When the Tools Go Silent

I lost my friend, Jonah, last Saturday.

The world feels quieter without him.

There’s a hollowness I can’t quite explain—like my chest forgot how to breathe properly, and my thoughts are running on fumes. People still talk, life still moves, but it feels like it’s moving past me, not with me.

There’s no space for grief. Not really.

It leaks out at inconvenient moments—when I’m brushing my teeth, or in the frozen food aisle. I’ve barely slept. My wife, already fighting through the haze of radiation treatments, tries to hold me up even as she struggles to stand herself. And Jonah’s wife—who, strangely, shares my wife’s name—is trying to navigate this sudden emptiness that none of us were ready for.

Jonah wasn’t just a friend. He was the guy who showed up before you even asked. The one who didn’t say, “Let me know if you need anything,” because he already knew. He just did.

Back in the early 2000s, I owned this ridiculous old Geo Tracker—convertible top, no insulation, and a heater that mostly just blew cold air louder. One winter, I was helping out a teacher by hauling hay for her classroom’s fall festival display. It was so cold that even the trees looked like they were trying to huddle together. I unzipped the soft plastic rear window to load the hay, and when I set the first bale in—crack. That brittle window shattered like glass candy on the spare tire.

Jonah just shook his head when he saw the mess. “You and that car,” he said with a grin, and told me to drop it off at his garage. A week later, it came back to me looking showroom new—better, honestly. He’d fixed the window, patched up some other spots, and never asked for more than the cost of the materials. That’s who he was.

When our car broke down—again—he loaned us an old sedan. It ran without a key, which both confused and slightly terrified me. He never explained why. Maybe he didn’t know. Maybe that was part of the charm.

He raised three kids, each of whom I had the honor of teaching once. They carried his quiet strength. His humility. His laugh. I’m also uncle to some of their cousins, so the lines between friend and family had long since blurred. Jonah wasn’t the kind of guy you called just to chat. He was the kind of guy you leaned on. Who showed up with tools in hand and left you feeling like you could handle life again.

When my wife had surgery last year, we scrambled to figure out rides for our teenagers. Jonah volunteered. First morning out, he showed up early—but at the wrong school. They’d built a new one since he graduated, and he never realized. My son had to give him a crash course in updated geography. Jonah just laughed—easy, genuine—and corrected course without complaint.

That was Jonah.

He didn’t make waves. He made things better. Quietly. Consistently.

I miss him already. Not in that abstract “someday” kind of way. In the now. In the quiet spaces. In the sound of a car that won’t start and the instinct to call him. In the way a good man’s absence echoes louder than his presence ever did.