Matthew Shepard spent the last conscious hours of his life tied to a fence on a freezing Wyoming night, slowly dying from a bludgeoning that was so severe a passerby thought he was a scarecrow.

On Friday, the college student who became a symbol of deadly violence against gay people following his 1998 murder, will get a final resting place at Washington National Cathedral — free from bigots seeking to desecrate his memory.

The days and months following Shepard’s death were difficult for his family. At his funeral, they were forced to face picketers from the Westboro Baptist Church who praised Shepard’s certain eternal damnation and said others like him would have the same fate. For this reason, they told the New York Times, they kept his remains at home, fearing any public display of his death would be vandalized.

Now, they finally have a safe place where he can rest and where others can come visit, too.

“I think it’s the perfect, appropriate place,” Shepard’s father Dennis told the New York Times last week of the massive, Gothic-style Episcopal church where Shepard will share space with the likes of Helen Keller and President Woodrow Wilson.

“We are, as a family, happy and relieved that we now have a final home for Matthew, a place that he himself would love.”

Shepard was murdered on Oct. 6, 1998, when he was a 21-year-old student at the University of Wyoming. He went alone to a Laramie bar, about an hour west of Cheyenne, where he was approached by two men who claimed to be gay and wanted to hang out.

The student, who’d recently been beaten twice for his sexuality, was driven to a remote area east of Laramie where he was robbed and repeatedly punched and pistol-whipped with a .357-caliber Magnum Smith & Wesson pistol. An autopsy would show Shepard was struck between 19 and 21 times in the head with the final hit delivering an irreparable blow to Shepard’s brain stem.

He was bound to that fence, slowly dying, for the next 18 hours until he was discovered by a passing cyclist the following day. He died in a hospital a week later on Oct. 12.

“His death was a wound on our nation,” Mariann Edgar Budde, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington who will preside over Friday’s ceremony, told The Times.

“We are doing our part to bring light out of that darkness and healing to those who have been so often hurt, and sometimes hurt in the name of the church.”

Judy, Shepard’s mom, asked the Rev. V. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop consecrated in the Episcopal Church who will preside over Friday’s ceremony with Budde, about interring Shepard in the cathedral. He helped make that request happen.

“We were waiting to find the right solution, and the right solution appeared,” Judy told The Washington Post.

“It’s a place where there’s an actual chance for others to sit and reflect about Matthew, and about themselves, and about their friends,” added Dennis.

Shepard’s private interment, scheduled for Friday afternoon, will follow a service of “thanksgiving and remembrance,” which will be open to the public and start at 10 a.m.

Shepard’s parents are grateful his death has paved the way for protections within the LGBTQ community and to know his internment at the cathedral represents some acceptance of gay people within the church.

However, Robinson made sure to note how much work still needs to be done. On the same week of the 20th anniversary of Shepard’s death, the Trump administration proposed a strict definition of gender based on a person’s genitalia at birth, which effectively erases the identity of transgender Americans if imposed, LGBTQ activists said.

Robinson reminded The Times people are still being hurt and killed for their sexuality.

“[Shepard’s death] became a symbol of the kind of mindless, pointless violence against us for no other reason than being who we are,” Robinson told the outlet.

“It is important for us to remind ourselves that we are still trying to come out from under that shadow.”