Country star Toby Keith talked about leaning on his faith and how it got him through the “rollercoaster” of cancer in an interview that aired less than two weeks before his death on Monday.
The 62-year-old singer reflected on his two-year battle with stomach cancer after being diagnosed in the fall of 2021 and what he had accepted about his future, Oklahoma News 9 reported. Keith’s remarks aired on January 24, ten days before his family released a statement announcing he had “passed peacefully” and “fought his fight with grace and courage.”
“It’s a lot of dark hallways,” Keith said in the January interview. “Cancer is a roller coaster, so it’s like, you just sit here and wait on it to go away, and it may not ever go away.”
“If it goes into remission, it will still be in the back of your mind,” he added, noting that he had gotten through the tough days with “faith.”
“You have to have your faith. Thank God that I got it too. You take it for granted on days that things are good and you lean on it when days are bad.”
“It’s taught me to lean on it a little more every day,” Keith continued. “I finally got a point…I was going through all the chemo, radiation, surgery, and I got to the point where I was comfortable with whatever happened. I had my brain wrapped around it, and I was in a good spot either way. People without faith don’t have that.”
Later in the interview, the country superstar praised his wife of almost 40 years, Tricia Lucus, for being by his side through it all.
“She’s been a trouper,” Keith told the outlet. “She’s the best nurse. The first time we went to Houston, to the hospital, she stepped right in and she just took control and said, ‘We got this. Let’s go.'”
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“So she’s like, ‘We’re going to get this and don’t worry about it,'” he added.
In one of his last interviews, Keith talked about his incredible career.
“Just seeing how enormous the career I amassed over 30 years when they show the video,” he told People magazine.“You know where you were when you wrote all those songs, you hear those numbers and you’re just like, you looked up one day and all of a sudden 30 years went by.”
He is survived by his wife, three children, and four grandchildren.