As I sit here at Beans and Brews, luxuriating in the Word of Wisdom loophole of a decaffeinated iced Americano-my hypocrisies are limited to decaffeinated coffee and the occasional expletive, the latter of which I have curbed by fining myself and using the accumulated funds to support Amazon purchases for my daughter, my niece and my nephews-I await a lunch meeting with a client. A little over two years ago, I walked over to my father’s house to warn him to stay away from my side of the land, as I had tested positive for COVID at my new job. The door was ajar, and my father’s door was never ajar. The lights were on in the middle of the day, and my father never left the lights on in the middle of the day.
I drew my pistol and cleared the front of the house, and then moved down the hall to the master bedroom where my father slept. His dog Layla was on the living room couch. I called out for him, but there was no answer. When I moved to his bedroom doorway, there he was, folded over the bed frame he had been assembling. His skin was black from the pooled blood, and when I reached down to touch his neck, he was cold.
Less than three months before, I had heart surgery. It was the culmination of four years of constant illness, multiple hospital stays, and dire diagnoses. My father was there with me, laughing at the fact that I had eaten chicken and black beans and ground turkey and brown rice in an attempt to avoid my family history and genetics. My cardiologist was there, his face furrowed as he declared the obvious: I didn’t look like a person with 99% blockages in his heart.
My father had been 44 years old when he had his first heart surgery. I was laying in a hospital bed awaiting heart surgery at 44 years of age. I knew why my father had heart surgery: he had eaten enormous amounts of food in order to bulk for body building, none of it clean. I had eaten lean and clean protein, eschewing anything processed and avoiding sugar like the plague. I had two doughnuts a year, on January 5th and July 5th.
You can’t outrun your genetics. You can’t outrun who you are.
I had tried to do something else multiple times. Neither of my wives liked the investigative research or the subject matter thereof. I didn’t expect them to, but that work gave me purpose and structure unlike conventional jobs. I did sales, and I was good enough at it to make gobs of money, and gobs of money silence a disgruntled wife. Before that, it was a political action committee and a consulting firm.
The job I caught COVID at was a call center gig. After four years of dying, I was determined to just get back up and go and live. Our training class was decimated by COVID, as we caught it from our vaccinated and boosted instructors and the employees of that call center. They were federal contractors who had gotten the jab as required to keep their jobs.
I had put out feelers to old associates, attorneys and accountants, letting them know I was willing to go back into the investigative work and take on paying clients. I needed income, but I was hoping that I’d be able to do anything that wasn’t scam artists and pedophiles. Normal is an end that has eluded me my entire life.
My father was laying on his bedroom floor, blackened and dead.
The rest of the day was a blur of family members and police and EMTs, my brother and I turning my father’s body over because my sister didn’t want him left face down on the floor. His face had hit the floor so hard that his eye socket had caved in. His hand was stiff in his pocket, as if he were reaching for screws to finish assembling his new bed. He was working when he died.
He worked when he lived. My father had two bypass surgeries and eight angioplasties, multiple strokes, and he was still out and about digging up trees and grinding stumps a few days before he died.
He would come over to my place and sit in camping chairs with me while I convalesced, and he would download his day of talking to people about Christ in parking lots and whatever he was doing around the land. He was hilariously frank, ranting about how everyone was gay and Christian these days, and when I asked him if he was gay, his answer was typical: “I might be.”
I burst out laughing. He smirked.
I understood his anger and frustration. Christian is a nomenclature void of meaning these days. Everyone is a Christian. Few people will tell you that they aren’t, but fewer will actually live the life. It’s hard life, especially for those who want it.
He was angry when I converted and was baptized as a Latter Day Saint.
The Church was heresy to him. I took his rants in stride, because I’d had eighteen years of practice in his house, eighteen years of being terrorized by a man I simultaneously loved and loathed.
He was dead. There would never be any more visits at the end of a day, no more conversations in camping chairs outside of my RV.
He was the greatest and most conflicted, convicted man I ever met. I am Hegelian, and I find delight in the inherent contradictions within humanity and history. My father, like the rest of us, was a mass of contradictions.
I sat with my sister while she made the funeral arrangements and executed his estate. I fired pistols with my nephew when he became overwhelmed as we cleared out my father’s house. He stood and aimed, right handed, but with his left eye, just like his grandfather. My father had the second highest marks on the range with a broken wrist during basic training. Nixon’s draw down saved him from Vietnam, and my dad always seemed to resent not being deployed.
Less than a month after he died, I caught the Hamblin case. I had done a few other Utah-related projects, one of which involved the Bountiful scandal with Dick and Brenda Miles. The Hamblin case was orders of magnitude worse, and I initially thought it was absurd. Two years later, I am convinced that it is real, and that ritual abuse is real and ongoing.
I had no time to reflect on my father’s death, or to dwell on it. I had a purpose. Two years later, I’m still at it. I’ve been blessed to have support from any number of people, and revenue from private clients to push back into the Hamblin project. Grief is something that can consume, if you don’t leave it behind.
All things come alike to all, there is one event that will come to us all: death. We will all die, and when we die, we will have no more share in anything under the sun. Our love, our hatred, and our envy will perish with us. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, the verse says, and I try to do that. The grave is approaching, and I have work to do. I eat my bread, drink my decaffeinated Americano, and I do it with joy because the Lord has accepted my works. I live joyfully, having almost died four times in four years. In those four years, both of my parents died. Life is for the living.
Thanks for the support, and thanks for reading. I can’t outrun who I am, and who I am is this work. It is what I was made to do, and I’m happy to do it. I’ll be at the Stevenson hearing in person on September 26th, before Judge Lunnen in Provo, and at the demonstration at 1:15 p.m. I’ll see you there.
I found you online one year ago this month. You were a mysterious person introducing a nightmare into my life through the revelations made on this site.
As an abuse survivor growing up part-time in Utah County, the new revelations haunted me day and night for months and months.
You validated that my upbringing was not the normal upbringing my family wanted me to believe it was.
My household was turned upside down as my husband watched me grieve and fret as I put two and two together that challenged all I believed.
I didn't know if I could trust this stranger with the handle that means redemption in Hebrew.
But a year later. I'm coming to accept what is truth and learning how to navigate through it with more courage than ever.
Through the Substack format my connection to you has connected me to other brave survivors that I get, and that get me.
Your approach to sharing the vulnerabilities of your own life which you are doing lately has helped me to understand you and trust you. Trust is hard for me to develop in anyone.
I also understand your heart journey. My husband, father of 7, had heart surgery 12 years ago, on two 99% blocked surgeries at the age of 49. He had six boys at home at the time.
We went on Caldwell Esselstyn, MD's plan and cleaned out his arteries and he is going strong.
I'm sorry about you losing your parents and all you have been through. Thank you for fighting for us survivors, and for your example of bravery. I'm also grateful that you have found the church, and that have so quickly brought yourself up to speed on the doctrine and scriptures. What you have learned in the few years you have been a member is amazing!
I live in the path of Hurricane Helene so I won't be able to show up to the rallies out there in Utah. Still have kids at home to keep safe but I'm there in spirit and praying for you
This was truly touching to read. Thank you for all you do. ❤️