“Being bedridden for 20 hours a day is pretty tough going. It’s just the hardest way to live that I have ever experienced. Mentally I am relatively sound now, but physically I have never been worse. Whatever you go through physically in your life, you just don’t panic too much because you know you’ll come out of it on the other side sooner rather than later. But this one doesn’t appear to ever get better. This is it. When a man never gets to walk or go fishing or even use his hands, that’s final.
I look at things logically and realistically. I understand this situation now and I know what is and what isn’t, and what can and what can’t be.
Life experience has helped me get to where I am mentally now. It’s also a matter of ‘have to be’. If I don’t handle it mentally, I am a dead man. There is nothing else left; all I’ve got left now is my brain.
I don’t want to die without finishing the stuff that I started. I want to have my family and best friends in a good place and everything I worked for in life. I want to leave a good legacy. The fire was obviously pretty devastating and damaged everything on the farm that I have been working on all my life. There’s not a lot of choice. Whether you are a broken man or an able man, you got one choice—you got to fix it. Whatever happens from here on now, I hope I have left a positive mark on the west end of the island.“