“He’s got three to six months,” said my neighbor’s daughter this evening when we spoke on the sidewalk between our houses as we usually do.

I’m blessed, among other things, with great neighbors. The neighbor to the north is a retired cabinet maker who lives with his wife, adult daughter and her young son. He spends most of his time in his garage next to mine, and between the times he’s helped me with home projects, loaned me tools, received packages for us, let workmen in and supervised them while I was at work, and come over to check on our house when we’re gone I’d say he’s done me two or three favors a week for the seven years we’ve lived here.

In return, he’s taken a few Tupperwares full of chili, borrowed my compressor once or twice, and had me hold tools while he worked on his pickup or his daughter’s SUV. And conversation. Most mornings when I’m home, I go out to get the paper and find him reading his sitting in his pickup truck in his driveway; we check in, say hello, and then when I roll my motorcycle out to the street he’s in the garage starting the day’s project, asking me what he can do for me.

Weekends if I’m working in my garage he’ll wander by and check to see if I need supervision. Otherwise I can listen to Limbaugh coming from the radio he keeps blaring all the time, and wander over to chat with him about politics, kids, and cooking.

He immigrated from Mexico when he was in his teens, and by the time he was 30 he had his own cabinet shop. The Century Freeway project eminent domained his shop back in the 80’s and he used the money to buy rental property and ‘retire’, which is what he’s been doing ever since I’ve known him.

Two years ago he started losing weight. He was diagnosed with stomach cancer, had surgery, and said he got better.

Apparently not.

It’s been a week of mortality. My ex-wife was hospitalized and had major surgery Tuesday. She’ll be fine, we visited her in the hospital this morning.

And Friday, as I was riding up the 101 freeway, traffic was jammed and as I worked my way to the bottleneck, I passed two CHP cars with a yellow tarp strung between them. Never a good sign.

Someone committed suicide by jumping from the bridge onto the freeway.

And that afternoon, as I rode home, the lanes had been opened and oblivious commuters were driving over the spot where he’d died.

Somehow that meant a lot to me, and means even more today.