My Cousin Denny

It’s been a strange few days since last I posted. The Memphis trip went amazingly well and I am working on a lengthy blog that will do it justice. However, the weekend had a haze of sadness that tempered the good spirits. In order to properly focus on both the sadness and the fun that was had, I’ll split this into two separate blogs so that each event will get its due. Sadness first.

I had just left work on Thursday night when I received a call from my Uncle Jerry over in Olathe, KS. From the caller ID I knew he was calling from my great-aunt Eleanor’s house, so I was nervous. He asked how I was and attempted to make small talk for a little while, but I immediately recognized the hollow sound of shock. I was convinced that something had happened to Aunt Eleanor. Instead, Jerry let me know that my cousin Denny Reaves had died that morning.

I’ll admit I sat silent for a few seconds while I tried to continue to focus on the road. This was not an expected death…an illness death…an elderly death. This was an out-of-the-blue death…a say-that-again-because-I-must-have-misunderstood-you death…a far too young death. Denny was only 33 and died when his apartment down in Northern Arkansas caught fire. It seemed such a freak occurrence to so quickly whisk a person away and it felt uncomfortably familiar to me. I had heard my family speak and had myself spoken with that same, hollow voice when my father died in an accident just as quickly and just as unexpectedly. It takes a while for the brain to process the idea of “gone.” It takes tears, really, but for those first few days, everything else gets shoved to the side while the brain focuses all available energy toward accepting a world without a loved one in it. Everything else gets…hollow. So I drove toward home and answered Jerry’s polite but hollow questions with polite but hollow answers.

“How’s Moonshot?”

“She’s good. Belly's getting bigger.”

That sort of thing. Jerry is a fire fighter in Olathe and had probably been drafted to make all the phone calls because he was more able to keep it together in times of crisis. But together or not, his nephew had died and his stunned mind was trying desperately for a casual conversation that he probably won’t even remember having.

My own sense of loss is certainly less than that of the family members I’ve spoken with over the last few days. I wasn’t as close to Denny as many in my family. He grew up in Topeka so I just didn’t see him as often as some of my other cousins. I do remember that as a kid he had a sweet keyboard that could exactly replicate the intro from VanHalen’s Jump. He also had a collection of Masters of the Universe toys that made me seriously jealous. And he let me play with all these amazing toys, so he was quite an impressive person to my younger self. More recently we see each other maybe twice a year when my Dad’s side of the family gathers over in Kansas. We’d laugh and throw a Frisbee, but that was about it.

Despite only seeing him occasionally, I can assure you he was a wonderfully warm person. Last year, while Mr. Dingus and I were trying to launch a side business manufacturing a yard game, Denny was working as a carpenter in Fayetteville, AR at the home of a guy who managed Chinese manufacturing and shipping. Having played a prototype of our little game, Denny went to bat for us and set up a meeting. Even though things didn’t work out with the deal, it always meant a great deal to me that he remembered my business and tried to help out.

After talking with Jerry, I called my brother. I broke the news to him and we took a few minutes to talk about Denny. Then the discussion came to what we should do about the Memphis trip. We were scheduled to leave in the morning and Jet already had people at his house who had driven or flown in for the trip. I had less obligation to be on the trip except that Duke had gone through such great pains to align his schedule for the event. I was hesitant to call him the night before departure and cancel the trip since I knew he would have no interest in traveling with Jet’s friends if I wasn’t there. Jet finally pointed out that if we were going to cancel anything, we’d have to do it right then. And since the timing of the funeral had not been announced, we had no reason yet to cancel. So the decision was made to stay with the plan. We would go to Memphis and hope we didn’t miss the funeral. And if we did miss it, we would be sure to take some time out of our revelry to honor his memory.

It turns out Jet made the right call. The funeral has been delayed until Friday due to the mysterious circumstances of Denny’s death. When I left, I had assumed that he had failed to escape due to carbon monoxide poisoning. Surly, I reasoned, he had been asleep, the alarms had failed, and he died peacefully in his sleep. The fire occurred at 6:30 in the morning, so it was certainly possible he had been asleep. But that doesn’t appear to be the way of it. The fire started in his apartment and was contained in his apartment, so something clearly happened in his apartment to start the fire. Further, the firefighters did not even know that Denny was there until after they had put out the fire and found his body in the coat closet by the front door. No one has yet explained this detail. So, the funeral waits until the local examiners can figure out why he was in his closet. The local paper seems to indicate that homicide is being discussed, but I prefer to imagine that he was profoundly disoriented due to the carbon monoxide. But I’m not really sure if we’ll ever know.

In the end, the result is the same. Whatever fluke events occurred at 6:30 in my cousin Denny’s apartment have forever changed the lives of countless people. His children in Arkansas, his mother and sister back in Topeka, and the full extended family and friends spread across the country are trying to come to terms with this new reality.

I know most the readers of this blog didn’t know Denny, so you’ll have to take my word for it when I tell you the world lost a good person last Thursday. And even though he was not a part of my daily life, my mind is struggling with the concept of his being "gone."

I will miss him.