There will come a day
When the tears and the sadness, the pain and the hate
The struggle, this madness, will all fade away.
—CARRIE UNDERWOOD, “Love Wins”
We slept through the storm. Well, that’s probably an understatement, because the deadly tornado that ripped through parts of Nashville on the night of March 2, 2020, was a monster that mowed through entire neighborhoods, flattening buildings and turning them into mulch. One of those buildings happened to be the apartment that Trea and I had moved out of just four months earlier. Our former home was on the top floor, with huge floor-to-ceiling windows. Had we still been there, we could have lost everything, including our lives. A few friends and associates didn’t know that we’d already moved into our new house just a mile away from the tornado’s path in Sylvan Heights and they were alarmed. At 1:30 a.m., we were woken up by the nonstop pinging of our phones.
We quickly scrolled down our text messages to make sure our loved ones were okay. My ex, Terresa, and our kids live in Franklin, far enough from the devastation, but we checked in with each other just in case. It was obvious as I checked the Twitter and Instagram feeds that the same weather system had struck at least twice through east and northeast Nashville and Mount Juliet, the exact same trajectory as Nashville’s last big “Super Outbreak” of twisters in 1974. How freaky was that?
Trea and I switched on the local news for more updates. The enormity of what had just happened struck us when we learned that twenty-five people had been killed, including five children. Our former home and stomping ground of Germantown, a cute neighborhood with restored Victorian architecture, a farmers market, and chic sidewalk cafés, had suffered some of the worst damage, including two streets that were completely wiped out. Of course, there was no way we could get back to sleep for the rest of the night, so we both just stared at our phones, examining each photo of the wreckage. As soon as the sun rose, we went up on our deck to survey the damage for ourselves. Mother Nature had wreaked so much havoc less than a mile from our new home.
The Nashville community has a history of coming together after a calamity. When the whole town, including the Grand Ole Opry, was underwater from flooding in 2010, just months after I moved here, country music celebrities got together and raised millions to repair the damage. We mobilized swiftly this time too. Two days later, on March 5, CMT and Nashville’s local NBC affiliate, WSMV-TV, cosponsored a telethon to raise funds for the American Red Cross’s Southern Tornado and Flood Relief Program, aired live from CMT’s downtown Nashville studio where I worked. I was one of the cohosts, and for three hours that evening celebrity after celebrity dropped by to man the phones, share personal stories, and encourage viewers to pledge to help out Middle Tennessee: Lady A’s Charles Kelley and Dave Haywood, Kid Rock, Travis Denning, Devin Dawson, Blanco Brown, Cassadee Pope, Gavin DeGraw, Kalie Shorr, Sam Palladio, Sarah Darling, Whitney Duncan, and many more. We raised close to $400,000 by the end of the night.
There wasn’t a murmur among us about coronavirus. We’d been so preoccupied with our local disaster that a global disaster didn’t even enter into our thoughts. Until the next day when I got a call from someone at Viacom/CBS’s human resources department (Viacom/CBS owns CMT):
“Cody, you have to quarantine for two weeks,” she told me.
“What?! Why?!” I asked, thinking it must be some kind of joke.
“Someone tested positive for coronavirus at the tornado telethon, so anyone who attended has to stay home and self-quarantine. Please report back to us if you have any symptoms.”
Immediately my phone started blowing up again. All those who participated had been asked to think about who we came into close contact with, so we were urgently comparing notes. When I reviewed the footage of the telethon, I realized there wasn’t anyone I didn’t come into close contact with. That’s just the nature of our affectionate, never-afraid-to-hug country music crowd. Everyone was embracing each other and kissing. I saw myself leaning over to whisper in someone’s ear, probably one of the most effective methods of spreading a highly contagious virus. Although I felt no symptoms, I spent the next few days worried I was Typhoid Mary, contaminating some of the leading lights of my industry. Luckily, there were no further reports of infection.
At first, I was mostly just annoyed by the inconvenience. I was also pissed off that I wouldn’t be able to go to work. That same week, I was to receive a Visibility Award from the Human Rights Campaign, an organization that’s been at the forefront of LGBTQ+ rights, and the gala in Nashville was a big deal to me. The work I’d been doing to raise awareness for this and other organizations counted among my greatest passions, and none other than my longtime friend Kelsea Ballerini was to present the award to me. But Cinderella Cody would not be allowed to go to the ball this time, even though she had the perfect outfit already picked out. Part of being gay is that you plan well ahead for these nights.
