The love story of Steve and Silver Kilgore sounds like a country song, which is pretty appropriate given their professions and linage. Both have made careers in the music industry, but the family’s claim to fame is still the song “Ring of Fire,” made famous by Johnny Cash and co-written by Steve’s father, Merle Kilgore.
“Everybody I’ve ever met, at some point in their life, has fallen into ‘a burning ring of fire,'” Steve says. “When my father died it was like a domino effect. Everything happened suddenly.”
Steve received his inheritance, which included ongoing royalties from “Ring of Fire.” His wife divorced him and took some of that money with her. He lost his job. He had to put down his beloved dog of 13 years.
“It was just one thing after the other. I became the invisible man. Nobody came to see me anymore. I was like a hermit,” he says. “Next thing I knew, I was knee-deep into cocaine.”
It was at this point that Kilgore’s mother suggested he get out and meet a woman. And at a songwriter’s event, he met Silver. They started dating almost immediately. But it took nearly three months for him to come clean about his cocaine addiction.
Silver sent Steve to her small cabin in the Kentucky woods to detox.
“Silver was like my June Carter to Johnny Cash,” Steve says.
“The guy needed help. I always helped people. But I knew he had a good man in him,” Silver says. “I got pretty rough with him. I made him toe the line, and he didn’t like it. I don’t think he ever had anybody hold him to accountability.”
But as soon as Steve climbed out of addiction and the couple was preparing to get married, Silver started getting sick. Doctors found a stone in her liver duct.
An endoscopy procedure punctured a hole in her pancreas, and Silver was put in a coma-like state for 45 days, with doctors telling her she would likely die.
She survived, only to find out she was in kidney failure, which caused her to go completely blind. Doctors caught the renal failure before that killed her, but she started dialysis three days a week.
And the hits kept coming.
One afternoon, Steve picked up Silver from dialysis in Hendersonville and took her back to her to their home in Madison, where she lay down, exhausted. Steve complained of feeling bad himself and collapsed. It turned out, he was having a heart attack.
Doctors put in a stent and scheduled open-heart surgery.
“I just thought to myself, if I don’t make it off the operating table, I want to leave Silver my house and my royalties and make sure she’s taken care of,” Steve recalls. “I just picked her up one day after dialysis and I said we’re going over to our pastor and we’ll meet him at the church, and we’re going to get married.”
Silver says she “looked like a dog,” worn out from dialysis. And Steve had forgotten their wedding bands, purchased years earlier. But no matter. The pastor found some keyrings to symolize their eternal love and slid them on their fingers.
At 60 years old, amid an astonishing list of ailments, the Kilgores married.
“It’s like a ball with us,” Silver says. “We play volleyball. ‘It’s your turn to be sick. No, it’s your turn.’ And we help each other.”
It’s often frustrating. Steve complains about Silver calling out for assistance “10,000 times a day.” Silver gripes at Steve for leaving things on the ground that she ends up tripping over. But it’s the only reality they’ve known.
“It’s just gets to the point where it’s no longer a chore. It’s just life, you know. It’s just another page. I don’t even look at it as a caretaker,” Steve says. “When you love somebody and something happens, you don’t just cut them loose if you’re any kind of a person.”
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