Michael Cox: Photo by Kim Leeson
Photo by Kim Leeson
“She made me a better person,” Michael Cox says of his late wife, Lindy, and his eyes fill with tears. “She was a phenomenal woman.”
As Cox talks about Lindy, and his life after her, it’s hard to not compare their tale to a particularly poignant Nicholas Sparks novel. Everything about their story — the flirtatious first meeting, the on-again-off-again love affair, the diagnosis, the wedding in Italy and the brain tumor that took Lindy away too young — seems made for print.
But Cox struggles to put the magnitude of her influence on his life in black and white. Except perhaps in song.
Cox, the former lead singer of the Dallas band Speedtrucker, explains in an online bio that he’s “happy that God has given me the gift of expressing my true thoughts through music, even if it only sounds good to me.”
After Lindy passed away in February 2013, Cox wrote the album “L” in her memory, and it was released in mid-May. The first two songs are about his childhood, and the third song is about the first year of their marriage, when he didn’t quite understand what marriage meant. The rest are about her, including a cover of Leonard Cohens’ “Hallelujah,” which Cox feels perfectly describes their marriage.
Part of the proceeds from the CD go to the National Brain Tumor Society, which is an organization Lindy was passionate about. For four consecutive years after her diagnosis, she was the No. 1 fund raiser.
Cox met Lindy in 2005 when he was the lead singer for Speedtrucker, a band that Lindy made no secret of hating. Despite her lack of affection for his profession, the two formed a close friendship, which eventually blossomed into romance.
Not long after their relationship grew serious, Lindy had an MRI scan to try to find the source of a splitting headache. The doctors didn’t find the source of her headache, but they did find a brain tumor. In August 2009, they told her she had a year to live.
Even though neither of them truly believed Lindy was going to die, they decided it was now or never for wedding bells.
“I mortgaged my life to give her everything she wanted because she didn’t have much time left,” Cox says.
The couple tied the knot in Italy and spent months traveling and enjoying life. Lindy loved horses, so they bought her a horse.
She lived 41 healthy months before she passed away in February 2013.
After she died, Cox went to Spain to walk the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, which is a pilgrimage to the shrine of the apostle St. James the Great in Galicia in northwestern Spain.
“I didn’t know anything about this walk. I just went and did it,” he says.
He spent 21 days walking 250 miles in the dead of winter. As he walked, he wrote songs and prayed.
“L” is the heartfelt result.
To learn more,
or to buy a copy of Michael Cox’s CD “L,” visit michaelpaulcox.com.
