Portrait of US Issue #28: Ted - Savannah, GA
I feel like I've been in survival mode for 18 years, and that's a hard way to live, to go from thinking your life is sort of manageable to just feeling like you're just keeping your head above water
We sat down with Ted in Savannah at Sulfur Studios in spring of 2023. This was our second visit to the city, and Ted’s fiancé Liz was the first person we had interviewed during our fist visit in 2022. In addition to sharing a powerful story with us, he told us that hearing her story had deepened his connection with Liz and motivated him to participate in the project.
My name is Ted Shepard.
I lived in New Orleans for a long time, for almost 25 years, even though I grew up in Savannah. I went to school down there, at Loyola University in 1988. Graduated and pretty much stayed there for most of my adult life.
The moment where everything changed was August 29th, 2005.
There's my life before Katrina and there's my life after. There's some people who have sort of a deep understanding of it because they were very aware of it during that time and maybe lived close to that area and could really grasp what a devastating event that was. Other people, it's like just kind of a blip in their memory, you know, because they only experienced it through TV.
For me, that event was so deeply traumatic that I'm still recovering from it and don't think I ever will. You go away from your life, you take a break from your life, you evacuate with this idea that you're going to come back to it and you don't. I had a five year old son, had a wife who was three months pregnant, and we had evacuated New Orleans many times prior to that, and always did, because I had a sense of just how serious it could be if a hurricane ever hit New Orleans.
If you've ever flown into New Orleans and looked out the window of the airplane, you can get a sense of how much water surrounds the city. The idea of what a storm surge could do to New Orleans is terrifying. So I took my family to Houston. So we packed a very minimal amount of things, thinking we were coming right back after the evacuation.
We met a whole bunch of friends in Houston at a hotel who all came with their dogs and their things and we were all just like a small group of New Orleans evacuees watching on TV as the hurricane unfolded.
We were celebrating because it seemed like after the hurricane had passed that New Orleans had dodged the bullet, then the news report started to come about the levees breaking. That event was just devastating for everyone who had to live through it.
It's hard to describe how much damage that did, but the water just sat for weeks on end. From our hotel room in Houston, I remember talking to some friends and talking to my wife and saying okay, we need to figure out where we're going because we're not going home for a long time.
We decided to put my wife and my son on a plane to Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is where her family's from. They flew there. I drove the car with a caravan of my friends and we all ended up going to Tulsa and then that was the point at which some of them split off and went to other places, some went to Chicago, another group stayed with me, and then others, they just all went in different directions.
Everybody was headed to somewhere safe where they had family that they could stay with. So, we stayed in Tulsa for a few weeks and... We realized that we weren't going to be able to stay for long, so we decided to come to Savannah.
My dad lived out on Tybee and he had a house out there that he was going to let us stay in, so we came to Tybee Island with this idea that we're going to have our child here, but we didn't know what the next step was.
I had my own company, so I was working and I knew that I could somehow survive financially, but it was tough, it was really tough to figure out how the mortgage was going to get paid or not get paid and all the bills and there was all this uncertainty and we had to apply for aid and go on food stamps and Medicaid. Those are things we never had to deal with before, so we were kind of thrown into this world of Dealing with all that trauma here in Savannah, plus having to listen to everybody's opinion about what they thought should have happened.
We were just sort of fed up with the whole experience after a certain point, and then it wasn't long after that we made the decision to go back to New Orleans, which was really strange in retrospect. I know my life would have been different if I had just stayed here. But I did choose to go back. It took a really long time to to get recovered enough to go back, so it was almost a year before we went back to New Orleans, lived in my house, had a place for my son to go to school, had a, a newborn, and a, sort of, ill conceived notion of how we were going to survive down there.
The trauma of that experience and going back into that city at that moment was, it was really more than our marriage could handle. And it slowly started to unravel. We tried to start over, but it didn't work, and my wife asked me for a divorce. I came here, and I've been here since about 2013, 14, roughly.
I feel like I've been in survival mode for 18 years, and that's a hard way to live, to go from thinking your life is sort of manageable to just feeling like you're just keeping your head above water all the time.
Just struggling to somehow make things work.
I've gotten some peace in the last few years. My relationship with Liz, my fiancé, has really changed my life. I've been able to make some decisions that I think have been really good for me, for my future and what to do with the rest of my life. I kind of feel like I'm starting to get a glimpse of what joy and serenity are again in my life.
It's really great to be here now.
I'm really excited by what my future has to hold or will hold with Liz and my life. I've got some other good things that have happened in the last couple years too. My son came to live with me during the pandemic and he's now a Savannah firefighter. I couldn't be happier that he's here with me, and watching him grow as a person has been life changing. Getting him back into my life after being separated from him for so long.
He's the greatest, he really is. I love him to death and I just am so proud of him. I'm really glad that he chose to come back here and be with me.
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