- April 26, 2024
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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.”
The comfort of horses
Like many girls, when Tess was about 6 years old, she asked her dad for a horse. But in the Boyd family, which has a long history of ranching in Flagler County, it was a request that actually could be granted. Her dad told her, “Just keep saving. You’ll get there.” Tess saved everything she could and even went through everyone’s pockets looking for change before her mother did the laundry.
Now that she’s a bit older and wiser, she realizes that the horse she eventually received was far beyond her price range. Her dad made up the difference.
Tess’s father helped cultivate her love of horses. He would buy magazines about horses for her to read. And he taught her the most important lesson a cowgirl can learn: When you get thrown off, get right back on the horse.
“When I was little, my horse took off with me, and eventually, I fell off, and my dad always told me to get back on, because if I didn’t, I never would have started riding again,” Tess recalls. “When you fall, you have to get back on again, or your confidence and your courage fade away.
“Falling off used to scare me, but the past two years, I haven’t been scared,” she says. “It’s been a buildup of my dad saying, ‘You can do it.’ He always made me feel like I could do anything.”
Tess’s courage built to the point that she has become a barrel racer. Horses became her friends. “Some people say horses know your emotions,” she says. “They just make me happy.”
One of the family’s nine horses is a small, 2-year-old roan quarterhorse named Gator. “He likes to tease me,” she says. “I just started working with saddling him, about two months ago, and sometimes I’ll leave to do something, and he’ll pick up the saddle pad and move it to a different spot in my yard. He doesn’t move it that far — he doesn’t have a good grip. He just picks it up and throws it with his teeth. It’s really funny.”
Get back on
Tess is a slender girl with a quiet strength and confidence. Like the rest of her immediate and extended family, she has taken her father’s death hard. But she has also found peace since the tragedy, and she credits the horses.
“A couple of days ago, I was with my horse, and I was just thinking about everything that happened,” she said. “I was looking back on some of the memories, and I thought, ‘We’ve got to pull together, and we'll be OK. If we just get back on.”
She feels it's her role to be the one with the light heart in her family and to cheer everyone else up. And she feels that the family doesn’t have to struggle alone.
“I just know that Daddy’s fine. He’s doing good,” she says. “He’s with us spiritually.”
BOX: IN LIEU OF FLOWERS
The viewing for Michael Joseph Boyd is 1-2:30 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 24, at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 402 N. Palmetto St., Bunnell. The funeral follows at 3 p.m.
In lieu of flowers, a fund has been set up to support the family’s four children. Checks should be made out to Heide Boyd and sent to the Bank of America branch at 303 E. Moody Blvd., Bunnell FL 32110.
A website has also been set up to accept donations. Click here.
