Willie Nelson said he asked Annie D'Angelo to “let me die” twice during a severe COVID illness in 2022, and the account has now surfaced as part of his new memoir release. D'Angelo, who said she spent two weeks trying to keep him breathing, described the episode as a nightmare.
The story is drawing attention now because Nelson’s memoir hit shelves Tuesday, putting a deeply personal chapter of his life back in view. In the excerpt, the illness was not presented as a brief scare but as a stretch of repeated crisis: Nelson said he felt “excruciating pain in every cell of my body,” while D'Angelo said she was trying to manage every breath, every hour and every turn for the worse.
D'Angelo wrote that she used a nebulizer and a Q-tip to test him for COVID-19, then got oxygen going when he still could not breathe. She said Nelson stayed isolated in the back of the bus as he grew sicker, and that she alerted Dr. Greenwood and asked for a mobile monoclonal antibody worker to meet them at the cabin. He was given Paxlovid in an IV infusion, part of what she described as two weeks of utter hell.
What makes the account more stark is the gap between what she was doing and what he was saying. D'Angelo said going to a hospital was not an option because he would have no chance of privacy, so she kept working to hold off a worse outcome at home. At the same time, Nelson recalled saying, “Annie, you need to let me go,” and then asking her, “Did I ask you to let me die?” She answered, “Yup, twice,” underscoring how close the ordeal felt to her even after he recovered.
Nelson and D'Angelo tied the knot in 1991 and share two sons, Lukas and Micah. The memoir, The Last Leaf: Reflections on Late-Life Creativity — and My Longest Love Affair, puts that family history beside a moment of illness that came close to overwhelming it. The unresolved question is not whether the scare happened; it is how a case that severe unfolded in 2022, and how much longer the couple had to keep improvising care before it turned.
