Amy Grant said faith gave her strength while recovering from a bike accident last year.
The Christian pop singer suffered traumatic brain injury and memory loss after she was unconscious for 10 minutes after the accident near her Nashville, Tennessee, home last summer. Grant spoke with Today about the challenges and how faith helped.
“I wrote this long book. It was a spiral notebook. And I was just writing to remember, writing — making sure I could remember everybody’s name in my family, which I couldn’t, at first,” she said, adding that she even forgot some of the lyrics to her songs.
“So the first night of the Christmas tour, which is the first time back on tour, teleprompter, and I was on heels,” she said. “I was, like, holding onto the piano. Before the show I was like, ‘I’m so scared. I’m so scared.’ And I work with so many great singers, and they’re like, ‘We got you, we got you.'”
Grant has been told it could take as long as 18 months to make a full recovery from the cognitive issues. Compounding the situation, in January she had a cyst removed from her throat.
“I was working with a vocalist and she said, ‘What is happening in your throat? Lean your head back,'” she said. “And I said, ‘I know. It’s like I’ve got an Adam’s apple that keeps getting bigger.’ Unbeknownst to me, I’d had a thyroglossal duct cyst.”
Despite her experiences, Grant said she was feeling “fantastic.” Leaning on faith helped her to overcome obstacles.
“It’s helped me not be afraid. And just to go, however this turns out, I believe I’m held by love, just like I believe that about you, and everybody I meet,” she said. Last year Grant admitted to The Washington Post that the weeks after the accident had been “the quietest season of my life.”
“There are times in our lives where we can just be so busy that you’re present, but you’re also ticking off that list of things that need to be done,” she said. “Or somebody sits down for a conversation and you’re giving 100% attention, but you also can’t make the next thing on the calendar completely go away. That was the biggest adjustment.”
Grant now sees a blessing in disguise.
“The timing of this … it’s really given me the opportunity to look at the majority of my life,” she said. “And kind of, I don’t know — just wrap my arms around the whole thing. That’s a gift for anybody.”
