Willie Nelson has revealed that he twice asked his wife to let him die while battling COVID in 2022. The country legend has previously discussed his fight with the virus, but in his new memoir, The Last Leaf (via People), he offers a more detailed account of just how close he came to death.
The 93-year-old recalls waking up in his tour bus bed alongside Annie, his wife since 1991, and realizing how seriously ill he was.
“The distance from the bed to the bathroom is less than five feet. But I couldn’t get there. I couldn’t breathe.”
Annie activated a nebulizer to ease his chest congestion and gave him oxygen, but neither seemed to help. Around that time, the COVID test she'd administered came back positive.
“Paxlovid had just come out, and I knew [bandmate] Mickey Raphael had a prescription, which he gave to us,” Annie recalled. “By this time, you could breathe, but barely. We gave our drivers, Tony and Gates, the option to fly home, but they said no. They drove us back to Austin.
“In the back of the bus, you stayed isolated and grew sicker. I wasn’t sure you would make it. I alerted Dr. Greenwood that we were on our way and asked to have a mobile monoclonal antibody guy meet us.”
Nelson — well-known for his passion for weed — asked Annie how she'd known what to do.
“I’d worked all this out for months,” she told him. “I knew there was a good chance you’d catch it. I knew I needed to be ready. I also knew that taking you to a hospital was not an option. You’d have no chance of privacy, and hospitals are hotbeds of deadly viruses.”
When they arrived home, Nelson was carried to their bedroom, which Annie said “was already fitted out like a hospital.” But while they waited for the medication to take effect, his condition continued to deteriorate.
“Every labored breath caused you incredible pain,” she recalled. “I wanted to do more, but I’d done all I could. I just had to sit there and watch you suffer. It was the worst thing I’ve ever had to do.”
Nelson, who remembered “feeling excruciating pain in every cell of my body,” then asked Annie: “Am I right in remembering that I said, ‘Annie, you need to let me go’?”
She confirmed he had.
“But you wouldn’t let me,” he continued.
“What I actually said was, ‘Willie, if you die, I’ll kill you,’” she replied. “And you said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be back in a minute.’ You were thinking about reincarnation, but I didn’t want to hear about reincarnation. I wanted you to understand that I was not about to let you go.”
The doctor returned the following day with medication that he warned could either cure Nelson or kill him. The singer's response was straightforward: “Either way, just give it to me.”
The treatment worked, but Annie told him he spent two weeks in “utter hell.”
Nelson then asked her one more time: “Did I ask you to let me die?”
“Yup, twice,” she replied. “The whole thing was a nightmare.”
The Last Leaf: Reflections on Late-Life Creativity — and My Longest Love Affair is available now via Penguin Press.
