Love, Loss, and Showboats

Field Journal: 03/01/2025

Weather:
H 58° L 34°

Location:
Central Montana

Wildlife:
Sign
Moose Tracks, Elk Tracks, Deer Tracks
Sighting
Bull Elk: 4 (still carrying)
Wild Turkeys: 50+
Coyotes: 2
Mule Deer: Countless

Activity:
End-of-life tasks
Snowmobiling

Harvest:
None

March 1, 2025

No one really talks about the month after someone dies. We all know the first part: the phone calls, the sadness, and the initial logistics. People bring casseroles you might not want to eat and offer condolences you don't know how to respond to.

The emotions come in a wrecking ball of variety. There is gut-punching grief, unexpected relief, guilt over that relief, confusion, what-ifs, grief again, frustration, more guilt, and inevitably, exhaustion. Often, for most, I think it's a combination of every comprehendible and incomprehensible human emotion.

Then there's the soon-after, and no one seems to talk about that.

Gary left on Saturday, February 15th, his 72nd birthday.
On Saturday, March 1st, we spent the day scrubbing the last bits of his life out of his final home.

There was the expected sadness and the hollow ache of it all, but also a strange sense of purpose. The motions of cleaning, sorting, and discarding felt like flipping through the last pages of a book. The candid, "Do you want this?" and "What should we do with these?" feel so cold but necessary.

Maybe being hunters forces us to see death for what it is in a world where death is often unseen and sterilized. It is not just an interruption, not an anomaly, but a certainty of life.

When you've stood in the woods with blood-warmed hands, feeling the last muscle twitch of something alive only moments before, you learn that death is not a thief. It doesn't steal. It just arrives when it's time. You come to know the weight of it, the silence it leaves, the way the world absorbs it without pause.

Maybe being so connected in the act of causing death makes loss sting just a bit less.

Maybe it allows us to look at death with an objective eye.

Maybe we heal faster because of that intimacy.

Maybe I'm full of shit and searching for some deeper meaning where there is none.

All I know is that sweeping up the last gray hairs of someone's life feels like an act both oddly sacred and unbearably small. The scent of off-brand Pine-Sol and the sting of unexpected tears make for an unholy combination. Death, for all its gravity, is cleaned up with trash bags and paper towels, canceled subscriptions, and final utility bills.

There is something cruelly efficient about the way the world moves on. You stop the auto-shipments of coffee pods. You do the last load of dishes. You gather up the dog-eared magazine and toss the half-eaten meals. You wonder how something as immense as a life can be reduced to a series of checkboxes and dump runs.

We all leave, and what's left behind is just a pile of collected things, a few good pictures, and, we hope, enough cherished memories to last our children until their final day.

When the day of cleaning was done, and we locked the front door for the last time, we loaded up the dogs and retreated to the mountains.

We watched a bachelor group of bulls meander through the trees. We counted mule deer until the numbers blurred. We sat in the presence of fifty wild turkeys schooled and moving across a pasture like herring. It only felt right to cap the day this way. We needed to go back out where we fell into the quiet pulse of the earth, where death is just another turning of the wheel and life continues to graze.

Gary would have loved it.

March 2, 2025

The weight of family dynamics, unfinished chores, and the relentless grind of responsibility pressed down hard. So, true to our nature, we did what we do best. We walked away from it all. Before the sun even thought about rising, we were up, loading the snowmobiles, stuffing the snacklebox, and grabbing a breakfast to go.

After a winter that had buried everything in record-breaking snow, the sudden gift of bluebird skies and 58 degrees felt almost criminal. The warmth on my skin sent something electric through my veins. It was a rush that was so pure and unexpected that it might as well have been heroin. I had not realized how badly I needed it until I was there, lying in the sun, flooding my body with the Vitamin D of a borrowed summer at the beginning of March.

The land was quiet, save for the pertnear foreign sound of running water. A few coyotes lurked at the edges of sight, and the fresh calves still dropping in the pastures made it clear that life churned forward whether we were watching or not. We put 60 miles of mountain beneath us, stopping whenever we felt like it for a beer and an unhurried conversation.

At the peak, we met up with other riders, a loose gathering of souls from all walks of life. We shared a meal from a notorious backcountry cabin, a feast fit for kings. There must have been thirty of us before we scattered. Each group headed back down their own way, carving tracks into the fading winter.

There were moments of deep, slushy stuckness that turned into an unexpected workout.

There were long stretches of buzz-filled stillness that turned into something resembling therapy.

It is funny where your mind wanders when you are alone inside your helmet, surrounded by nothing but pine-dotted white.

In that humming silence, I wrote most of these words, started half of another story, plotted a garden, questioned my career, thought about Gary and the children he left behind, missed my own children, debated ordering another greenhouse, wrote another few lines of a different story, and then wondered, for a fleeting moment, if maybe our wild and untraditional life should be tethered down and a bit more traditional, at least on paper.

It’s funny how moments of finality make you consider your place in the world and, more so, the place of the important people beside you.

In the end, I found myself oddly grateful; grateful for the comfort of love, for the pain of loss, and for the kind of therapy only sapphire skies and a dense treeline can provide.

Reflection:

Loss and living don't take turns. One minute, you're sweeping up the last crumbs of a life that's ended. The next, you're flying through the mountains on a snowmobile, high on sunshine and borderline bad decisions. Grief doesn't wait politely in the corner while you try to have a good time. It rides along uninvited, like a backseat driver with too many opinions (Steve).

But maybe that's the deal. You carry the weight of what's gone while making damn sure you don't stop moving. You drink a beer at the peak, let the sun stain your skin, and pretend for a little while that nothing has changed. Then, when the quiet creeps back in, you sit with it, let it settle, and know that this is just how it goes. Life doesn't stop for death. It just folds it into the mix, one snowblind mile at a time.

And when the loss happens to be a guy who carried the nicknames Crowbar and Showboat, I can't imagine he'd have it any other way.

To borrow a few words from Gail, the matriarch of the family:

Good luck on your journey, Gar.

February 15, 1953 - February 15, 2025