It’s tempting to think of Farmer’s essay collection as an album we need to listen to again and again, looking for clues that might explain what drove Bill Dresser to try and kill his wife, and how much love and courage and devotion the act took. After all, the event plays back like a chorus here, appearing first in “Mercy,” the opening essay to the book, and then again as a reference point several times over in the other essays. Farmer’s chronicle of the tragedy in “Mercy,” and of its aftermath, tells how her grandmother finally succumbed to her injuries shortly after the shooting and how her grandfather sat in jail for days afterward, ultimately being released on bail after he was no longer deemed a threat to the community. Eventually, too, the charges made against Dresser by the Carson Township were dropped, after Bill’s family and other members of the community wrote to the courts on his behalf.
This temptation to find answers through analysis, too, is something Farmer addresses but then dismisses in the essay “Seeing the Dead Alive:”
My grandmother’s life doesn’t equal her death. Yet I keep writing and rewriting her ending because I learned from her suffering that you can die more than once: your life can leave you, but you can still die further, a more final death. The inverse is true, too: you can find yourself paused just outside of death like my grandfather, who’d chosen to end his life but found himself accidentally alive, walking his desert yard while out on parole, reading the newspaper in his pale blue chair, drinking coffee in the sun with my mom while he waited for the law to decide what remained of him.
In this quiet moment of reverence for her grandparents’ stories (and their endings), Farmer reminds us that she wants to avoid this reading of the Dressers’ lives as background noise to their great tragedy.