.

Back when he was in the Kentucky legislature, my dad had fought hard to get an experimental cancer-fighting drug called Laetrile legalized. It was made from apricot seeds. At the time, desperate people were going to Mexico to get it. The bill didn’t pass, but it was the hardest thing I’d ever seen my dad fight for and lose, until he began his own battle against cancer.

Against my wishes, he decided on treatment with the world’s leading specialist in mesothelioma at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Why was I against it? Chemotherapy. Although I understood that his doctor was number one, I’d never seen chemo do anything but tear people down. I didn’t know how much time he had left, but I knew I wanted it to be quality time.