Lucky People: In Memory of Trent Babcock

Sometimes life throws you a series of incredible moments that morph into days and blend into weeks and turn into months that without your giving it conscious thought for even a moment become a life in which you are more than occasionally overwhelmed by the true depth of your own personal happiness and the underlying inviolable conviction that things are just as they’re supposed to be.

This is wonderful to experience.

Then you get an email that should never have been. This is not wonderful at all.

I got my email this weekend, arriving as all emails do, with the constant flashing “Read Me” light on the top of the Blackberry announcing its presence. Expecting some mundane work-related request, I opened the mail icon and stared blankly for several minutes at the subject line, knowing I didn’t want to open the message.

To: MaddyB@greatmail.com
From: Brent.Babcock@ElectriWorldwide.org
Subject: Trenton

My brain did the math pretty quickly and told me not to open the message at all, because it wasn’t going to be good news: Ex-Husband Emails On A Sunday Morning And The Subject Is His Twin Brother’s Full Name. Not Trent, not Trenty, not T. None of those, but the full name. A little too formal verbiage when talking about your other half.

My brain, as it turns out, does excellent math:

I wanted to let you know that Trenton has passed away. He’s been struggling with depression since his return from Iraq and decided to take his life. I’m going to be out of touch for quite some time but feel you needed this information. The family is doing well under the circumstances…the funeral will be later this week ..bdb

I’d be lying if I said this was information easily processed, because it wasn’t. It wasn’t just disturbing, and sad, and shocking – it was surreal. Trent Babcock was the best brother-in-law anyone could ever hope for, and one of the most genuine human beings I’ve ever met in my life. He was the perpetual kid, the boy with a practical joke or twenty up his sleeve, Mr. Glass Half Full No Matter What’s Going On, and he could get more enjoyment out of the simplest things in life…walking the dogs, spending time with his nieces, listening to music, watching any TV series involving Emergency Rooms or car chases…than anyone I’ll ever know again. He had blue eyes I referred to once as “Santa Claus eyes” because until I watched them when he was laughing, I’d always thought the whole, ‘…and his eyes twinkled’ thing was a bunch of literary hooey that didn’t hold water in real life. His eyes truly did twinkle, and he had the spontaneous, barked-out-from-the-gut laugh and giggle you usually only hear from kids. Where Brent was over-stressed and taking life far more seriously than it warranted, Trent was a calmative. He could make his brother laugh. He could make his brother play. He could make his brother have fun when his brother thought he’d never find time in his life to do that again, ever. It took Trent to show him that there was always time, and the time was right that minute.

Trent shared a house with Brent and I when we moved to Colorado, and while I could have made, and probably did, a laundry list of irritations inherent in that (he paid his portion of the rent when he felt like it, he ate more groceries in a week than Brent and I generally ran through in two, he insisted on playing the same CD over and over again until I wanted to scream every time I heard its selections, and he left a perpetual line of scuff marks on the white linoleum kitchen floor from his work boots that somehow he never ‘remembered’ to clean), the benefits were there, too. My husband, stressed under normal circumstances, became increasingly difficult to live with – or even be around for more than ten minutes – as the stresses of his new job position mounted. If it hadn’t been for Trent, I may have gone the entire year without hearing a simple, “How was your day?,” a much-appreciated, “you look nice today,” and the tiny but huge, “Nice meal,” after dinner. Trent wasn’t a meddler, but he wasn’t stupid and he certainly wasn’t deaf. He knew how hard that year was on Brent and I both, and he brought more than a little comic relief to the household because of it. One afternoon, stepping into the parking lot after leaving my office, I saw him parked in the lot, our dogs Grudie and Flags hanging out the windows.

“They wanted to see where Mom worked,” he said, and it seemed to make perfect sense. It was also a great end to my day, and something only someone like Trent Babcock would have thought to do.

If Trent hadn’t been our ‘roomie’ that year, we’d both have missed a lot. The almost constant aroma of Pillsbury orange rolls he seemed almost addicted to, and the way he’d make a big production of licking the tops of the best ones as they cooled, just to prevent his brother from taking them. The Matchbox cars hidden in the mixed vegetables which rendered them ‘inedible’ and excused both brothers from actually having to eat them with dinner. The strands of pasta half stuck and half dangling from the ceiling because I’d left them alone with the boiling pot for more than a minute and a half and that was, according to them both, ‘the way to see if it’s done’. And I’ll never forget the entire kitchen cabinet which mysteriously removed itself from the wall and repositioned itself in a different location in the time it took me to run to the grocery store, all with neither brother apparently knowing a single thing about how that could have happened.

