66 Time October 21–28, 2019
there are rosebushes in the Taylors’ front
yard, a picturesque swirl of pink, white and ma-
genta. But when they first began to bud this past
springtime, Jennie despised them. “I felt like
nature was mocking me,” she says. Brent had
planted them there.
One of the most difficult parts of Brent’s death
was how to deal with the things he left behind.
It wasn’t just the shoes, shirts, pants, suits, hats,
underwear, uniforms and coats in closets and
drawers. It was that he had left them on hooks on
the bedroom door and by the front door. He was
coming back in January—except he didn’t.
Jennie couldn’t muster the strength to
go through each of these items by hand. His
clothes smelled like him. His shoes still had dirt
in the treads from their garden. The other thing
was that people from around the country who
had seen her story on nightly newscasts were
sending her things: a throw pillow with Brent’s
face embroidered in the middle, a teddy bear in
Army fatigues, a velvet blanket with an Amer-
ican flag that featured each family member’s
name on the stripes.
One day, Jennie decided it all had to go. So
one Tuesday morning, while she was at a polit-
ical event, a group of women from the neigh-
borhood came and spent several hours placing
everything in more than a dozen black storage
containers and carrying them into a shed in the
backyard. “She needed to reclaim her life with-
out swimming in mementos every day,” says
Kristy Pack, Jennie’s younger sister, who lives
about a mile away.
But eliminating all of the reminders is impos-
sible. Every day, Jennie drives the kids to school
down Washington Boulevard, the street where
Brent’s body returned home, past the Maverik
gas station, one of the
businesses Brent had
helped lure to North
Ogden, and past a pen-
nant with Brent’s smil-
ing face that hangs
on a streetlight Brent
helped install as part of
his town “beautifica-
tion program.”
The family’s ranch
house was entirely Brent’s idea. It’s built on an
acre and a half of land that stretches like a big
green blanket outside the back door. “He had a
crazy idea that we could turn it into a farm,” Jen-
nie says, smiling. “He didn’t grow up on a farm or
anything, but he thought it would be a good idea
for the kids to learn the virtues of manual labor.”
They planted peaches, plums, pears, apples,
apricots, hot peppers, sweet peppers, green
Nation
beans, squash, tomatoes and even raised 19
chickens in a coop. It was all irrigated through
an elaborate system of 150 ft. of water hoses
and diverters that Brent engineered. But in his
absence, the farm has faded. The fruit lays in
heaps under 41 hunched-over trees. The pink
and black water hoses sit coiled in a pile. The
chicken coops are empty. Weeds compete with
the fruit and berry plants. Jennie is unsure
about what to do with the land. “It’s really sad,”
she says, picking a plump yellow peach from a
sagging branch. “But it’s hard to find the time or
energy to take care of everything.”
She helps the children deal with the grief as
best she can. She looks for signs of pain. Her
own father committed suicide when she was
10 years old, so she knows what it’s like to live
with loss. Money is a constant concern. Jen-‘We’re not the onlyfamily to suffertragedy in this countryor in Afghanistan.’