Walker Hayes endured what no parent should have to endure: the loss of a child. Hayes and his wife Laney lost their seventh daughter, Oakleigh, shortly after she was born in 2018. At the time, Hayes had been sober for less than three years. In his grief, he now reveals how perilously close he came to numbing his pain with alcohol.
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"The day we buried our daughter, I was two-and-a-half years sober. I immediately came home from the cemetery, and drove [to] downtown Franklin, just to self-destruct," Hayes recalls to K-Love, revealing he went to a bar call 55 South.
"I looked through the window, and there were three guys at the bar," he remembers. "And I was like, 'I'm gonna get a little buzz, and I'm going to just mess with those guys. I'm just gonna get in a fight with those guys,'" he adds. "It makes zero sense. I just want to start over, and just explode."
Hayes' will may not have been strong enough, but fate intervened.
"I opened the Honda, and my wallet wasn't in the door," Hayes recounts. He drove home to retrieve his wallet, and had an eye-opening moment about what he was about to do.
"When I looked through the window, my wife, sadly, was just by herself, on the day she's buried her daughter. My kids are I don't know where, and she's just in the dark," Hayes recounts. "I could literally see what I was about to do."
Why Walker Hayes Is Glad He Didn't Start Drinking
Hayes still vividly remembers the clarity he received in that moment, and what he almost threw away, out of his own sheer pain.
"She's gonna have to pick me up from jail the next day," the "Fancy Like" singer says. "We were gonna have to start the rehab process all over, and go back to square one. That was some sin in me that I just saw clearly, and thought, I need a Savior. This isn't Iike 'I got this under control.' I need redemption from myself."
Hayes has been open about his sobriety, and how he overcomes his desire to drink.
"There were many nights where I counted on my wife and friends to talk me through and say, 'You will not regret it if you don't have that drink. You will not regret it if you wake up tomorrow and don't have that secret to keep,'" Hayes tells Rolling Stone.
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