You don’t have to look too hard to find Johnny Cash in Thomas Gabriel.
You don’t even have to squint. It’s written all over him.
The grandson of the “Man in Black” is more than just a talented singer/musician from a legendary family; he’s a walking miracle.
The fact that the man is alive proves that.
Here’s why.
One day he goes to the gym, moves a chair, sits down, and something just doesn’t feel right.
As it turns out, there was a good reason for that.
He didn’t realize it at the time, but he had been having a major heart attack — apparently for much of the day.
“I had no idea,” he says. “It’s not like the movies.”
There was no dramatic clutching of the chest.
No collapse to the floor.
Thomas eventually walked himself into the hospital and, while waiting to be seen, even grabbed a bag of chips because he was hungry.
Then the doctor walks in with some breaking news.
He tells Thomas that he’s in the middle of a heart attack.
Tests would reveal what he describes as a 99% blockage in his widowmaker, the critical left anterior descending coronary artery.
When the doctor says “widowmaker,” it sure sounds like there’s not much daylight between you and the other side.
Suddenly, there wasn’t much time for anything.
Thomas remembers wanting to call his family before doctors took him back.
“They’re like, ‘We don’t really have time for that.’”
And somehow, that was only the beginning.
Four days later, Thomas underwent bypass surgery.
What happened afterward is something he still struggles to describe.
While in recovery, he says something internally came apart.
Something internally came apart?
Yes.
He began bleeding severely.
Then he was gone.
Not dead.
But not conscious, either.
Thomas would spend days in a coma.
When he finally woke up four days later, he was in extraordinary pain. Somehow, during the ordeal, he had also broken his ankle.
But it was what his doctor told him afterward that has never left him.
“First time I’ve ever seen a heartbeat without blood in it.”
Thomas says the doctor explained it even more plainly:
“Every piece of blood you’ve got, we gave you.”
He had bled out.
And somehow, against all reasonable odds, he was still alive.
The Man Who Wouldn’t Leave the Opry
Surviving the heart attack and bypass surgery didn’t mark the end of Thomas Gabriel’s medical battle.
More blockages followed.
His heart had taken a beating. A double bypass and five stents later, Thomas was still standing.
That’s bad enough, right?
But as they say, “Wait, there’s more.”
Then came his lungs.
Five, count ’em, five lung surgeries!
Of all the times for his lungs to give him trouble, they chose the night Thomas was about to play the Grand Ole Opry.
His oxygen saturation, he says, was just 78 percent.
His doctor was backstage monitoring him and telling him he needed to go to the emergency room.
Thomas had another idea. In the most “Cash family” way, he said, “I’m about to walk on stage, and I’m not leaving.”
So he didn’t.
He walked onto the Opry stage, played the show, and then he walked off and went straight to the hospital, where he’d spend the next five days.
Doctors eventually performed another major operation on his lungs.
There he was, Thomas Gabriel, as tough and as stout as the day is long, weak and using a walker.
There was the humbling realization that all the strength he had built in the gym could disappear almost overnight.
“Everything you worked for in a gym — gone. Just gone.”
And then came the work of building himself back.
Again.
There is another part of Thomas Gabriel’s story that makes everything that happened to his body more complicated.
For years, he says, he had been destroying it.
Thomas has spoken openly about beginning to drink at an extraordinarily young age and continuing to drink heavily for decades.
“I drank so heavy…from the time I was 11 years old until six years ago,” he says. “Just ruining myself, basically.”
He decided enough was enough.
His diet changed.
His doctors eventually allowed him to begin exercising again.
Slowly, the man who once needed a walker began reclaiming his body and his life.
The physical recovery became another chapter in a much larger story of recovery.
Thomas Gabriel had already survived addiction.
Then his heart, complications from surgery, and his lungs all took their turn trying to kill him.
And still, he kept getting back up.
During a recent conversation with Thomas and the Fourth Door Media team, someone watching our podcast posted a comment:
“That man is a walking miracle.”
Thomas laughed.
Then, in the most “Cash family” response ever, he says, “And that’s nothing compared to some of the other stuff I can tell you.”
The Cash legacy has always seemed to contain contradictions, darkness and faith, addiction and recovery, mistakes and redemption, falling down and somehow finding a way back up.
Thomas has lived his own version of that story and has the mental and physical scars to prove it.
Which Johnny Cash song might fit Thomas’s life story?
“Ain’t No Grave” comes to mind.
Thomas Gabriel has been frighteningly close to one.
More than once.
Today, he’s back out on the road, playing his own songs alongside some of his legendary grandfather’s hits.
He’s worth the price of admission, whatever it is.
As we like to say here, Thomas Gabriel sure seems Unbreakable.
So far, so good.