Requiem

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I’ll say more about the circumstances later, which were as horrific as I can imagine. But we lost my brother and my nephew suddenly last weekend. Any writing juice I had this week went into working with a family of word people to pay exactly the right tribute to our boys—lights of our lives, who loved each other in each atom. Here are their stories.

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Adlai Owen

July 23, 2017–May 18, 2024

Adlai Padma Owen, who rode an inborn tide of warmth and humor and a professor’s expertise in Godzilla to the sort of acclaim that only a few great figures can capture and keep, died on Saturday. His star is visible from St. George to Salt Lake City and from Brooklyn to the Oregon coast. Just like Calvin, he will always be six years old.

He was an artist and a wordsmith, a casual poet and a stop-motion animator. He was a woodsman and an explorer and, just about, a black-diamond skier. Sometimes, especially back when he was three, he walked among us in disguise, performing heroic acts. But his talents were so varied that he had to assume different identities, even taking them on for long periods of time. His family might think that Adlai had gone away for a few days, to outer space or the climbing gym, only to remember that Spider-Man had showed up right around the time that Adlai left.

“It’s an elephant!” he would say to his mom, Naomi. She marveled at the transformation of her modeling clay, even if she never quite recognized an elephant. She kicked off his animation career with a tutorial in flip books, and he added his own sound effects, and pretty soon he was on FaceTime showing her the first Godzilla film of his own making.

Adlai lived with his dad, Sam, when he was in school at Uintah Elementary, and they ranged far and wide across worlds more and less imagined—worlds made of art paper and Sharpie, worlds navigated on rollerblades or on a mountain bike or in a kayak. They were often joined by Adlai’s grandma Becky, who knew all about magical hideaways and took him to one after another. When he was one and a half she taught him the word “intrepid,” and he applied it to himself generously. Many of Adlai’s expeditions with his family—to the gully, to Snowbird’s Hidden Peak, up the “living room” hike into which Adlai negotiated Lego breaks—would end next to his grandma’s fireplace, where they’d put back a few gallons of hot chocolate, reading books and reminiscing about old times. 

Adlai was the kind of guy who’s at home in many places: in St. George with his mom, their pigeons, and his grandpa Dale, where he honed a gift for the Nerf gun ambush. (Word had it he was working on a “prank machine” to lengthen his reach.) In Salt Lake City with his dad and their dogs, Mooch and Maggie, and cat, Witch. In his grandpa Dave’s garden, where he would eat the new grapes, or pull his uncle Dylan aside for a symposium on which Ninjago is the strongest. He engaged in almost constant debate, on all topics and some of it spirited, with his aunt Hannah. With both his mom and his dad, he loved to leap around the oceanside sand. He had places to visit: In the fall he was going to New York City, to watch his uncles Michael and James run the marathon and dig a tunnel into the Statue of Liberty.

He was teeming with friends, most of them armed with mighty superpowers of their own. Some didn’t realize they were his friend because they hadn’t technically met him yet, but he’d induct them for life with a “hey,” or its equivalent in their language. He was the kind of student you hope you’re going to meet on your first day of first grade and then talk to every day after that forever. His classmates recall that he was funny and kind, that he was good at making comic books, that he freely lent out his eraser. The next time a question about Godzilla comes up, they won’t know where to turn. Their hearts, they said, are broken.

Adlai is survived by his mom and by many other relatives, in all of his families, who love him and miss him and whose lives will never wear off the light he shined. Every last person around Adlai loved him from the ground up, from the moment they met him, and they will tell all the stories about him for years and years, until it’s time for them to follow.

Adlai said yes to everything, because he didn’t know how to be afraid. He did know that he was surrounded by love. “Momma,” he would say at bedtime, “thank you for making it so I can always live my dreams.”

