Mortality

I came back to work today to discover that a guy that I worked with died last week.

Normally I am relatively unphased by death, especially when its the a death of a person with whom I am only generally acquainted in a work sense. Heck, I didn't even work closely with this guy, and whole weeks would go by without me even seeing him. However, this one hit me differently and I'm very distressed about it.

His name was Giles and I always had a bit of a crush on him. He was a definite redneck, handsome, worked in our toolroom and in maintenance, he was around my age, married, with a ton of kids (one of those uber-breeders). But Giles was always a bit different in that he was... well, he was just nice.

I mean ULTRA nice-- sweet even. Never angry or pissy, he would always be smiling, laughing, and joking around. He would joke around with you and make you feel comfortable, even if you didn't know him all that well. And I mean he was ALWAYS laughing, so much so that his nickname was "Jolly". No lie, everyone called him Jolly.

His laugh and smile were infectious. You couldn't help but just be pulled in by his twinkling eyes and his sort of giggle. I'll miss that.

What makes it so much more difficult to cope with for me is the way he died. He crashed into the back of a logging truck on a road he's driven a million times before. We have a lot of logging trucks down here-- old, crappy trucks that haul big pine trees to the paper mills. They naturally overload the trucks, and trees stick out the back sometimes 10 or 15 feet, with only a small red flag tied to the furthest point.

But this logging truck didn't have working taillights. And it had just pulled out onto the road, so it was going slow with its heavy load of trees, trying to accelerate.

Jolly crashed his car into the back end of the logging truck- with all the trees sticking out the back.

My stomach is a knot right now that won't untie.