I have stuff to do, man! I thought. I was robbed!
But the more information trickled in, the more I understood how serious this was. I wasn’t going to be missing anything, because two days later, the gala was canceled, and the entire world was on lockdown. Life as we knew it had come to a hard stop. Two weeks later, we also learned that this invisible danger wasn’t going away in a couple of weeks. I had to figure this out for the foreseeable future because, in the middle of all this chaos and uncertainty, I figured my listeners needed the comfort of a familiar voice. And I needed the comfort of being able to listen to them and be heard beyond the confines of my home. As unsettling as all this was, I needed my country music community to get through whatever this was with some sense of normalcy.
Within twenty-four hours of the lockdown notice, my CMT team swung into action. They brought over all the equipment, set up the radio equipment and microphones on my kitchen table and the lighting and cameras in my dining room. I got a crash course on how to be a one-man show on radio and TV and prayed that when the time to go live came I would know which buttons to push.
All that busy-ness kept me from thinking too hard about how scary the pandemic was. We didn’t have time to panic-buy toilet paper or Purell. At no point in the early phase of the lockdown did it occur to me to be particularly worried about my own health. Of course, I was concerned about my mom, who was at a high-risk age, but I knew she was staying at home in South Carolina, and that my nephews, both young men, were with her, going to the store and taking good care of her. Terresa and my own kids were also safe and well.
Trea was the loved one who had me most worried. Not necessarily because he might get sick, because he was a fit and healthy guy, but because his job as an occupational therapist at an assisted-living home meant he could put his elderly patients at risk. Every day he went into work, changed into an entirely different set of clothes, and layered up with a hazmat suit and personal protective equipment (PPE). The man was working directly with COVID patients, in the COVID unit, and you could not get more front line than that. Aware that this was a highly contagious disease, Trea was scrupulous about safety, showering and washing his clothes at work, even switching his shoes, then coming home from each shift and doing the same. The thought of spreading the virus was devastating. Trea would much rather have the illness himself than pass it along to others, and that fear hung over us both.
After a few weeks of this new routine, it was apparent that my way of working would not be going back to normal anytime soon, so I had to come up with a more sustainable way of doing my shows from home without dragging my germs all the way across town. Besides, I was getting sick of staring at all the wires, boards, and laptops in my new kitchen.
The other hazard of working that way was the close proximity of Little Debbie cakes and potato chips (at least I found the time to stock up on lockdown snacks, along with seventeen cans of Chunky soup, which I’m pretty sure are still in my pantry, untouched). A month into it, I noticed I was packing on more than a few pounds. It was hard not to when I had to look at myself on Zoom video all day. My solution was to convert one-half of our two-car garage into a home gym and get busy with the weights. I also decided to turn the guest bedroom, several steps and one flight of stairs away from the fridge, into my home office. My sanity and my thirty-one-inch waistline depended on it.
It was hard to believe that just a couple of months before, none of us had ever even heard of Zoom, and now it’s a verb, like Uber or Google. It completely transformed the way I work. In my little spare bedroom, I was able to set up a radio and TV studio using my laptop, my iPhone, a couple of tripods, and the trusty ring light, one of many delivery purchases from Walmart. com. I took Trea’s dining table from his old apartment and set it up as a desk, invested in a swivel chair, and created a backdrop with shelving to display a bunch of cool stuff like my ACM awards, a “Favorite Dad” baseball from my son, Landon, some books, my portrait of Dolly Parton inscribed with WWDD (What Would Dolly Do?), and a rock I’d pilfered from a park in Alaska a couple of years earlier, just enough treasures for the background shot, to say a little something about me without being too distracting.
I was back to being the boy in his bedroom playing with Mr. Microphone, albeit with much more expensive technology. Although I missed seeing my team in person every day, part of me dug the fact that I could get out of bed and be just thirty-seven steps from work. Beyond that, I relished the challenge, adapting the format of the show, going from analog to digital, in-person to virtual, in a matter of days.
The setup was perfect. I had three broadcasting stations within inches of each other. I just had to swivel to my right, where I had a monitor and a big camera in the corner. When I swiveled a notch to my left, I faced the radio mic, then my Zoom camera, which was actually my iPhone set up on a tripod under the ring light, a circular light that compensated for the fact that I had no makeup people on hand to airbrush the flaws away. For any of you thinking about getting filler or Botox after too many depressing reflections of yourself on a Zoom conference call, try a ring light first. It’s much cheaper!
The other important prop inside the home studio was my dog, Teddy, a golden retriever pup who snoozed at my feet all day when I wasn’t giving him his long morning walks in the nearby hills. Over the months, Teddy became a kind of mascot for the show. In fact, he was more like a social media superstar with his own Instagram account: @NasvilleTeddy. We even created a segment on the show called “Teddy Time” where my dog had playdates with the pets of the celebrities I was interviewing. I got the stars to introduce their animals and Zoom in with me and Teddy, showing us tricks and eating their favorite treats. One guest was Mitchell Tenpenny’s rescue dog, Annie, who got her name from the Zac Brown Band song “Sweet Annie.” Annie was sweet, and Mitchell shared how much comfort she brought him during the lockdown.
California country singer Jon Pardi showed off his fur babies live from his farm just outside of Nashville. From the looks of it, they’re spoiled by Jon and his wife, Summer, as Gus, Charlie, Bear, and Cowboy enjoyed a massive spread of land during the lockdown and beyond. This Teddy Time appropriately began with Jon exclaiming, “Release the beasts!”
Another Teddy Time guest was Runaway June, or, rather, Naomi Cooke, Natalie Stovall, and Jennifer Wayne.
“This is the show where we not only introduce the stars and their dogs, but also do some heavy petting! Heavy petting is encouraged,” I explained to the girls as they presented their fur babies and Teddy licked my post-first walk, sweaty leg.
Since Naomi has no pets, we were joined by Natalie’s animal brood, which consisted of her fourteen-year-old pooch, Cinnamon, some sort of Chihuahua mix with a few gray whiskers around her muzzle, and her Heinz 57 rescue, Brady Bell. Jennifer’s rescue dogs were the adorable mutt Beau, who was swept off the mean streets of East Nashville to lock down in luxury in Malibu with his siblings; Spike, a funny-looking, small yellow dog; and Little Blue, an overfed, seventeen-pound Chihuahua. Little Blue showed us a trick, standing up on her hind legs for a treat. It was clear how she got to be seventeen pounds!
Teddy Time, bringing the dogs of the country music world together, is just one of many ways I was trying to bring my listeners more comfort food for their ears and eyes through social media. Of course, I want to make clear that cats were always welcome. I’m still hoping to get Taylor Swift and her cat Olivia Benson on Teddy Time. We don’t discriminate!
Did I miss doing my interviews in person? Hell to the yes! I feed off the energy of the people in the room with me. And there were all those little moments with the artist off the air, walking them to and from the studio, where they would reveal something about themselves, that I was no longer privy to. I also am always quick to observe their wardrobe, new tattoos, or even fragrances that might be fun to talk about on air. But our new, hermetically sealed existence meant I’d have to work much harder to find that level of intimacy.
I also missed the awards shows. Each year, the country music industry recognizes its artists through three platforms: the Academy of Country Music (ACM), which normally takes place in April; the CMT Awards (country music’s best night out), which typically happens in June; and the Country Music Association (CMA) Awards Show, which in past years happened in November. In 2020, all these shows would be clustered together over a few weeks in the fall.
In March 2020, when I was discussing the impact of coronavirus on the industry during an interview with Dierks Bentley, we were talking about the fact that all these shows would be jam-packed together, and he asked me, “Do you really think they’re going to happen?”
“Sure,” I told him. “That’s months away!”
I joked that I would wear the same suit to all three shows, to save myself the time and trouble of picking out three.
“Man, if all those shows happen, I will buy you a new suit to wear to all the shows!” Dierks promised me, half-seriously. “When people ask you who you’re wearing on the red carpet, you can tell them it’s ‘Dierks Bentley.’”
Until those fall awards shows, by when I figured this COVID thing had to be over, there would be a lot of changes to my old format. We worked with what we had and, in a way, the “new normal” was just what I needed to shake me out of my rut. When you get proficient at something, it’s almost as if you are relying on muscle memory. You take certain things for granted. You’re not always present in the moment. So, by necessity, I had to press the reset button, which wasn’t a bad thing.
It was a question of balance. I wanted to acknowledge what was going on in our world. At the same time, I wanted to bring the comfort food of dad jokes, pop culture, and a smattering of silliness so that my listeners could get a break from the endless stream of bad news and doom scrolling on the internet. People needed somewhere to turn for a reassuring tone and a sense that somehow, some way, this, too, would pass.
