Five years ago, in March 2021, my friend and cousin Gary Hamlett passed away at the age of 41. It was the height of the COVID pandemic. He was also my brother-in-law. And no, it’s not as weird as it sounds. Seriously.
It’s been five years since Gary passed away. He was my first cousin and good friend; then, later in life, he became my brother-in-law. The brother-in-law thing is not as weird as it sounds. Allow me to explain: we married the Watkins’ sisters. He married Emily. I married Allison. He had three kids. I had two. Does that make our children first and second cousins? I guess so, maybe. How does that work? Sounds even stranger writing it out.
But me falling in love with Allison and him falling in love with Emily wasn’t exactly planned out, and again, not as weird as it actually sounds. No crossing of bloodlines. Becoming brothers-in-law meant, even as we moved from childhood to adulthood, I was fortunate enough to get to spend extra time with him in my life that, as it tends to go in adulthood, trails off as we age. That wasn’t the case for us.
I often think of Gary in my day-to-day life. He had a way of injecting well-timed humor in ordinary days or in days when I was feeling down and out. Then, without him even knowing it, sitting at home or at work hundreds of miles away, I’d get a ridiculous text from him and my mood would shift upward.
There used to be a group text with the two of us, plus Cal and Robbie. In some ways, the text thread was a constant state of one-upmanship. Who would find the dumbest or funniest thing online (“Glass muffins!” “Ma! Protein shake!”) and send it to the group text first? Who would pull off the day’s ultimate Photoshop that included the face and/or body of someone else in the group text?
Gary once sent a video of my head and Robbie’s on the bodies of Lloyd Christmas (me) and Harry Dunne (Robbie) from Dumb and Dumber. There was the Austin Power’s video with my head on Verne Troyer’s tiny body dancing to “It’s a Hard Knock Life” by Jay-Z. I returned fire with Robbie as Indiana Jones cutting the rope on Gary who I’d photoshopped into the evil high priest Mola Ram from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
When Gary went with Butch and family to the beach, and uploaded a photo to Facebook of the two of them in a hot tub smiling, I dropped in a red bikini-clad supermodel between them both. My uncle Butch asked me to take it down and I said, “I’m sorry Butch. I can’t. It’s Photoshop War. Gary can explain.”
For Christmas one year, I transformed Gary into Santa Claus and Cal into an Elf on the Shelf making angel wings in the baking flour, surrounded by sugar cookies and a rolling pin.
In spring, in a scene that transpired in the middle of a lake, I photoshopped Gary driving a jet ski with Cal sitting in his lap and Robbie in the background swimming with Jaws emerging from the water behind him with his giant mouth wide open exposing rows of razor sharp teeth.
This kind of thing went on for years. I’d go as far to argue this is the best use of technology, smartphones, social media, and the Internet in combination. It certainly made my day, plenty of days. I remember Allison urging me to please get in the car because we were going somewhere and we were going to be late if I didn’t hurry the hell up, and I said to her, “Give me three minutes. Gary just hit me with a Photoshop bomb and I need to respond. I’m almost done.”
Then, once I got in the car, I shared Gary’s latest with Allison and the kids.
Allison: That’s pretty good. Not sure you can beat that one.
Kids: Is that really you and Robbie?
Me: No, that’s not really us. That’s Lloyd Christmas and Harry at a bar in Colorado.
Me: Here’s my return fire.
Allison: Yeah, he got you.
Me: I may have lost the battle, but I will not lose this war.
For fifteen years, from 2006 until early 2021 when Gary was hospitalized during COVID, the battle raged on. It was One Battle After Another long before Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar-winning theatrical release of the same name.
I can no longer remember what my last text to Gary said. I can’t remember if it included a joke or humor of any kind in an attempt to make him feel slightly better about the situation he was in or if I was completely serious in my text. I feel like it was the latter. Pretty sure it was the latter. That I said something along the lines of “Thinking of you” or “Praying for you” but much more longwinded or “You’ll be back to yourself in no time. Just hang in there.” That I told him I wish we were allowed in the hospital to visit, which sadly we weren’t because of restrictions then.
