The Flying Out

The phone rang at 7:18 this morning. I knew what it was before I answered it. You don’t help a man put his life in order without eventually being called to witness the end of it.

Still, knowing doesn’t soften the sound. It just makes it heavier.

Jim passed away quietly, the way he lived for the most part, without much fuss, without asking for attention, without pretending things were bigger than they were. If you’ve read some of my stories, you’ve met him before.

He was there in the background: the ranch, the cattle, the porch, the pauses between words. He didn’t seek remembrance, but he left an imprint anyway.

For the last seven or eight months, I helped him around the ranch. That’s how it started, anyway, fixing small things, sorting paperwork.

Making sure the practical details didn’t pile up and become overwhelming. But it didn’t take long before the work became less about chores and more about listening.

Jim had a way of talking that wasn’t really talking. He’d say a sentence, then let it sit there long enough for you to decide whether it needed company.

Most of the time, it didn’t.

Going through his papers, I learned something he never volunteered: he was a Vietnam veteran, 1968 to 1971. When I asked him about it, he shrugged like I’d mentioned the weather.

Said it wasn’t a big deal. Everyone else was doing it. That was Jim. No medals on the wall. No stories told unless they were dragged out accidentally, and even then, they were trimmed down to the bare minimum.

We got his cattle sold before winter set in. That mattered to him. Ranchers don’t like leaving loose ends, especially ones that breathe.

He organized a silent auction through the church he and his wife attended to sell his saddle and tack to the highest bidder. No announcements, no ceremony, just passed along to people who’d use them. His firearms were sold, too, handled cleanly and legally. Another chapter closed.

His wife passed away four or five years ago. He still spoke of her in the present tense sometimes, like she might walk through the door if he said her name the right way.

Once cremated, Jim’s ashes will unite with his wife’s ashes at the National Cemetery in Fernley. Side by side again, finally. I think that gave him more peace than anything else.

He had three kids, two boys and a girl, the oldest being 41. They hadn’t been close to their dad in years.

Jim didn’t sugarcoat that. He said he was too hard on them while they were growing up. Not mean, just rigid. He believed in hard work, discipline, and always showing up.

Somewhere along the way, that line got crossed, or maybe it always had been. He didn’t ask for forgiveness out loud, but he carried the awareness of it quietly, like a stone in his pocket.

I learned early on that my job wasn’t to fix anything. It was to listen. To ask a question only when it truly mattered. To let silence do most of the work. Jim didn’t need advice. He needed room.

By the first week of December, he was too weak to stay out of bed. That’s when hospice came in.

The nurse was kind, competent, and a little too enthusiastic about explaining the process. She spoke about transitions, and signs and stages with a brightness that felt out of place in a room where a man was slowly letting go. But she was doing her job, and she did it well.

She warned me about something I didn’t fully believe until I saw it. There would be moments when Jim would seem gone and in need of total care. And then, suddenly, he’d come back. Hungry, alert, and wanting to get out of bed as if nothing had happened.

Just this Tuesday, I spent most of the day with him on the porch. He was wrapped in a heavy blanket, wearing his last remaining cowboy hat.

The wind was light, the kind that carries the cold but not dust. Jim didn’t say much. I think he was looking inward, as if he was walking familiar ground in his mind.

I didn’t interrupt that. Some journeys aren’t for company.

By Thursday, he was winding down again. He needed help getting back to bed.

He never climbed out of it after that. Leaving that afternoon was hard.

There’s a particular weight to walking away when you know it might be the last time. I came back Friday and stayed until after the sun had gone.

By then, his children were there, the minister had visited, and the circle had closed. There was nothing left for me to do but go home.

Jim trusted me with the quiet parts of his life. With the unfinished business, the remembering.

That’s not a small thing. It’s a gift, whether it feels like one or not.

We chatted about Buck Ramsey’s poem Anthem. Both of us agreed it was a favorite.

There’s a line in the second verse that’s been stuck in my head all day:

“And as I flew out on the morning,
Before the bird, before the dawn,
I was the poem, I was the song.”

Jim understood that line. He lived it, even if he never would have said so.

I’ll never read that poem again without thinking of these last eight months. Of the porch, the pauses, and the work that mattered, because it was done quietly and with care.

Thank you, Jim, for your wit, wisdom, friendship, and for trusting me to the end.