In the ongoing, years-long group text between my four brothers and sister, there was a brief exchange the Saturday before Memorial Day between me, my son Paul and my next younger brother Perry.
I had forwarded Perry a message from Paul, a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy serving on a U.S.-flagged commercial tanker between Singapore and the Arabian Sea. In it, Paul related that his ship would be diverted briefly to Diego Garcia, a tiny, Indian Ocean atoll that shelters mostly boredom.
Wrote Paul: “We’ll get there on Tuesday morning and …. I’ll see if Uncle Perry carved his name in the bar on base — even if they still have a bar on base….”
Perry, who had spent a few monotonous months of his 20-year Navy career on the island, replied that what he remembered most of it were the “coconut crabs, the intense heat and the coral! Used to run three to five miles a day, nothing else to do there but drink beer…”
Paul texted back: “Hope I don’t run into any coconut crabs but I’ll definitely go on some runs and I’ll send pics.”
Perry closed the brief, 13,000-mile chat with a respectful “Sir… SO proud of you… be careful, love you… AME1 (AW, NAC) GUEBERT.” I’m sure Paul smiled at the thought of his Navy uncle, 20 years older and now 20 years retired, offering a stiff, sharp salute.
Paul did get to Diego Garcia, did take pictures and did text them to Catherine and me on the following Wednesday, our Tuesday because of the 11-hour time difference.
I never sent them to Perry, however, because he died earlier that morning, just three days after our texting triangle and the day after he and I had exchanged texts on Memorial Day. It was very sudden, sad and awkward.
Awkward in that we — my remaining brothers, sister and me — were thrown out of balance after almost 75 years of being “us.” Of being six. Of being one. Now a piece of us had fallen away and we didn’t know what to say.
If there are any rules about little brothers, one should be that they don’t die before you. Or, failing that, that they don’t die alone or not before we all had one more time to gather for a meal, a laugh and maybe a Euchre game.
Perry received none of those graces; he died first, alone and months since any of us had last seen him. He preferred it that way. He had spent most of his military career in Europe and, as the years grew, so did his time between visits to the U.S. His correspondence with any of us — long before email, texts and cell phones — was almost non-existent.
The distance those years built never narrowed, even when he was just a river or two away instead of an ocean or two. The breadth of that distance was shown again at his funeral when we learned Perry didn’t live where we all thought he had and — even more remarkably — had survived two recent life-threatening challenges without telling any of us.
Maybe he didn’t want us to know or maybe he just didn’t get around to telling us or maybe he figured there was nothing we could do so why even mention it. Any of those reasons sounded exactly like our brother.
Later, at his funeral dinner, a church lady sought us out to relate that some years back she had asked Perry to build oak coat racks to replace some “old ugly steel ones” in the church’s entrance. Two weeks later, she said, Perry had them built, installed and said nothing.
“They’ll be there 100 years,” she predicted.
(The Farm and Food File is published weekly throughout the U.S. Contact information is posted at farmandfoodfile.com. © 2026 ag comm)