In radio, we create fun jingles and one-liners to blast in between segments. We adapted our format, punctuating our shows with a line from Luke Combs’s song about the pandemic: “Someday when we aren’t six feet apart.” It’s a hopeful, poignant song on its own, but put that line in the context of my broadcast, and there was some intended humor to it. We also used the phrase “Siiil-Ver Liii-Nings!” to highlight the scraps of positive news or inspiration we could share with our listeners. We knew it was a cliché, so we played it up, announcing it like the latest score at a ballpark, to wink at our audience and laugh at ourselves.
Every hour I also paid tribute to the frontline workers, a subject obviously dear to my heart, with a recording of the noisemakers, whistles, and cheers that went out whenever health care workers changed shifts at the hospital. This “Here’s to the Heroes” segment paid tribute to listeners who were nurses, doctors, EMTs, truck drivers, military personnel, grocery store workers, delivery truck drivers, you name it. We invited these fans to call in and share what they were going through. I was on a mission to celebrate these folks and share as many positive, inspiring stories as I could.
The music itself also gave comfort. Just as the soil in a field gets richer when it’s been left to lie fallow for a time, 2020 was an intensely creative moment for many of our artists. Because they weren’t constantly on the move with their concert tours, they were forced to turn inward, writing songs inside their home studios during the lockdown, with lyrics that expressed a little or a lot of what we were all going through, from Big & Rich’s “Stay Home,” a silly song about searching for toilet paper and homeschooling to make us laugh through the fear, to Thomas Rhett’s “Be a Light,” an uplifting, spiritual tune featuring a pantheon of country stars like Reba McEntire, Keith Urban, and Hillary Scott.
Dolly’s wistful “When Life Is Good Again” gave me resolve and hope. Adam Hambrick wrote “Between Me and the End of the World” to honor his wife, who was on the front lines treating COVID-19 patients as a physical assistant. “It’s a hell of a thing watching you stand in between / Between me and the end of the world,” was one of many lines that struck a chord with me, and Trea.
The country artists were experiencing the full array of human emotions about this epidemic, and country songs were the perfect way to channel these natural responses to what we were going through. Some of the music voiced the anger and frustration so many were feeling weeks into the lockdown, with millions out of work, and small business owners struggling to keep the lights on, like Chris Janson’s workingman anthem “Put Me Back to Work”:
Trucks still gotta drive / People still gotta thrive / Open up the doors and fill the seats / ’Cause people still gotta eat.
Although some thought the lyrics were a political statement, Chris shared with Billboard magazine his inspiration for the song:
A few weeks ago, I met a neighbor who had just lost his son to suicide from being out of work. Not only was it heartbreaking, but I’d heard other stories just like his. I was thinking about the hurt and the struggles that so many of us are feeling right now. So, I woke up the next morning heavy-hearted and did what I do: I wrote.
Seeing the authentic way country music reflected so many aspects of how we were all feeling reminded me of other touch points in history, like after 9/11 when Alan Jackson sang, “Where were you when the world stopped turning on that September day?” Our music has always had a way of matching the emotions of the moment.
It was my mission to present these sincere expressions of human emotion that connected us all, as well as songs that were already written yet somehow seemed appropriate for the times. I didn’t believe it was my role to address the issues head-on. The music could do that. Folks tuned into my broadcasts for a lightening of their load. If they were carrying a lot of rocks, I wanted to take away a few of them to make their climb just a little bit easier.
Of course, I acknowledged what was going on and how people were feeling. You can be positive without being glib. And there was plenty to be grateful for. Almost every artist I spoke with shared how they would never get this kind of time with family again with all the running coast to coast and concert to concert, being on tour bus every single weekend. There was a sweetness to being home all the time, which I felt myself. Not only was it a pleasant change not to be on a plane or in some hotel room all the time, I got to focus on my kids more than I ever could when they were growing up. Being able to tune into them as they were becoming young adults was another blessing.
Makayla was something of a social butterfly as she pursued her career in Nashville. The lockdown required her to press pause on her lifestyle, at least for a while, and content herself with fluttering her wings on social media instead. We benefited from being in proximity to her joyful energy. Selfishly, I enjoyed the fact that Trea and I got more movie nights, cookouts, and sit-down family dinners.