Memories are a good thing. Maybe not always but most of the time. And that’s what I’ve still got five years after Gary’s death. Memory after memory after memory. Some have started to fade. But the big ones are still as vibrant as ever: the shenanigans and near arrests when hanging out with him in public somewhere and alcohol was involved. The fights we stopped or helped Robbie avoid because for whatever reason Robbie was a magnet for getting punched in the face when we were younger.
Gary’s wheezing laughter whenever I broke out food from a coat pocket at 2 AM in the morning: “Are those country ham biscuits in your pocket? Did you just pull out country ham biscuits?”
Listening to Neil Young’s “My, My, Hey, Hey” and Willie and Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings at too loud a volume and smoking way too many cigarettes and him telling me he wanted to ask Emily out but wasn’t sure if she’d be interested in him or not and I was like, “Oh, no. She’s definitely interested. She said you were looking good the other night. Her words. I swear.”
Riding bikes up and down Proctor Street and to our grandparents’ old big white house in Drakes Branch and Papa chasing the two of us through his garden with the grubbing hoe when we were, I don’t know, maybe five and seven years old, perhaps younger, because we’d stepped all over his vegetables and Papa didn’t play when it came to his garden. Him and me and Tiffany and Jennifer and Susan cautiously walking down the driveway to the witch’s house behind the Tastee Freez, who, of course, wasn’t an actual witch; and then when she’d open the door, we’d haul freight up the driveway, kicking up dirt beneath our feet, back to the white house hearts racing a thousand miles an hour until we caught our breaths in the kitchen and filled up glasses of lemonade and our grandmother walking in and asking what we kids were up to, not having any idea we’d just escaped from being yanked into the witch’s lair.
I’ve still got those memories and I hope as I age I never lose them because they’re a part of me, who I am who I was who I became, and Gary is an integral part of that becoming. I mean listen I’m in my mid-40s and I can still smell the sweat and taste the caked-in chunks of white deodorant from his armpit hair all these years later from when he put me in a massive headlock at our grandparents’ house, the little blue one they moved to after leaving the big white house. He wouldn’t let go. Then he picked me up and pile drove me, a tactic he’d learned from watching professional wrestling for far too many years, onto the bed but at least hey thankfully it wasn’t the floor. There was some give to the mattress, some springs, cushion, to bounce off of and not the thud of the lightly carpeted floor below.
I think about that moment whenever I put on deodorant and when my son reached the age to buy his first stick of deodorant I told him the story too in the grocery store aisle, probably for the tenth time in his life, of when I was his age what his uncle Gary had once done. I think about how happy Gary was to be getting married to Emily and how absolutely nervous and shaky and sweaty he was on the day of his wedding and him wiping his forehead with a handkerchief while we waited in back and how proud he was of his first born Sidney, his daughter; and then Hyde and then Rutherfoord, his two sons.
They of course have different memories than I do. They have the memories of a dad, of a husband. Someone who was always there for them and then suddenly wasn’t and my heart ached for them on the day he passed and still after and for Butch and Julie and Tiffany because no matter my connection to Gary, no matter the titles bestowed upon us like friend or cousin or in-law (again, not as weird as it sounds), the loss they experienced was a far different and even greater loss than I experienced. They lost a dad, a husband, a son, a brother.
But I still miss Gary regardless. He was just a good dude. Someone attached to so many of my memories from infancy to teenager to young adult to closing in on middle age when we started talking to each other about back pain at the beach one summer when we shared a rental together in Topsail. Someone who like Jeremiah or Brian or Scott left this world entirely too early for all of us. All good people who made me laugh until my cheeks couldn’t take the pain anymore, that made the world a better place simply because they were in it, a part of it.
And despite their young deaths are all still here because of memories.
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