Head Tale

A bit of a different Throwback Thursday this week.

I recently posted about how death was a dark cloud this summer with a handful of people we know and/or were connected to having died.  Unfortunately, that trend has continued into September with my parents letting me know that the father of one of my best friends in high school died recently and then, yesterday, a school classmate who was the same age as me died unexpectedly of a heart attack.

(Here’s the weirdest thing I might ever have been proud of.  My friend whose father passed got lots of generic “Thoughts and prayers/You’re in my thoughts/My condolences”-type messages on his FB post about his father’s passing.  But I wanted to put a bit more into it so wrote about how much I remembered his dad from Katepwa Lake, hockey tournaments and how his dad was a big presence in so many of our group of friends’ lives.  I noticed my friend went through and hit “Like” on every comment people had left but mine was one of the only ones – possibly the only one – that he put a “Love” symbol beside.  Again, not why I did it but it was nice to see the extra effort I put into personalizing my condolence message was appreciated.)

Anyhow, I went to SaskObits, not expecting to see the obituary of the classmate who died is up yet (and it’s not.) But I did see one for somebody I’m pretty sure was the installer when I worked as a door-to-door salesman for a cable TV company the summer after I graduated from Grade 12 before I went to University (and that initial program in six larger towns around Saskatchewan was so successful, the company continued to employee me and various others in some of their other towns around Saskatchewan for the next few summers giving me reliable, good-paying, enjoyable summer work while I completed my undergrad degree.)

Garry was a great guy who gave me a lot of my basic training about the cable TV business.  I was 17 when I worked with him and he seemed so much older to have a job and a house and all kinds of other adult “stuff”.  But turns out he was only five years older than me and that makes it even sadder to see his obit and realise he’s yet another person taken in the prime of their life.