May 21st – July 8th 2006
After we left the farm, my grandparents and the rest of the family headed back to South Carolina. I stayed behind one extra day to take care of a few loose ends before following them. I was grateful that day happened to be a Sunday.
I wanted to go to church. I wanted to see the video I had recorded actually used. Mostly, I wanted to be around my church family—especially my parents’ small group. They had been my spiritual support long before everything fell apart, and I needed to be near them now. I wore my dad’s blue dress shirt, the one he always liked to wear to church. It felt familiar on my shoulders, grounding and strangely comforting all at once.
Standing there singing was harder than I expected. My eyes kept drifting toward the stage, toward the place where my mom should have been. Just a week earlier, she had been standing there, singing. Now there was only empty space. The church used my video as the introduction to the lesson, and I was glad they did. While I was in the hospital, I’d worried about whether it would make it there at all. People told me not to worry. I worried anyway. Seeing it used felt like finishing something I had started before everything changed.
We sat in the back pew. I couldn’t bring myself to sit in the front row where my parents and I had always sat together. My pain tolerance and energy came and went without warning. Sometimes I felt almost normal. Other times my head hurt badly enough that I needed to lie down. One of those waves hit during the service, and I had to leave early. It made me sad. I wanted to greet people, to encourage them and be encouraged in return. I missed that connection, even though I knew I didn’t have the strength to hold onto it for long. We slipped out quietly, unnoticed.
Undoing a Life
The rest of the day was spent on the quiet, practical work of undoing a life. We made phone calls, canceled subscriptions, and arranged returns for things that had been purchased. My parents had always handled that kind of detail. At the house, they kept a notebook with everything written down—memberships, financial obligations, passwords. Now we worked through it line by line.
We drove to Bridgeport to cancel the gym memberships my parents and I had at Extreme Fitness. On the way back, we stopped at the Chinese buffet in the shopping plaza. On the bright side, I ate an enormous dinner. That place had started to become one of my parents’ favorites. It was all-you-can-eat. My mom always went straight for the crab legs. My dad and I piled our plates high with lo mein and vegetables, carbs without apology. The only downside was that we ate so much we didn’t accomplish anything else that day. It was the kind of indulgent sluggishness that used to feel harmless. Now it felt like a brief refuge.
The Plan to Leave
That evening, plans were finalized. My brother would drive me to South Carolina in my car, then fly back to Boise. His wife and in-laws would leave the next day. No one said it outright, but the assumption hung in the air—this wasn’t a short stay. It showed up in the way plans were discussed, in how the future was framed without my input. I stayed quiet. Speaking up would have turned the conversation into an argument, and I didn’t have the energy for that. Silence became the only control I had left.
I understood why they wanted me to go. Their concern for my safety was real. The logic made sense. But being sent away felt less like protection and more like exile. I wasn’t just leaving West Virginia; I was being removed from my home, from the farm, from the friends who were grieving alongside me and didn’t need explanations. In South Carolina, I would be surrounded by care but cut off from context. Everyone there wanted me to move forward, while the people who shared my grief were still standing in the wreckage with me. Grief doesn’t heal in isolation. It needs witnesses. It needs shared memory. Instead, I felt relocated not for healing, but for management—safe, perhaps, but disconnected from everything that had shaped my life over the last two years.
The Drive South
The drive itself was quiet. I slept most of the way, not to escape, but because my body demanded it. We stopped to eat and to take care of Charley and Buffy. When I was awake, I didn’t have much to say. Exhaustion carried resignation with it.
I didn’t yet have the language for it, but resentment had begun to settle in. I knew even then this wasn’t a fresh start. It was a pause. An interruption. Whatever anyone else imagined, I wasn’t starting over. I was waiting—to heal, to regain my footing, and to go back.
Arrival in South Carolina
I arrived at my aunt and uncle’s house on the twenty-second. The house had once belonged to my parents before they moved to the farm after Aunt Mary died. They’d sold it to my aunt and uncle in a rent-to-own agreement. I moved back into the bedroom I had stayed in before. Familiarity has its advantages, but this familiarity felt hollow. Nothing in the house belonged to my parents. There was no lingering presence, no connection like the one I felt at the farm. It was recognizable, but emotionally empty.
Charley and Buffy adjusted well to my aunt and uncle’s animals, which had worried me. I called a few friends to let them know I was nearby for the foreseeable future. I needed to see familiar faces. I needed reminders of who I had been before everything fractured.
Returning to Work
I needed to work. Before leaving West Virginia, I’d reached out to my old boss at Cracker Barrel to see if he could help me find a job in Spartanburg. He did. I started on the twenty-fifth—nine days after being shot. They knew what had happened and put me at the host stand instead of waiting tables. It probably wasn’t the best idea. My face was still injured. My right eye was blood red. I was still on painkillers.
People would stop when they saw me. Their eyes widened. I smiled and said, “How many in your party?” I scared children. A week later, they let me wait tables anyway. At first, working made me feel human again. It gave me somewhere to be. I liked being around people. It kept my mind from circling the loss. But as the stares increased, I became self-conscious. I felt like something on display.
Looking back, I’m surprised no one questioned whether I should have been driving. I drove to work and worked full shifts while taking painkillers. No one asked. I didn’t offer. It seems absurd now, but at the time it felt normal. Everything felt slightly out of sync, like life was moving at the wrong speed. Still, it made the pain manageable.
Reconnecting with Friends
I spent time with friends. We’d gather, I’d tell the story of what happened on the farm, and once it was told, we could simply be together. Being surrounded by familiar faces brought real relief. For a few hours, I could step back into a version of life that still recognized me.
