THE KIRBY FILES: Jimmie Ann Barefoot was the love of his life, with the promise

You spend most of your life telling stories, and some of them you never forget.

“I knew it from day one,” Bill Barefoot said in February 2023. “I loved her from the first moment I saw her.”

Bill Barefoot sat in the recliner in the living room of the home he designed and built for the woman he idolized for 54 years, the last 13 while Jimmie Ann Barefoot battled Alzheimer’s, which gradually robbed a wife, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother of a home she held so dear – a house directly across the street from her grandmother’s house where she spent her childhood.

The living room was quiet, but Jimmie Ann Barefoot’s signature was evident everywhere, from the display cabinet with the perfectly arranged dishes and cups to the large grandfather clock and the many family photos of the couple’s life together and the daughters they loved so much.

“Where Bill and my girls are…”

Bill Barefoot married Jimmy Ann McFayden on March 6, 1970. The wedding was, he describes it, a simple one at his parents’ home in the Bordeaux neighborhood behind the medical center on Owen Drive. His work took the couple to Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Costa Rica and Houjie, China, before they returned to Hope Mills in 2005.

“Where Bill and my girls are,” Jimmie Ann Barefoot once said, “that’s my home.”

She loved to make her ground beef noodles and banana pudding when her grown daughters came to visit with their own children. She enjoyed the quiet of a Christmas Eve or an Easter morning at Snyder Memorial Baptist Church, where the couple attended Bob Ervin’s Sunday school class and Jimmie Ann Barefoot loved to sing in the choir.

She was a woman who reached out to others in times of grief and trouble.

She was a woman with uncompromising faith in her Lord and Savior.

She was Jimmy Ann Barefoot, the woman with the bright smile and engaging personality and the love of Bill Barefoot’s life.

“She smiles at me”

Jimmie Ann Barefoot was 63 when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2011.

The disease would progress slowly.

“She stopped speaking about three years ago and now she’s becoming more mobile,” Bill Barefoot said 16 months ago. “I have to hand feed her. I wake her up at 8 a.m. for breakfast and when I wake her up she smiles at me. That just means the world to me.”

Each morning he drove to St. Joseph in the Pines on Raeford Road, where Jimmie Ann Barefoot received clinical, rehabilitation and holistic care. Each day he took her home.

“It’s tough,” Bill Barefoot said one February afternoon in 2023. “But when I’m really depressed, I think about memories with her, the time when she was raising the girls, the places we went and how excited she was. Just the little things.”

A wife who graduated from college at 40. Who once could swing a golf club and hit a golf ball so cleanly. A fried pork chop just for her Bill and probably some banana pudding too. Together on the porch, talking about their daughters and families and looking forward to the next visit with the grandchildren. Quiet time for a husband and wife who just hold hands.

epilogue

Jimmie Ann McFayden Barefoot died on June 24.

She was 76.

Alzheimer’s, as many know, is a debilitating disease that can rob one of cognitive, communicative and physical abilities. It is a disease without a conscience. What it cannot take away from a man is his love for his wife, and if you knew Bill Barefoot, you would say the same.

“She is my life partner and my everything,” Barefoot said. “I have loved her since I first saw her. She is still my Jimmie and what memories we have of her.”

Some stories you never forget. Some people you never forget. This is the story of a man and a woman’s reciprocated love and promises they make to each other that they keep forever.

Bill Kirby Jr. can be reached at [email protected] or 910-624-1961.

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