That precious time also allowed me to focus more of my energy on my son, Landon, who was attending a prestigious music academy as COVID hit. Landon’s like me in a lot of ways, an extroverted introvert. He’s more than capable of being social, but his happy place is alone in his room, making music for emerging artists (hip-hop, pop, country, any genre) while generally being a music nerd. Like father, like son. As the lockdown continued, I started noticing he seemed lethargic and a little down. Every day was Blursday, and Landon was spending a little too much time alone. When I knocked on his door during a visit to Terresa’s house, I could see why. His space looked like a dungeon, cluttered and dark, not helped by the fact that he never opened his curtains. We talked about how he was feeling and why.
Because I was no longer always on the go, I noticed things I might have missed pre-COVID, and could slow down long enough to really hear my son. He, like a lot of young people living through this crisis, was scared for his future and wondering if he’d ever be able to have a successful career and branch out on his own. He had already been experiencing some success for years, making money from his growing production business, but the constant doom and gloom on the news made him question what was out there for him in the long term. He felt stuck, with nothing to look forward to, something no young person should ever have to feel. But I had a hunch I knew how to improve his outlook.
“Landon, I know it seems like so much is beyond your control, but there is one thing that is within your power,” I told him.
“What’s that?”
“Your environment! We should fix up your room a little bit and bring a little sunshine in here!” Suddenly, I became Cam, the flamboyant gay father from the show Modern Family.
I guess this is the one stereotypically gay trait of mine, besides an abiding love for drag queens. I do love to decorate and have done so ever since I was a little boy, rearranging my parents’ living room to perfect its feng shui. If a poster on my wall was a little crooked or frayed, it drove me crazy, and Mom never had to tell me to make my bed. I even did the dishes as a kid without being asked because I couldn’t bear the site of them sitting stinky in the sink.
So, together, Landon and I drew back his curtains, tidied away all the loose socks and lightning cables, rearranged the furniture, swapped out the curtains and bedding, and repainted the walls. The bedroom makeover was exactly what he needed to get past his slump. Just as perking up his space did the trick for my son, tapping my inner domestic god was therapy for me. During the COVID months, I found great joy in fixing up my new home, repurposing and refinishing old bits of furniture. I also discovered a passion for vacuuming. With Teddy roaming the house, I’m constantly finding little hairy golden retriever tumbleweeds everywhere. So it’s become like COVID therapy to get out the ole Dyson V11 Animal cordless vac and suck it all up. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit there is sweet satisfaction of a job well done that I bask in after every vacuum session. Do others feel this way, too, or am I the only weird one?
The lockdown also forced me to be more creative. I needed to build a sense of real intimacy with the folks I was interviewing without being in the same room. And I needed to transmit that connection to my audience of viewers and listeners. To that end, I had to dig a little deeper in my questions, getting the stars to open up more about the very real and human struggles with what we were all dealing with: the specter of COVID, the fear of getting ill, and, for many, the economic blow of not being able to get out there and earn a living. Again, I peeled back the layers, not so much making it about myself but revealing more about my own life and what I was going through. I got my interview guests to do the same.
Of course, many of us were blessed to still have jobs, security, and the financial means to get through this while social distancing. That wasn’t the case for a lot of my listeners, who were unemployed or facing down death every day as nurses and doctors, or dealing with the pain of shuttering a small business and wondering how to put food on the table for their families. But we all shared the same fragile state, facing a health threat that did not discriminate.
This strange moment in history was an opportunity to demonstrate that we were all human, that we were not alone. Rich, poor, young, or old, we were all facing our own mortality. My celebrity guests were just as affected by this as the fans, at least in terms of feeling vulnerable and fearful. We were all going through something huge.
I consider myself a natural empathizer, so the situation played to my strengths as a caring listener who could offer fragments of relatability to anyone on the other end of the conversation. In a crafty way I brought these commonalities up as often as I could in my interviews. Some of the artists I interviewed had been dealing with loved ones who were sick. Others were dealing with career disappointments. In September 2020, ahead of the Academy of Country Music award show, the aforementioned Kelsea Ballerini was once again passed over for a much-deserved nomination. Everyone, including Kelsea, thought she’d be a shoo-in, but, in fact, being passed over is what her song “Homecoming Queen” was all about.
Look damn good in the dress
zipping up the mess
dancing with your best foot forward.
