Frank
Do you ever have a full conversation with someone who isn’t there anymore?
I do. More than I’d like to admit. And the answer I always get back is the one I invented, which means it’s never quite right and never quite satisfying and I’m still standing there in my own head talking to a guy who’s been gone since December of 1995.
William was twenty-six. I was twenty-five. He was a Deputy Sheriff in Baldwin County, Georgia, and he was my brother in every sense of the word that actually matters.
We Were Each Other’s First Roommate
We shared a room growing up on Lakeside Drive. Just the two of us in there for years, with Tom coming up behind us. William went off to college during my senior year of high school, and I thought that was it, that’s how it goes. But he came back after that first year, and my freshman year at GCSU we moved in together and stayed that way right up until the night everything ended.
That’s not nothing. That’s six, seven years of being twenty feet away from your best friend at all times. You don’t even realize how much you’re absorbing from a person until they’re not there to absorb anymore. William shaped how I think about loyalty, about showing up, about what it means to do something hard because it’s right. He put on a uniform every day. That wasn’t lost on me then and it sure isn’t now.
The Part Nobody Warns You About
People think grief is mostly about the big moments. The first Christmas. The first birthday. The funeral itself.
Those are brutal, yeah. I’m not going to minimize that.
But nobody warned me about the thirty years of small moments. The time I fixed my first server and wanted to call him. The day Kimberly and I got married and he wasn’t standing next to me. When Lauren was born. When Logan was born. When my grandson Kade came into this world, and I sat there thinking William would have been fifty-five years old and absolutely insufferable about being an uncle.
That’s where the weight actually lives. Not in the monuments. In the ten-second moments when your brain goes to reach for someone and finds nothing.
The Trial. The Appeals. The Nineteen Years.
I’m not going to go deep into the details here because that story deserves more space than a blog post and I’m honestly not sure I have the emotional bandwidth to unpack all of it right now.
What I will say is this: from December 17th, 1995 to December 10th, 2014, my family existed in a state of half-closure. Nineteen years of trials and appeals and Supreme Court hearings and the specific kind of anguish that only comes from having to relive the worst thing that ever happened to you on a schedule set by the legal system.
I was in the room when it ended. My dad was there. My younger brother Tom was there. We’d waited almost two decades for that day and I’d be lying if I said it fixed anything. It didn’t. It closed one chapter, hard stop, full period. But it didn’t give me William back. It didn’t un-scar any of us. It just stopped the clock on one particular kind of agony and left the rest of them running.
What Fifty-Five Feels Like With This in It
I’ve spent the last few years starting to understand some things about myself that explain a lot. The anxiety. The anger that flares up without much warning. The lack of patience for people who waste their second chances, because I watched someone who never got one.
I’ve got hard edges. Most people who know me know that. I don’t have a lot of softness left for foolishness or entitlement or people who treat their lives like they’re something to be irritated by. I know exactly where that comes from. It comes from Lakeside Drive and a brother who deserved to be here and isn’t.
I think about William every single day. Not always with sadness, not anymore. Sometimes it’s just him being part of my internal monologue. What would he say about Kade. What he’d think about the Falcons being the Falcons for fifty years running. Whether he’d be a homelab nerd too, or if he’d look at my server rack and tell me I need to get a life.
I don’t know. I’ll never know.
That’s the part I’m still carrying. Not the grief, exactly. The not-knowing. The conversations that never got to happen. The thirty years of things I never got to tell him that built up into something too heavy to put down and too important to throw away.
So I carry it. That’s what you do. You carry it and you keep going, because that’s the only option that was left on the table.