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Sam Owen

June 22, 1989–May 18, 2024

Samuel Bean Owen was an adoring father whose brilliant analyst’s mind and diplomat’s dexterity made him the rare person just about everyone in City Hall could love. He died under the weight of an emotional suffering beyond all of his efforts, and those of his loved ones, to turn back. He was 34 years old.

After his son was born, in 2017, the life Sam built was in every way for Adlai. When Sam and Adlai’s mom, Naomi, separated, the boy shared time between them. In Salt Lake City, where he went to school, the house he lived in was more Adlai’s than Sam’s—its walls papered in Adlai’s precocious art, its floors an epic hazard of Legos. Sam saw it as his first job to make way for Adlai’s ceaseless imagination. Even as it rolled from one realm to the next—Batman to Spider-Man, still photography to homemade movies—the world they crafted never ran out of room.

Sam would ferry Adlai several hours south for time with his mom, often camping nearby with his dogs to save a few dollars. Back in Salt Lake, on schooldays, he’d pick up a son who smiled from ear to ear at the sight of his father, and couldn’t wait to be home. The weekend before they died, Sam took Adlai on a closing-day ski outing with Sam’s mother and sister. They said they’d never felt closer to Sam.

From the time he was small, Sam’s love for wild places led him to wander with his family and friends: hiking the Needles, deep in Canyonlands National Park, and biking the White Rim Road; canoeing at Shoshone Lake in backcountry Yellowstone; backpacking in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument; camping outside Capitol Reef’s dinosaur-age Waterpocket Fold, where he and his mom had locked in plans to take Adlai this very weekend.

He was legend on four different 50-milers in Boy Scouts, where, after depositing his backpack at the destination, he would hike back down over and over to carry the packs of friends. He did this twice in the High Uintas, including at King’s Peak, and at the Windrivers’ Cirque of the Towers. For the final scout adventure, in Dark Canyon Wilderness, his scoutmaster asked Sam to be the one to hike back out with him the grueling 17 miles to bring in a rescue chopper for a badly injured boy.

Sam started on the staff of the Salt Lake City Council as an intern, in 2017, and quickly unveiled a savant’s mastery of civic esoterica—water rights and inland ports. Within months he was assigned primary staff responsibility for public utility policy. He climbed to the level of policy analysis, but, as for most of us, his job description didn’t quite capture it. Sam’s quiet, respectful and collaborative nature was appreciated by both branches of government. When the council office might otherwise reach an impasse with the mayor’s staff on one issue or another, Sam would, more often than not, see the start of a positive way through.

He got his education at the University of Utah, first with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and then in a master’s program in public administration, which he pursued under an unyielding load of work and parenting. Sam had been an uneven student, but his intellect was never in question: Early in high school, he wrote an essay that his English teacher was convinced could only be plagiarized. The teacher consulted the rest of the department, and they decided the way to determine if Sam’s work had been original was to set up a monitored in-class exercise. Deciding the matter, his second essay was better than the first. That incident was not isolated: His unprepared riff on “Crime and Punishment” once set a new standard, a teacher said, for 15-minute oral presentations.

Sam’s compassion and sensitivity shared roots with enormous pain. He struggled with substance use from his teenage years, paired with intense anxiety and other challenges to his mental health. Sam’s friends, acquaintances, and colleagues sometimes knew about these hardships, and sometimes not. But they knew that his kindness was constant, and that what he wanted most was to be the best father he could to Adlai. He’d been sober for an extended time, and both of Sam’s parents had made it their urgent daily task to ease his burdens, to find him the right help. But the darkness was deft and strong. It swept Sam away, and with him his supremely beloved Adlai.

Sam is survived by his twin sister, Hannah; his brother, Michael; his mother, Becky; and his father, Dave. They hope for peace and understanding for other suffering families, and beg for understanding from those who surround them. If you are struggling, please seek help; know that there are others around you, or others you can reach, who will never, ever give up. If you have thoughts of self-harm, call the national suicide and crisis lifeline, at 988.

Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.