I asked her how she bounced back. How did she make it through the trial of disappointment? How does a person go on in the face of something even more serious, whether emotional or physical?
“I just get up, put one foot in front of the other again, and keep going,” she told me. “I look to the next day, and the next thing, and continue to strive to do absolutely the best I can, and that’s all I can do.”
Amen. I feel the same way. Sometimes I have to push myself, even when the baggage is heavy, and I don’t even know where exactly I’m headed. That seemed to be the state of the whole country the year of COVID. It didn’t matter who we were or what we had, we were all vulnerable.
On the face of it, my life was more than okay. I was conquering the challenge of working in this brand-new way and producing a high-quality show from my house. Who knew? My loved ones were healthy. But then one day in August of the Year of COVID, as Trea and I were driving to the beach to hang out with our family, my heart started beating fast, I felt a pain in my chest, my hands went clammy, and I felt like I couldn’t get enough air in my lungs.
“Babe, you need to drive me to the hospital,” I told Trea. “I think I’m having a heart attack.”
I really thought I might die. They ran all kinds of tests and assured me my heart and lungs were in great condition. “Well then, what was that?” I asked. The doctor said I was having a panic attack. In my head, I’d felt perfectly calm. I thought I’d mastered the whole COVID situation. My conscious mind had it all held together. But I guess my subconscious mind had other ideas. Maybe, as I was keeping myself busy with the show, the house, the family, I wasn’t tuning into myself deeply enough. The fact that the love of my life had been on the front line day in and day out for months had to have taken its toll. Of course, I was worried about him! Of course, a part of me was terrified we’d both get infected and become two of the more than half-million casualties of this disaster.
Fast-forward to February 2021, when Trea and I did finally test positive. The brave man had been working in the COVID units of assisted living centers since the beginning of the pandemic, so I knew it was only a matter of time. Bad things happen even when you do all you can to prevent it. He was getting tested every other day and was sent home on a Monday with the news. I made a separate living space for him downstairs in our guest room, and by Tuesday he started having symptoms. By Wednesday I started feeling lousy, waking up with a sore throat, fever, aches, and a cough. That Thursday, I had a Zoom interview with Luke Bryan, so I took some Tylenol and did my best, warning him beforehand that I might not be my usual perky self. I smiled through the interview, and no one knew the difference. Sometimes you’ve just gotta push through it!
By the next day, my fever was gone. The worst phase of it lasted a week and felt like the flu, except that I lost my sense of taste and smell. And I still get tired running up the stairs. But Trea and I were among the lucky ones.
A week after my interview with Luke, he called to see how I was feeling. That’s Nashville for you. Even though I have a working relationship with these artists, it’s such a close-knit community. They genuinely care about my well-being. I already knew that to be true, but the year of the pandemic confirmed this.
It’s been a mix of blessings and curses. The virus came and left my body, but not the anxiety. I buried myself in projects as a way of coping. But my physiological self wasn’t buying it. Just because I had this beast of a situation by the tail didn’t mean it couldn’t turn around and bite me in the butt. My doctor said he was seeing a lot more patients experiencing anxiety who had never suffered from the condition before. There must have been millions going through similar moments. The condition was something I’d just have to learn to live with and manage. I was troubled by the fact that it comes with no warning, just when I think I am doing great. It was yet another reminder to slow down and pay closer attention to what was going on deep in my soul.
Prayer and meditation have helped me immensely as tools to cope with anxiety. Also, I’ve learned to be careful with everything I take into my body, especially alcohol. All those years as a Mormon taught me I don’t need it, but sometimes it feels pretty damn good to mix a little Tito’s in your drink!
In 2020, I also learned how much we need to listen a little closer to each other, as well as to ourselves. My career has kept me running, from city to city, event to event, interview to interview. But for the first time in my life I’ve been still for an extended period. I needed to turn inward and tune out all the noise, fear, and political strife. I’ve focused on building a home with those I love.
I’ve also taken the time to be truly present to my kids, to make sure they are okay not just with COVID, but all the changes in my personal life. I’ve checked in with Mom more regularly. Although we couldn’t meet in person, my nephews taught her how to FaceTime so that we can look into each other’s eyes on our mother/son “digital dates.” I’ve found joy in the simple things, like learning new recipes and reading more books: Adam Rippon’s Beautiful on the Outside and Laurence Leamer’s biography of Johnny Carson, King of the Night, and Al Roker’s You Look So Much Better in Person. I also rediscovered The Golden Girls reruns and fell in love with Schitt’s Creek, to create some healthy distance between the news and bedtime.
