Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer. It's too bad he's never cried. Hilarious, right?
But Norris is just as human as the next person — and his struggles are just as real.
Just a few months after Chuck Norris' younger brother, Wieland, was born, their father was
drafted into WWII. In his memoir, Against All Odds: My Story, Norris recounted his family
getting one of the worst messages imaginable: Ray Norris was MIA. When he ultimately returned to
the family, his time in the war weighed heavily on him, and his alcohol addiction grew worse.
Norris recalled some harrowing incidents, writing about his father threatening his
mother, trying to get her to give him the five dollars she'd put aside for food. Norris wrote,
"When he was drunk, little things often sent him into a rage. If he heard the water running
while he was suffering from a hangover, he would explode in an abusive tirade, roaring
threats and expletives. [...] While Mom tried to calm him down, Wieland and I hid in the bedroom."
Norris wrote about his eternal hope that one day the drinking would stop, but he also wrote about
realizing that wasn't going to happen. And it took years, but the worst did happen: Not
long after the birth of Norris' youngest brother, Aaron, their father was driving drunk when he hit
and killed a woman. Convicted and sentenced to a work camp, they visited him regularly.
Norris recalled being hopeful that it would encourage his father to stay sober, but that hope
was short-lived. After he was released, Norris stated that Ray went right for the bar, writing,
"Dad was becoming increasingly aggressive at home and abusive toward Mom. Luckily,
he was too drunk to take my threat too seriously."
That, he said, was when the family realized they had no choice but to leave for good.
"He always was like the man in the house, because his father wasn't there."
Chuck Norris is famously patriotic: He's so patriotic, in fact, that he wrote Black Belt
Patriotism: How to Reawaken America as a sort of blueprint of how to fix all that
he saw wrong with the country. He hasn't always had such an unconditionally devoted
attitude toward the country, though, and when he appeared on The Dick Cavett Show in 1993,
he shared the heartbreaking story of how his brother Wieland was killed during the Vietnam War.
He had been acting as the point man on a patrol when he realized they were walking
into a Viet Cong ambush, and he tried to warn the rest of his unit. He was shot and killed.
Norris went on to say that they'd found out what happened from one of the other soldiers
who had been there: He attended Wieland's funeral, and made sure that his family
knew that he had given his life to warn his fellow soldiers of immediate danger.
"The conflict cost over three million lives."
When Cavett asked if the loss was made worse by the loss of the war,
Norris explained that when the U.S. first got involved, he was 100% behind it, saying,
"I'm one of these ultra-patriotic type guys. But reflecting back, [...] realizing what kind
of a war it was, it was a war of monetary gains, rather than a war of principle. [...] I think it
was a war that could not be won, [...] and we have to be careful about that in the future."
Chuck Norris' first marriage ended in divorce,
and he stated in his memoir that he was absolutely devastated, writing,
"Divorce was a shock to my system. Besides the emotional issues of dealing with a sense
of failure, I was suddenly thrown into a whole new lifestyle. [...] All my life I
had been accustomed to being taken care of and nurtured by strong, wonderful women."
His entire life changed when he got a letter in the mail from Dianna DeCioli,
and she was writing to tell him that she was his daughter. Her mother, Johanna, had a short-term
fling with the then-married Norris when he was in the military, and Norris stresses that he
never actually told her that he was married. She later discouraged her daughter from reaching out
to him — saying it would ruin his marriage — but with the news of his divorce, she reached out.
Norris said that he knew he was her father as soon as he saw her, and that he struggled with what
he'd done: His faith had taught that extramarital affairs were a definite sin, and not only did he
feel the weight of the sin, but also guilt over not being there for his daughter and her mother.
By 2017, Chuck Norris' fans were beginning to notice that he had sort of stepped away
from the limelight — and according to a statement he gave to The Washington Post,
there was a heartbreaking reason for his absence. He stated that over the past several years,
he had been focused on his wife, Gena's, health.
Gena O'Kelley had undergone an MRI scan as a test for the possibility she would
develop rheumatoid arthritis, and after the test, she experienced a laundry list
of symptoms that included tremors, numbness, and difficulties putting thoughts and words together.
"My whole body was just tremoring."
In an interview with CBS, the couple
said Gena had to be taken to the emergency room multiple times. She spent months in the hospital
and accumulated bills to the tune of $2 million. That included treatments to repair her central
nervous system, and trips to China for stem cell therapies. Norris spoke about the fear he felt:
"And I said there's nothing going on here, she's dying, she's dying right in front of me here."
He continued that it wasn't just about her, and that it was about the others who had been
diagnosed with illnesses connected with gadolinium deposition disease.
"I had IVs literally every day for five months."
They initially filed a $10 million lawsuit against
the companies manufacturing the dye that Norris blamed for her illness,
but the lawsuit was voluntarily withdrawn, and no settlement was arranged.