A Sad Week

My husband's best friend died last week in a motorcycle accident. He was riding through a Navajo reservation with his girlfriend on the back of his motorcycle on his way to a job when he came to a two-way stop. His was the through street, but an old lady driving on the side street blew the stop sign and ran right into them. He had just enough notice to push his girlfriend off the back and save her life, but he didn't get a chance to jump and he was killed almost instantly.

It has been a really hard week for us. He has helped us immeasurably in the time that we have been here. There are half-finished projects he helped us with around the property that are hard to look at and we almost don't have the heart to finish. I wish I could write something really eloquent and pretty, but I don't have the heart for that either. Not yet.

We met him about three years ago when we saw his enormous black dog trotting happily behind our property carrying one of our chickens in its mouth. Jacob ran in to get his gun, but by the time he got out there he decided not to shoot it. He knew whose dog it was, so he decided to just go and tell the guy that his dog killed one of our chickens instead. He was so grateful to Jacob for not killing his dog that he shook hands and asked to be friends and brought us two laying hens a little while afterward to make up for it. That's how we met Garnett.

They saw each other almost every single day after that. Jacob would more often than not stop by his place on the way home from school. Whenever he went anywhere he asked Jacob to check up on his place and feed his animals. His mother and his brother and his family live on the same property and they offered to take care of things for him, but he would tell them, "No, that's okay. I've got the Marine on it." He took Jacob out working with him in his family's well business. I think Jacob was probably a real asset to him because he was the only one of his buddies who could be relied upon to show up for work consistently sober. And on time, but punctuality was certainly not one of Garnett's strong points. Eh, who's counting?

Garnett knew just about everyone in the entire county, and that is not an exaggeration. If there was something that needed to be done, Garnett knew just the guy to do it. He introduced Jacob into his inner circle and provided a real network for us, which was a blessing for us trying to make it here with no one around that we knew. We feel like we've been here for thirty years instead of three, thanks to Garnett. Garnett was an Army veteran of one of Clinton's forgotten wars--Somalia. No one really thinks about it anymore, but it was an ugly one, and it gave him and Jacob a tie that not all that many share. That, and Jacob was, by Garnett's own admission, the only guy he ever knew who could out-shoot him.

Garnett smoked and drank too much and had done some things to land himself on the wrong side of the law a time or two, but I can't really blame him for that. Garnett had his own sense of morality, and it was a strong one, just not always a legal one. When we first met him I was afraid he would be a bad influence on my husband, but I underestimated them both. Garnett turned out to be the best friend Jacob ever had.

His funeral was yesterday. I have never seen a funeral attended by so many--including about a dozen of Garnett's ex-girlfriends, two of whom he had while we have known him. His current girlfriend, whose life he saved at the cost of his own, was wheeled in for a while, two broken legs and all, until she just couldn't handle it anymore and had to be wheeled back out again. The really sad thing about that is that out of all of his girlfriends, I think she was the one he could finally have settled down with. There were two hundred chairs set up on the gym floor. Every chair was full, plus the bleachers along the sides, and all the standing room in between was packed. There were hundreds and hundreds of people there. There were people dressed in suits, bikers in motorcycle leathers, cowboys in black shirts and white hats, Indians, Mexicans, old ladies, small children, you name it. There was even a guy about five feet tall in a long-tailed tuxedo. It was probably the only suit he had. I've never known anyone who was loved by so many.

Jacob was a pall bearer at the funeral and even helped fill in the grave with a shovel. It was a really hard day for him. It was hard for me to watch him, with the pain on his face that was only obvious if you know him well enough.

Garnett's brother had a son born the day before Garnett died, and Garnett got to see his one-day-old nephew briefly before he left on his last bike ride. If it weren't for Garnett, we never would have met Weston (his brother) and Heidi, and their kids, and their little son. He's the only kid on the street even remotely close to the age of our sons, and I know they'll grow up together probably making a huge ruckus most of the time. The O'Neil and Bohannan boys.

I don't know what I'm trying to say. Nothing really, not in particular. Just that no death that I have ever experienced has hit me this hard before. When my grandparents died they were old, and for the most part we saw it coming. They weren't a daily part of our lives. I'll miss Garnett calling every day asking for Jacob (forgetting that he is at school late most nights), and then asking me how the "units" are doing. "Unit" was what he called any cute little thing. He meant my sons, of course. He named all his puppies "Unit," but I wasn't insulted by the comparison. He didn't really mean it that way. Once when little Jacob was a baby I was wearing him in a Snugli belly pouch and went out to tell Jacob something as he and Garnett were working on a job. Garnett said that I "looked so cute with that baby between my boobies that it made him want a unit too." I took it as a compliment. Even Jacob just smiled. You had to know Garnett.