I missed the specialness of weekends. I missed the fact that I could go anywhere in Nashville—Target or our favorite taco restaurants—and bump into someone I knew. I missed being able to shake hands with strangers, something that was instilled in me as a missionary going door-to-door.
But, as Dolly sang to us, life would be good again. By June, I was already doing some in-person interviews—outside, of course. My first was with Cole Swindell. We sat on stools by a lake in the back of one of our TV producer’s homes. Six feet apart looks odd on camera. It looked miles away, and I’m not sure I loved it. The protocols made it awkward. You can’t get out of your car until someone comes to get you, and you have to keep your mask on until the artist shows up. Catering consists of individually wrapped sandwiches, and you’re lucky if you can get a Capri Sun. Not the usual homecoming party. But it was nice to see the familiar faces of our crew, or at least their eyes above the mask lines.
Ramping up to the awards shows, I interviewed Luke Bryan in October. In preparation, I got a COVID test seventy-two hours before, then twelve hours before. There’s a COVID test concierge service that comes to your house, so you can get your nose swabbed in your own driveway, another modern convenience that’s come to us by way of a global pandemic. When in-person TV tapings resumed, I started counting the number of COVID tests I’d taken—fifty-six at last count! I honestly don’t know if I should be proud of this achievement or not.
And the awards shows did happen after all. For most, only one artist, their band, or a manager was allowed onstage at a time. Not even talking heads like me could get too close. But for the first time since I started my career, I was able to sit back and watch a full award show from the comfort of my couch, live tweeting my thoughts instead of waiting backstage to congratulate the artists and frantically thinking up interview questions in the moment. I could enjoy the presentation almost like a normal fan.
Dierks Bentley’s one caveat with our awards show bet was that there had to be a live audience. Well, there was a smattering of people physically present, and millions were watching from their homes in real time, so technically I guess I won. Dierks owes me a suit. The problem is, at the time I’m writing this, I’d be all dressed up with nowhere to go.
by Terresa, Cody’s ex-wife
THANKSGIVING 2020 WAS SMALL by our standards, with only the closest of family getting together to celebrate; me; my three kids; my boyfriend, Patrick; Cody; Trea; and their dog, Teddy. We packed up all the side dishes, including Patrick’s famous mac and cheese, and drove over to Cody and Trea’s house, where we hung out on the deck on a sunny, crisp fall day, warmed by a firepit, heat lamps, laughter, and love. The pandemic notwithstanding, it was a typical modern family event for us, with plenty to eat and drink. Cody even got out the slide projector after the sun went down, as we cozied up under extra blankets and looked back on our wonderful history together. Our son, Landon, said it was the best Thanksgiving ever. In spite of all that the world had gone through that year, I never felt more grateful.
A little more a decade ago, if anyone had told me this was how our family would look, I’d have called them crazy. I didn’t have the slightest notion that my husband was gay. But when Cody first came out to me, I wasn’t angry. I didn’t feel betrayed. What I felt was overwhelming grief and frustration, with myself. How could I have missed this huge fact about the most important person in my life? Why couldn’t I have listened more, paid attention, and seen this beautiful man for who he really is? I spent a long time beating myself up for being too self-centered while he’d lived all those years suffering in silence. I was mad at God and the world for making my husband feel like he had to hide his light his whole life. From that point on, I was determined that he would not have to go through this alone. Whatever Cody needed, I’d walk this journey beside him.
Of course, it wasn’t a sprint to where we are now. We had our moments. But the one thing I never doubted was that Cody loved me deeply, even if it wasn’t the passionate, romantic love I felt for him. He was, is, and will always be my person, my soul mate. He has gone above and beyond to take care of me and our children but, more than that, he’s never left me emotionally. We are empty nesters now, but Cody, who would do anything for me, has made sure that I never feel alone.
I put him so high on a pedestal that it can be hard for anyone else who comes into my life. They will surely lose by comparison. Of course, I was heartbroken when our relationship as husband and wife ended and it still hurts sometimes. I am working things out on a daily basis. But I would not change any of it because it’s helped me to grow and love in ways I never imagined. My life is good now. Cody and I were put together for a reason. I’m here to be that person who gives him unconditional support and understanding. And I believe Cody came into my life in part to show me that love is love, whatever form it takes.