Johnny Cash, loss, and redemption
By Sarah Kendzior | Nov 18, 2025
I am on stage at the Ryman Auditorium, the most famous concert hall in Nashville. A photographer tells me to smile. I hate getting my picture taken, but that day smiling came easy.
After years apart due to the pandemic, my family was reunited: my mother and father, my husband and children, and my sister and her husband and kids. We were in Nashville to celebrate my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. My parents drove from Connecticut, my sister flew from Dallas, and we drove from St. Louis. It was the first time the ten of us had taken a vacation together.
We didn’t know it would be the last.
Sunlight poured through the stained-glass windows of country music’s holy ground. Legends surrounded me: Willie, Dolly, Hank, and my favorite, Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash, who sang with the weariness of reconciling mortality with morality; Johnny Cash, apocalyptic and American to the end.
There is no better music to ride out a pandemic than Johnny Cash. That’s a truth I never wanted to learn. Twenty-first-century truths are like that.
Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.I had taken the kids to the Johnny Cash Museum the day before. I showed them his guitar, his crucifix ring, his handwritten lyrics to “Folsom Prison Blues.”
They shrugged. They knew Johnny Cash — his baritone blared through their childhoods — but preferred the Glen Campbell Museum, where we belted out “Rhinestone Cowboy” karaoke to the horrified amusement of other patrons. Nashville was in full “Nash Vegas” mode and the kids lapped up the flash. Being in the Johnny Cash Museum was too much like being at home.
“What’s wrong, Mama?” my son said when he found me on a bench, tears streaming down my face.
“Nothing,” I said, embarrassed. “I’m watching the last music video Johnny Cash made before he died. He was dying in this video. He was 71, the same age my parents are now. I was so scared they would die when covid came. I still am. I keep thinking about it and how lucky we are to see each other again.”
“And celebrate the anniversary,” he said. He was ten.
“That’s right. Watch with me. You can see a whole life in this video. You can see life go by so fast. Decades and decades, memory and regret, time too fast to bear.”