In 2017, Joye Lee-McNelis began writing her obituary.
Where she was born. In the southern Mississippi community of Leetown.
Preceded in death by. Then a blank space, not knowing if she would die before her parents.
A note of thanks to her family, to the players she had coached, to the staffs she had worked with and the administrations she had worked for.
McNelis had been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. While thinking about her death, she focused on how her life would be remembered. Her husband, Dennis, thought she was crazy. She reassured him she wasn’t concerned about the act of dying. “I just want to plan it all out,” she told him. “There’s no need having you and our children worrying about it.” She wanted it to feel like a celebration.
McNelis is now 61 and in her 20th season as Southern Mississippi’s head coach. She hasn’t looked back at what she wrote. But one afternoon earlier this fall, McNelis and her father, Louis, sat outside on her patio talking about their prospective funerals. Louis, 87, had Parkinson’s disease and congestive heart failure. Every artery in his heart had been bypassed. McNelis, meanwhile, was in the midst of a third fight with lung cancer. Her second came in late 2020. Having been diagnosed again in August, this time, for the…