Grudie and Flags reaped the benefits, too. In all the years they lived after he moved out, they never came close to matching the number of car rides, and I’m betting not the number of Milkbones, either. He loved animals and they loved him back, and whole-heartedly.

The last time I saw Trent, he was about to deploy to Iraq. He and Brent came by my condo and I don’t know who said what, but there was that laugh I knew so well, and Santa behind the eyes. Even moving forward in different lives, Brent and I shared the concern that no matter what else happened, Trent make it home safely. I wasn’t there to hear it from Brent when it happened, but I can pretty much guarantee you we both let go a big sigh of relief when that day came.

Brent keeps me posted, which I appreciate, on news of relevance about people in our long history together. Bill’s happy retirement, the sad death of Gina from an over-fondness for prescription pain pills. And one day or in one conversation, I think I’d called to locate some document or other he had filed away, he let me know that Trent was struggling with depression since coming home from Iraq, but he was doing well. He was going to be OK. I digested that because the idea of Trent ever being anything other than OK was, again, surreal.

Sometimes life throws you the surreal when you least expect it, and that’s where I sit with Trent’s death. Talking with Brent, I could only say what I’d emailed him earlier: The Trent who came home from Iraq wasn’t the same Trent who deployed to Iraq. Trent wasn’t so much gone now as he was just taking some time off to hang out in heaven with Grudie and Flags. “I hope,” Brent observed, his voice breaking again, “he remembered to pack treater bones.” “They have an endless supply on hand,” I assured him. I’d tell you my heart broke for Brent right then, but I’m not one for understatement. It more or less shattered, then reassembled itself just in time to shatter again, and repeat the process over and over and that’s just the way it is. I’ve seen siblings who care for each other. I’ve seen siblings who love each other. Until I met Brent Babcock and was able to watch his relationship with Trent, I’d never seen the kind of love that made two brothers pretty much one person, just in two different bodies. Unconditional love and acceptance and just a huge amount of, “Hey, I like this guy!” that was always amazing to observe. They perfected the Mutual Admiration Society, no matter how ‘different’ they were, or non-similar their lives.

Death has a unique way of rendering those left behind exactly helpless, especially those who were ‘family’ at one time and who, at the time of the loss, are peripheral, ‘once associated with’, so when I told Brent if there was anything I could do, to please let me know, I didn’t think he’d take me up on it. I was gratified that he did. Seemed he needed an email he could send to friends, just to let them know what had happened. Parts of the email were incorporated into Trent’s obituary, so if I was able to help even that much, it’s the most important writing I’ve ever done. And proof positive that I actually CAN multi-task, having managed to shed a few tears and type at the same time.

Brent said there’s really nothing to be done now, you just have to move forward, and really the only thing I could do was to mourn Trent in my own way, and as anyone who knows me knows, that’s going to involve a keyboard or a notebook.

If they’ve got treater bones in heaven I’m quite sure they have the Internet too, so when Trent’s reading my blog with Grudie and Flags, I think he’ll understand what I’m trying to say. Which really, in a nutshell (or a dog bone) is this: Trent Babcock was a real gift in my existence, and a completely great guy. I know he touched my heart in only fifteen years, so you can imagine the effect he’s had, the joy he brought, to those who had the pleasure of knowing him always.

I keep a magnet on my fridge and of course, off the top of my head I can’t remember who authored the quote on it and I’m too lazy to get up and go check, so allow me to punt here: It says something along the lines of, if you grow a good garden, or touch the heart of one human being, you may consider your life a success. There’s another quote, and again I couldn’t tell you who said it, but it said to live on in the hearts of those you’ve met is to never die, and with that in mind, Trent’s life was a monumental success and to top it all off he’s immortal. The guy’s going to be around forever, in a whole boatload of hearts.

So here’s to you, Trent Babcock. You’re the kind of memorable even an Alzheimer’s patient couldn’t forget, and everybody who knew you, including myself, may absolutely consider themselves some pretty lucky people.