In May 2022, a week after his 89th birthday, Willie Nelson woke up on his tour bus in the middle of the night and couldn’t catch his breath. The man who gave us “On the Road Again” had COVID, his lungs were already weak, and over the next few days he got so sick that he asked his wife to stop fighting for him. Willie Nelson, now 93, tells the whole story in his new memoir, The Last Leaf: Reflections on Late-Life Creativity and My Longest Love Affair, which Penguin Press releases today, November 10, 2026.
He doesn’t dress it up. “COVID nearly got me,” he writes. “I was hurting so bad I wanted out. But Annie wouldn’t let me go.” Annie is Annie D’Angelo, his wife since 1991, and he calls the book “a love story” whose heroine is “my wife, Annie, who kept me alive when I was sure I was gone.” What she actually said to him at his lowest point is the part fans can’t stop quoting, and it sounds exactly like the woman who has kept the Red Headed Stranger in line for 35 years.
How Did a Makeup Chair Lead to Willie’s Fourth Marriage?
Longtime fans know Willie’s love life was never simple. He married his first wife, Martha Matthews, in 1952, and that famously stormy union lasted ten years. Singer Shirley Collie, who sang with him on his first charting single, “Willingly,” became wife number two in 1963. Connie Koepke followed in 1971. She was his wife through the outlaw years of Red Headed Stranger and Stardust, through “On the Road Again” from Honeysuckle Rose in 1980, and through the first Farm Aid in 1985. They divorced in 1988.
Then came 1986 and a TV remake of Stagecoach, with Willie cast as Doc Holliday. According to The New York Times, the Hollywood makeup artist on the set “found Willie Nelson in her chair” one morning. When the producers wanted to cut his famous hair, she was the one who talked them out of it. She also had three rules about men: no divorced men, no men with children and no celebrities. Willie broke all three, and so did she. “He felt like home,” she told the paper. They married in 1991, her first marriage and his fourth, and their sons Lukas and Micah grew up to become musicians who now share the stage with their father.
That shared life on the road is exactly where the trouble started in the spring of 2022.
What Happened When COVID Hit Willie Nelson in 2022?
Annie had been strict about precautions during the pandemic, and Willie, by his own account, thought she was overdoing it. Then he caught the virus. Annie told The New York Times Magazine back in 2022 that it happened the week after his 89th birthday, and the camp quietly canceled his New Orleans Jazz Fest set that May “due to a positive Covid case” in the band. Few fans had any idea how bad it really was.
“I had a nebulizer on the bus,” Annie recalled. She kept him isolated in the back and gave him Paxlovid as the bus rolled home to Texas, and then she turned their ranch in Spicewood into a private hospital with a doctor bringing monoclonal antibodies to the house. “There were a couple of times when I wasn’t sure he was going to make it,” she said. Willie was even more blunt when he spoke with Anderson Cooper on CNN in September. “I could tell that I was dying,” he said. “I wanted to die. It was the worst feeling I’ve ever had.”
Somehow, by May 27 he was back on stage in New Braunfels, Texas. But the new book makes clear that the recovery almost didn’t happen, and that it took more than medicine.
Why Does Willie Call ‘The Last Leaf’ a Love Story?
This is Willie’s eighth book and his first since 2023’s Energy Follows Thought, and it reads like a thank-you note to the woman who runs his world. In the Times profile published last week, Annie, who is 70, was candid that their marriage hasn’t always been easy. She once planned to take the boys and leave him. Then one of his songs came on while she was grocery shopping. “I realized then that I couldn’t get away from you,” she writes in the book, “and then I realized I didn’t want to.”
She was also the one at home when he was gone. “I was always the bad cop,” Annie admitted of raising their sons, adding that Willie “dadded up when it was important.” She still stands at the side of the stage at every show, and she has a sense of humor about the rest of it. When he dreams he’s playing Trigger, his battered old guitar, he sometimes wakes up strumming her arm instead. “It’s better than his night terrors,” she joked. Willie’s own summary is simpler: “It’s me and Annie against the world.”
In September we watched Willie head back out with Neil Young ahead of Farm Aid, still touring at 93. The reason he’s still out there comes down to one conversation in 2022.
What Did Annie Say When Willie Begged Her to Let Him Go?
According to HELLO!, which read the new memoir, Willie twice asked his wife to let him die. “For 10 days I was really out there wanting to die,” he told the Times. Annie never left. Willie said she slept on an ironing board in the next room so she’d be there if he died. “Massage table,” she corrected him.
The book itself captures the moment. In one exchange, Willie asks her, “Did I ask you to let me die?” and Annie answers, “Yup, twice,” as the Austin Chronicle quoted in its review. When he told her, “Annie, you need to let me go,” she gave the 89-year-old the only answer that was ever going to work on him: “Willie, if you die, I’ll kill you.”
And Willie, being Willie, had an answer ready. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
The Only ‘The Facts Of Life’ Cast Members Still Alive Today