Nonfiction

Horses help 13-year-old ‘get back on’ after father’s death

The Boyd family

Tess Boyd, 13, lay on her mother’s bed. It was past midnight, but the light was on in the bedroom, illuminating the somber group: her mother Heide, her 17-year-old brother Colton and her sister Millie, 7. Her oldest brother, Michael Anthony, 19, is a missionary out of the state but was there in spirit. No one spoke, but they all cried together. Hours earlier, Michael Joseph Boyd, the husband and father of this tight-knit family in western Flagler County, died of a heart attack Aug. 15 while he was playing basketball with friends at church. He was 43.

Mike Boyd was a 1987 graduate of Flagler Palm Coast High School, a tireless worker who commuted to Leesburg every day to provide for his family, and a faithful elder in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But most of all, he was a dad. He was a husband.

Tess didn’t hear it at first because she was crying, but finally her mother, who celebrated her 20th wedding anniversary with Mike earlier this summer, got Tess’s attention and told her to listen. They all stopped crying for a moment.

It was the horses. Nine of them, neighing just outside the window. Typically, the horses would graze or sleep at night, far away in the back pasture. Tess listened to them call out in the night for two hours. Neither in the years before nor in the week and a half since her father died have the horses gathered near the window to neigh like that.

“My dad knew that horses were the one thing that made me happy,” she recalls. “And I just felt like he had something to do with it.” …

(Note: The full story first appeared in the Palm Coast Observer in August 2013. Click here for the full story.)