From a blog -

"My cousin, Jeffrey, took his own life last Saturday. He grew up in the Midwest, was in the Navy, lived in California, moved to Brooklyn, was in tv shows and commercials, rode motorcycles, dove off cliffs, and I guess just decided he had done all he could in this world and it was time to move on and overachieve somewhere else."

Even at 7 years old, he was one of the most independent kids I knew. On the road trip back from Florida one summer, we all stopped at the Levi's outlet store. Jeff picked out a fleece-lined stonewashed denim jacket. All summer, he wore a pair of black and yellow shorts, cowboy boots, and that jacket. No shirt.

He could eat an entire jar of olives in a day (of course, he would puke them all up). I used to hate olives until he showed me how to eat them. You put your index finger over the pimento, then suck out the juice from the other side, out of the little "x" cut in the back. THEN you eat the olive. He was right, I loved them. I actually told my husband that story last week when I showed him how it's done, and now he likes olives, too.

He would order onion rings, pickles, and root beer in restaurants. Chex Mix would have been his survival food of choice if he was dropped off in the woods for a week. Marachino cherries were a staple, as were croutons.

One time, we were playing hide and seek with Frankie over at MeMaw and PePaw's house. We hid in the basement, under PePaw's workbench. I'm pretty sure we had said the basement was off limits, but we thought it would be funny. We had a bag of chips with us. We hid under that table for an eternity, being real quiet. We could look out the side basement window and see up into the family room addition where Frankie was looking for us and we'd just laugh. Jeffrey put a chip in front of my face and said, "Want a CHIP?" I don't know why, but we thought that was absolutely hysterical. One of us said it to the other almost every time we saw each other, even up through the last Christmas that I saw him, especially if there was a bag of chips around.

He said, "Just a bit," a lot.

One Christmas, when we were kids, he got MeMaw a present. I think the rest of us grandkids were surprised, because none of us had money and I know that I personally felt this was going to make the rest of us look bad. So, MeMaw starts opening the gift, and I think it was a box in a box, where she had to keep unwrapping. The box was empty. Nothing in it, just an empty box when she was done with all that unwrapping. She said, "Thank you," to Jeffrey. Jeffrey replied, "It was nothing."

He lived with us for a few summers and worked at Six Flags. He would stay out late (or stay out for days) and get into trouble, and I imagined it's what it would have been like to have a little brother around.

Although I cried at the funeral last night, I think I am still in denial. With as creative and sneaky as he could be, I like to think that he staged the whole thing, left behind all his belongings, and hopped a plane to France to start all over. He is living in an apartment in Paris with a view of the Seine. I'm hopeful that one day, when my husband and I return to France for a visit, I'll catch a glimpse of him on the street. I won't run to him and I won't say hello, because the witness protection program would have to move him again, and I'd hate for him to have to take the time to learn a whole other language after just picking up French. But, I'll see him nonetheless, and I'll know that he's okay. He'll see me, give me a wink, and mouth, "Want a CHIP?"