February 2007 – April 2008
With the trial behind me, I did my best to step back into a life that looked normal from the outside. As long as there was something on the calendar, something to work toward, I could keep moving and avoid noticing that the ground under me was still shifting.
No one seemed to notice anything was wrong. I didn’t either. At the time, I didn’t have a name for what I was experiencing. That would come years later. Back then, I only knew that feeling didn’t come naturally anymore. When I suspected I should feel something and didn’t, I compensated. I laughed louder. I reacted bigger. I learned how to perform emotion convincingly enough that even I believed it.
Hoping to get out of this funk, I took time to do things I was interested in. In February, I spent a week interning at the West Virginia State House. For a brief stretch, my days were defined by schedules, meetings, and policy discussions. I was still in college, still working toward my Political Science degree, and being there felt like proof that I hadn’t been permanently knocked off course. We worked in the offices of the government officials we were assigned to and ended each day with presentations from legislators explaining specific bills or legislative processes.
One afternoon, I found myself arguing with the Senate minority leader about why he believed he deserved a raise for what was essentially a part-time job—one that would already pay six figures if it were full-time. I was there while the gambling bill was being debated and made more Kenny Rogers “The Gambler” jokes than anyone needed to hear. The highlight of the week was the Governor’s Ball—a night of dancing, networking, and continuing my spirited debate with the now-inebriated Senate minority leader.
In July, I went to Chicago for an improv workshop at The Second City. I had performed improv in the late ’90s, and it felt good to dust off those skills and remind myself that I could still be quick, still be playful, still enjoy being in a room full of people.
I went to a lot of sporting events in Pittsburgh and Cleveland. I traveled to see friends and family. I spent late nights at Denny’s with coworkers. This was the version of me everyone saw and interacted with—the version that appeared intact, social, and engaged.
Then there was the other me.
That version went to the farm. There, I was quieter. Calmer. More alert. The haze that followed me through my regular life lifted when I pulled into the driveway.
I packed my parents’ belongings one room at a time. Box after box of a life that had ended but still occupied space. In the spring, I worked on drywall, trying to make the house whole again. In the summer, I maintained the yard and worked on the outside of the house, keeping decay at bay and appearances intact.
I avoided the master bedroom for as long as I could. That room was the hardest. The blood stain on the floor was still there. It was the last room I packed, the one I always told myself I’d get to later.
The trial had been a turning point. All the energy I had been carrying—everything pent up inside me—was gone. The positive was that I felt lighter. Even though I had accepted the responsibility fully, not having to speak for my parents anymore lifted something off me. What needed to be done for them was done. Their murderer was behind bars. I believed I could finally move forward.
But with that release came new problems I didn’t yet understand. In my regular life, I felt like I was walking through a haze, similar to being on painkillers. My emotions felt dulled, distant, flattened. I went to college, worked, and spent time with friends, but it all happened on autopilot. Life felt like it was occurring around me rather than with me.
I would later learn that I was experiencing PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder. My nervous system was in protective shutdown. My mind was rewiring itself without my awareness. Work, college, and social life continued, but emotionally I was still anchored to the farm. That’s where I wanted to be more than anywhere else.
There was so much left unfinished there, and that incompleteness prevented any sense of closure. The farm existed in a place frozen before the shooting. My parents felt present there in a way they didn’t anywhere else. It was a way to stay close without letting go. My grief was trying to anchor itself to something solid.
I began to understand the duality I was living with. One version of me functioned. The other preserved. One tried to move forward. The other protected the past. I brainstormed ways to keep the farm productive—to turn the house into a bed and breakfast, to grow crops again, to generate enough income to justify staying. I continued renovations with whatever materials I had left.
There were times the two versions of me argued relentlessly. I was frustrated that I wasn’t moving forward, yet terrified of letting go of the only place where I still felt intact. When things weren’t going well in my regular life, I retreated to the farm. By the end of the summer, the part of me that wanted to stay had nearly won.
At the same time, my brother and I had ongoing discussions about selling the farm. He—and every other family member—didn’t want me there. The sooner it sold, the better. I made excuses. I bought time. My brother and I owned the property equally, and I seriously considered buying him out.
Then something happened that made me snap out back to reality.
I received a call from the property attorney my parents had worked with and was asked to stop by the office. When I arrived, I was told this wasn’t about business. It was personal. As friends of my parents, they felt it was important to sit me down and have an honest conversation.
The attorney told me that if I stayed on the farm, it might not be tomorrow, or even a year from then, but eventually a friend or relative of the Eagles would hear Dale’s stories and about me still living there. Someone would take it personally and would decide to do something about it. They would come up through the woods, take me out, and no one would ever know who did it. I was told this kind of thing happens more often than people realize.
I believed the attorney immediately. After everything I had been through, it didn’t sound exaggerated. It sounded realistic. Protective. They told me they didn’t want to see anything happen to me and that, as much as I wanted to keep the farm, for my own safety it was best to let it go.
Despite everything I was struggling with, I knew one thing clearly: I wanted to live.
I drove back to the farm and walked the property. I sat on the side of one of the hills, looking out over the land, and thought. That’s when it became clear to me that I was letting history repeat itself. For years, family members had warned my parents and me that we should move for our own safety. Every time, we said we were staying. The farm had been in our family for eighty years. It was our home. No one was going to run us off.
That decision had cost my parents their lives.
Now I had family members telling me to sell. I had an attorney telling me to sell. And I wanted to stay for the same reasons we always had—because it was home, because it was ours, and because there was still so much my parents and I had started that I wanted to finish. Sitting there, I understood that if I stayed, I would likely be making the same mistake again.
With deep sadness, I accepted what I had to do.
I called my brother and told him I wouldn’t stand in the way of selling the farm.
Selling wasn’t easy at first. People were interested until they learned the Eagles still lived at the end of the road. Then they backed out. After a few months, we found a buyer and finalized the sale.
By then, most of the house was already in storage. What remained was boxed and ready for a moving truck. My brother and his wife came, and together we moved the last of our belongings out. The house sounded hollow. Our voices echoed in rooms that no longer held anything of us.
On April 8, 2008, I stood on the steps outside the side door of the farmhouse as the new owner drove up the driveway and parked in the carport. We spoke briefly—mostly about where supplies and fixtures were located. I handed him the key. We shook hands. I told him to take care of the place.
I walked across the driveway to my car and opened the door. Before getting in, I stopped and took one last look at the house and the yard. In my mind, I saw Teta making pastries, Aunt Mary feeding her ducks, Uncle Tom setting fence posts, Grandpa Slatt pulling up in his red Ford pickup, Mikey smiling from the porch, My brother and I as kids playing in the front yard, mom and dad on the Kabota, Kitza, Sammy, the obnoxious rooster. Decades of memory arrived all at once, and my throat tightened.
That was grief. I still didn’t want to let go.
One last memory surfaced—my dad standing by the alpaca pen, wearing his auburn winter coat, his arm resting on the rail. His eyes glistening under the barn lights and his half smile, “We’ll see each other again.” The memory settled something in me. It gave me peace that I was doing the right thing. My parents would have wanted me to live my life—not remain on the farm as a self-imposed prison of memory.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and softly said, “Goodbye.”
I got into my car, rolled down the windows, and listened as the tires moved over the gravel. I didn’t look back. I kept my eyes forward and drove away.