He's been suffering with cancer for a few months now and I got an email from his sister last month that it had spread to his liver and bones, so the news wasn't unexpected, but that fucking call still hit me like a punch in the guts.
Skip was a fighter and that's the reason he was my favorite. It seemed like every time Life wanted to fuck somebody, Skip was on the receiving end. Life would knock him down and Skip would get back up smiling.
When he was just a baby when his daddy was stationed at Ft Campbell, he caught a fever and by the time they got him to the hospital, the damage was done. He wasn't retarded, just real slow.
He had health problems after health problems. When he was a teen, he was in constant pain. Turns out he was afflicted with tumors that wrapped around his nerves. At one point, he enlisted in the navy but was discharged within a month because he neglected to inform the doctors that he had those tumors.
He tried to led a normal life, he really did. He married and moved to Silver City Nevada for a while but it turns out his wife wasn't much of a wife. He divorced and moved back to California. Shortly after that, he began having seizures. Once that happened, the doctors notified DMV and his driver's license was pulled.
The seizures were bad enough that he ended moving back in with his dad, and there he lived with his new wife Sonja until he passed away with her at his side.
The kid was a hard worker. His passion was ranch work, loved working with horses and cattle, and he'd work my ass into the ground when we worked together. Actually, anything he did, he put 110% into it. It wasn't that he felt like he had anything to prove, that's just the way he was.
I remember one time about 30-40 years ago we were smoking a joint and I asked him if he ever felt bitter about the hand that Life dealt him, and he just smiled and said No, there wasn't a fucking thing he could do about it, so why trip?
I wish I had that boy's attitude.
Here's a picture of me and him at the little get-together Mom threw for us the night before we moved out here:
