Two years ago today, Hurricane Helene changed everything.

For two years, we have been rebuilding without a building.

Today, for the first time, we can look across the property and see the beginning.

There is no building yet. No walls are going up. No machines are running inside a new workshop. What you can see right now is demolition, cleared ground, and grading.

To someone passing by, it may not look like much.

To us, it means everything.

The ground is finally moving.

And so are we.

The Long Road

When we wrote about the six-month anniversary of Hurricane Helene, the devastation was still raw. At one year, we wrote about taking control of what came next. At eighteen months, we wrote about the quiet work of rebuilding—the paperwork, applications, estimates, planning and waiting.

Those things are still part of our story.

But the longer recovery continues, the more difficult it becomes to find help.

FEMA wasn’t able to help us with the business. SBA assistance wasn’t available to us because of a credit issue dating back twenty years. And many of the local nonprofit organizations created specifically to help Helene victims have proven difficult to work with when we needed a sponsor for grant opportunities.

Five different nonprofits have backed out on us.

That has cost us opportunities that could have changed the course of this rebuild.

In July, we lost a $189,000 USDA Rural Business Development Grant when our nonprofit sponsor backed out on the day the application had to be submitted. Before that happened, we had been told by the USDA representative handling the grant that if we could secure a nonprofit sponsor, the funding was available.

We had done the work. The application was prepared. The project was ready.

The nonprofit would have received 10% of the award—$18,900—for its general fund to help with administrative costs.

We had another $50,000 grant where essentially the same thing happened. The sponsoring organization backed out as I was submitting the application. That organization would have received $5,000.

We weren’t asking these organizations to do the work. We were doing that ourselves. We were simply looking for a nonprofit sponsor so we could access funding specifically intended to help businesses and communities recover.

We even agreed to be responsible for repayment if a grant ever had to be repaid.

And yet, one opportunity after another disappeared.

I’m not writing this to attack those organizations. I don’t know everything that went into their decisions.

I’m writing it because this is part of what the last two years have actually looked like.

And it has been heartbreaking.

Give Us the Ability to Fish Again

There is one conversation from this journey that I have carried with me.

We had been speaking with a woman from a large nonprofit organization about our situation. During one of our conversations, I told her:

Help us get our shop back to work, and we’ll fix the damage to our house.

Don’t feed us.

Give us the ability to fish again, and we won’t have to worry about where our next meal is coming from.

We talked again.

When we saw her a third time, she told us that God had told her that somehow, some way, we would get the help we needed.

I’ve thought about those words many times since then.

They didn’t mean the road would be easy.

They didn’t mean we wouldn’t worry.

There have been stretches during these two years when things became thin enough that simply getting through the next day felt like survival. There have been times when we have gone without. There have been times when I wondered how much longer we could keep going.

But underneath all of that has been a peace I can’t really explain any other way.

I know we are going back to our craft.

I don’t know exactly how every piece of the road will come together. I don’t know how many more obstacles are ahead.

But I know in my soul that this is what we have been called to do.

And I believe He has been walking with us through all of it.

What It Has Cost

Keeping Randolph’s Custom Caskets alive for these two years has also come at a very real personal cost.

With no functioning shop and no normal business income, there came a point when keeping this dream alive meant drawing from my retirement—both my county and state retirement accounts.

That wasn’t something I ever imagined doing.

It wasn’t done lightly.

But after five generations of this craft, walking away wasn’t something I was willing to do.

So we found another way to keep going.

We kept working on the business. We kept developing our ideas. We kept planning the next shop. We kept building the brand and preparing for the day when we could finally return to the work itself.

For a long time, almost all of that existed on paper.

Until now.

The Ground Is Moving

The old shop is gone.

The site has been cleared.

The ground has been graded.

And for the first time since Hurricane Helene, we can physically see where the next chapter will begin.

That may seem like a small thing.

It isn’t.

For two years, the future of Randolph’s Custom Caskets has existed mostly in plans, applications, drawings, conversations and hope.

Now there is a piece of that future sitting right in front of us.

There is still a long road ahead.

The ground has to settle. There is a concrete pad to pour. There is a building to construct. There is equipment to install. There are still funding questions to answer and plenty of work left before we can open those doors and get back to building.

We know better than to pretend otherwise.

But something has changed.

For two years, when we looked at this property, we saw what Hurricane Helene took from us.

Now we can finally look at it and see where something new will stand.

We Aren’t Simply Replacing What We Lost

The new workshop won’t simply be a replacement for the building that was destroyed.

During these two years, Randolph’s Custom Caskets has changed.

Our ideas have changed.

Our plans have changed.

We’ve had time to rethink what the next chapter of this five-generation legacy should look like.

The shop we’re working toward will give us the opportunity to take those ideas out of drawings and prototypes and put them back into the hands of the craftsman who has been waiting to build them.

That’s what we’re looking forward to most.

Not the building itself.

The work that will happen inside it.

Two Years Later

Two years ago, we were standing in the aftermath of something none of us expected to see.

Today, we’re standing on the beginning of something we have spent two years fighting to preserve.

We aren’t at the finish line.

We aren’t even close.

But we are finally at a place where we can point to something physical and say:

This is where we begin again.

There is still a long road ahead of us.

But the road is finally visible.

The ground is moving.

And so are we.

Two years later, we can finally see the beginning.

— Randolph’s Custom Caskets
Where Legacy Takes Shape.