Randy died on Tuesday. Head-on collision on a two-lane road, just outside of Channing. They say he drifted out of his lane, though why is a mystery. He had just dropped off his wife at the airport in Amarillo. He wouldn’t make it back home.
Randy finished his life at 45.
Moments such as this, especially those unwelcome or unexpected, are one of the reasons I believe we capture and preserve pictures. The fact that we’re able to look back when we wish and, with a little visual help, remember happier times is an authentic privilege never felt more pronounced than after we’ve lost someone, notably someone lost too soon. The picture never lies, reliably tells us the same story every time, and returns us to a single moment when that person we love was still with us and the world felt right.
An old, grainy photo from nearly 40 years ago in Dalhart, our grandparents’ home, suggests the grown-ups successfully managed to keep all eleven Johnson cousins together and still for the brief time it takes the shutter to click. We’re all there, from the bottom left and moving counterclockwise, Rusty, Robert, Ashley, Jimmy, Stacy, Amber, Chad, Trey, David, Michaelene, and, finally, Randy. Allison, Stephanie, and Jeremy are absent but would join us a few short years later.
Each of us sitting stationary in the shot, looking ahead, have no idea what actually lies ahead, and I doubt any of us concerned ourselves at the time with that or anything other than moving on to play or to get into trouble, or both, for that matter. None of us know what we’ll grow up to be, who we’ll be with, or how many kids we’ll have ourselves to force into sitting still for group photos. Concerns such as that were for the adults; we just had to be kids.
Back here in the future, we’ve all made it to adulthood, to our chosen professions, and have picked our significant others. We each have our kids and take more photos of them than necessary thanks to the ubiquity of cameras and abundant storage. Our busy, full lives have taken us all in different directions. Consequently, it’s rare that we ever have moments for all of us to be together again, even if only for an afternoon. And that’s what makes me sad — with Randy now gone, the opportunity to reconnect, to make up for lost time, to take just one more picture of all of us together, is gone as well, and it isn’t going to return.
Randy and I didn’t know each other well, and I can’t recall the last time we spoke to one another. Regardless, there came a moment when it hit me that he is gone, that there wouldn’t be another chance to change that. He was family, after all, and that was enough to feel the loss as acutely as if it were a close friend.
He didn’t come to my mind that morning, but I nonetheless wonder what he imagined that day would bring. There was plenty, I’m sure that felt routine and uneventful. Even driving from one place to the next shouldn’t have given him a second thought. He couldn’t have known, waking up to the day, that there wouldn’t be another. In a way, I wish he had known, if only for closure. No time to say goodbye.
No, we all expected years further into the future when old age and its associated setbacks would naturally claim each of us Johnson cousins gradually, one at a time, long after we had laid our parents to rest. Only then would we later attend each other’s funerals after nature had taken its course. That’s the plan. But that’s not the story, it would seem, and it feels unfair. We’ve lost something — rather, someone — that we can’t replace.
John Donne famously wrote, “each man’s death diminishes me.” I can’t help but notice in the poem that he doesn’t specify more about the “man” or the nature or depth of the relationship. It doesn’t matter. We all are less for the loss, regardless; yet the bell tolls all the more profoundly for family.
Randy Johnson, 1975-2021. R.I.P.
Time in a Bottle 