Those visits were a gift, but they only delayed the inevitable. No amount of laughter or easy conversation could undo what had happened or bring my parents back. I didn’t fully understand it then, but something inside me was already splitting. There was the person I’d been before the shooting—someone who could slip easily into old friendships and move through a world that felt intact. And there was the person I was becoming—someone standing just outside the circle, watching everything unfold as if my friends were characters on a screen. I was growing detached.
One friend helped more than she probably knew. We had dated once and stayed close afterward. She knew I was on painkillers, so she drove me everywhere. On her birthday, we went to Brewsters Ice Cream—a place I’d never been—and I tried a pretzel in my ice cream for the first time. For a little while, celebrating something ordinary like a birthday felt genuinely good.
Our history made everything feel closer and impossibly distant at the same time. There were quiet drives and shared laughs when it seemed like we might rekindle something—a familiar warmth that could have anchored me again. She was patient, still seeing the old me in a way that made the possibility feel real.
But I couldn’t meet her there. The divide inside me had grown too wide. When she looked at me with that old affection, I felt like an observer in someone else’s life. Hollowed out by grief and pain, I had nothing real to give, and trying would only have hurt her. The opportunity lingered, then quietly passed.
This would be my reality for years. When community ended and I was alone again, the disconnection remained. I could reach back and touch pieces of my old life, but I no longer lived inside it. The distance had taken root, slowly widening, and I had no idea how to close it.
666 – The Number of the Beast
On June sixth, I received a phone call. Dale had been indicted on two counts of first-degree murder, one count of attempted murder, and malicious wounding. Seeing the date—6/6/06—felt grimly appropriate. More than symbolism, though, the indictment made everything real. It was the first step toward justice for my parents.
Eye Surgery
Not long after, I finally had eye surgery. The blood in my eye wasn’t clearing as doctors had hoped, and they needed to assess the damage. They put me under and drained the blood. What they found was worse than expected. Two pieces of metal had passed through the back of my eye and lodged in my forehead. My retina had detached. If scar tissue formed, it would never heal, and I would permanently lose vision in that eye.
After surgery, I began tapering off the painkillers. I stopped taking them during the day, saving one pill at night to help me sleep. When the fog lifted, the first thing I noticed was the pain in my eye socket. I dealt with it. I hated living in a constant state of numbness, and I didn’t miss it the way I thought I might.
Growing Frustration
By the end of June, my frustration with being in South Carolina had settled into something harder to ignore. I wasn’t doing well. I understood the reality my parents had been living with. They had built an alpaca business, and like any business, it came with debt. Those obligations didn’t disappear with them. I knew that.
But my parents and I were a team. We made decisions together. We had worked intentionally toward that kind of relationship—one where my voice mattered and responsibility was shared. I was the firstborn son, and regardless of what had happened to me, I felt obligated to be part of what needed to be done. I owed that to my parents.
Instead, decisions were being made without me. I was informed after the fact, not consulted. From a distance, it felt like my life was being dismantled piece by piece while I was told to be patient and stay put. Everything was happening too fast. Before I could process one loss, another followed. There was no room to grieve before something else was taken away.
This put me at odds with my brother. He saw debt and a practical solution: sell everything, pay what was owed, and move on. He had a life waiting for him. So did everyone else. I did not. I was untethered, watching choices unfold that would shape the rest of my life without my presence or consent. And even then, I can see what he was facing. He had lost our parents too, and in the middle of his own grief, he was trying to protect me the only way he knew how. We were both acting from loss. Life had narrowed our options, and we were choosing among them as best we could. I should have told my brother how I felt. I didn’t. Silence felt safer than risking another fracture.
With each passing day, the absence of my parents became harder to bear. The emptiness expanded instead of fading. It wasn’t just grief—it was displacement. The thought that sustained me was the possibility of returning to where they had lived. That land was my last tangible connection to them. Without it, I felt unmoored, as if I might disappear along with everything they had built. All I wanted was to go home.
Independence Day
I spent the Fourth of July with my uncle in Atlanta, passing the time in the simplest way possible—watching baseball. The Yankees were being demolished by the Cleveland Indians, 19–1. For a few hours, things felt easy. I didn’t care that the Indians were having a rough season. That night, they crushed the Yankees, and there is nothing better than watching the Yankees lose.
The game brought back memories of the previous summer, when my uncle visited the farm and we drove to Cleveland to watch the Indians play Detroit on the Fourth of July. Detroit lost that game too. The Indians won ninety-three games that season and still missed the playoffs.
But my strongest Fourth of July memories went back even further, to childhood. We made a tradition of going to Indians games for the fireworks afterward—five years in a row, I think. Municipal Stadium wasn’t glamorous. The bleacher seats were cheap, and they were the best place to watch fireworks explode over the lake. The Indians were awful back then. The game was just an excuse to watch fireworks from the best seats in Cleveland.
The Decision to Return
After that holiday, I made a decision. The painkillers were finally out of my system, and my mind felt clear again. As much as I loved my family and appreciated their concern, staying in South Carolina had been a mistake. My parents’ murderer was in jail awaiting trial, and I wasn’t going to leave everything to chance.
I had already lived through one trial with Dale. I knew how long and draining the process could be, and I refused to sit on the sidelines while he and his lawyer built their defense. As the oldest son, the responsibility now fell to me—sorting through the farm, deciding what to do with my parents’ belongings, preserving what they had built. More than that, it was my duty to make sure they received justice.
Returning wasn’t reckless. College could wait. This mattered more. Going back was an act of resolve—of shouldering what my parents had left behind and quietly refusing to disappear.
It was time to go home.