Celebration of Life for Yar Sheets

John Sheets, Brother

Good morning.

On behalf of Bonnie, Brandy, Adalynn, my siblings, and our extended families, I would like to welcome you to the celebration of life for Millard Owen Sheets the Third – more commonly known as Yar. We very much appreciate that you’re here, and I know Yar would as well.

On the evening April 28, Yar passed away peacefully, surrounded by family. He was 69 years young. I say young because he was young at heart, mind, and spirit. As our older sister Mary noted, ‘He was unique, a narwhal in the animal kingdom.”

In January, Yar told me he wanted to have, in his words, “a beautiful death.” He had no illusions about his prognosis, though at the time he did have a good dose of hospice imposter syndrome, as he was doing relatively well, while Bonnie had just suffered through a particularly difficult course of chemotherapy and was then recovering from major surgery. But his attitude was upbeat and he went about his days planning for the inevitable. He shared many of those plans with me, including reading me his eulogy. No, not this eulogy, as sadly the one he wrote couldn’t be found. So I will do my best, but any praise should go to Yar, as I was inspired by him.

I know at least some of you have only known Yar later in life, so I’ll share some of his early history.

Yar arrived in this world on April 9th, 1957 and was fond of saying he was born in the same hospital as Barack Obama. He was the second child of Owen and Jean Sheets. You may be wondering how Millard Owen Sheets, III became Yar. Actually, he was accidently nicknamed by his then two year old sister Mary, who called him Millyar. And since our grandfather was known as Millard, and our father was Owen, Millyar became Yar.

In addition to Mary, he had a younger sister, Tiare who is attending remotely (Hi T!), and two younger brothers John (that’s me) and Tim. Along with the rest of us, he spent most of his childhood in O’okala on the Big Island of Hawaii.

When Yar was nine, in a letter to his parents our dad wrote, “Yar never ceases to amaze me. He is so alert and observant about those things that interest him, and so completely oblivious of other things.” Well, I can’t comment about any supposed obliviousness, but Yar certainly was an astute observer of the world with a finely honed ability to focus on whatever he was interested in. (More on that later.)

He graduated from Laupahoehoe High School as the class salutatorian. While I don’t recall his exact words, his graduation speech caught us all by surprise. Yar said something along the lines of “Just because my high school experience was like a car crash, it doesn’t mean I couldn’t learn from it.” My parents were in turn horrified and proud.

As he was my older brother, I followed what he did. He took science and math courses, so I did the same. He ran cross country, so yup, me too. He wrestled. Alright, I didn’t follow him in everything…!

After a couple years studying Journalism at the University of Hawaii, Yar moved to the mainland, as we say in Hawaii. He moved around a fair bit and then as luck would have it, he arrived in Yakama WA, just in time for two hugely impactful events: the first was the1980 Mt St. Helens explosion.

The second was meeting the love of his life, Bonnie.

While the former was an interesting experience (midnight at mid-day due to volcanic ash), meeting Bonnie was truly the best thing that ever happened to him.

Yar and Bonnie got married on July 3, 1982 and four years later joyfully welcomed Brandy …

…to the world. To say Yar loved them both would be a huge understatement. They were truly the world to him.

When Brandy was two, Yar decided to go to the University of New Mexico to get his engineering degree, in part because he wanted Brandy to be proud of her father.  So, the family moved to Albuquerque. At UNM Yar worked very hard and earned excellent grades. He went to work in a field he unfortunately didn’t always love, yet nonetheless became an expert and was sought after by employers old and new.  

Yar, Bonnie, and Brandy built a life together during which they lived mostly in or near Albuquerque, where Bonnie was the much-respected Financial Controller for a large landscaping business. Yar was proud of the life the three of them built, of Bonnie’s love of her garden and her work, and of the wonderful woman Brandy has become, with her own career success, marriage with Jeremy, and motherhood to Adalynn.

In addition to his professional success, Yar had many other talents. He was a painter, could Pictionary like no tomorrow, and he was very…..um, very detail oriented. He once built a deck and planned it such that all scrap wood fit into a five-gallon bucket! (He sure could focus…)

He also baked a mean pie.

Yar was eventually recruited by his good friend Colin to come work together again, this time in the Seattle area. Bonnie moved up a year later to join him after ensuring a smooth transition from her office manager role in Albuquerque. In 2020, like most of us, Yar struggled with the pandemic and how it upended normal life. Yar ultimately asked to take a leave of absence from his work for a few weeks.

He focused on his health, got into therapy, …

… lost the extra pounds he had been carrying for years, became much more in touch with his emotions, and frankly transformed his life. In his own words, “I learned to love myself”. It was with this newly found inner peace that Yar and Bonnie retired and moved to where they had long wanted to return: the beautiful Olympic Peninsula where we are today. They anticipated a long, happy retirement with some travel, and lots of time with Brandy, Jeremy, and Adalynn.

Sadly, retirement bliss was tempered first by discovery of Bonnie’s cancer, and then by Yar’s.

Yet they both soldiered on, doing the tough job of fighting cancer while living their lives. And live they did.

Their last big trip …

…was back to the Big Island of Hawaii, where they shared an Airbnb with Sandy and me. And on the day before Yar’s 68th birthday…

… Madam Pele obliged us with a Kilauea summit eruption which we enjoyed table-side at the Volcano House, thanks to Bonnie’s securing of coveted reservations.

We visited places he loved which gave him a chance to say goodbye to the island of his youth. It was a wonderful trip that Bonnie, Sandy, and I will cherish for the rest of our lives.

Back in Lacey, Yar and Bonnie had become active members of their cancer support group. At first Yar participated as the spouse of a cancer patient, but eventually he was also a patient. Yar told me many times that he had more friends at this stage of his life than he’d ever had before and that he was truly happy. Yes, my brother was dying of cancer, but he was happy. Not all the time, of course, but life was something he still savored and enjoyed. He was quick with a quip and sharp of wit, still made his (often tortured) puns, and took great pleasure in family and friends.

He was so happy that Brandy and Jeremy moved to Lacey and especially treasured getting to know and spend time with his beautiful granddaughter Adalynn.

In his latter months he told me often of how he marveled at this turn of events. He correctly guessed that his celebration of life would have more than just family and a few friends and he was genuinely pleased by the prospect.

Yar was a very good writer and in his final years writing became even more of a passion. Poetry was a way to process his complex emotions and understanding of his and Bonnie’s diseases, and he often shared his poems with their cancer group. He became their unofficial poet and even informed the group of his cancer diagnosis in a poem.

He decided to compile his writing into a memoir and was so excited to take a multi-week-long writing class to help him succeed in his goal to publish…

… A Life Well Loved. It included poetry and prose, and Yar gave family and many friends copies of his book. He really put his heart into the project; his satisfaction upon completing it was gratifying to see, and through reading it I learned a lot about him too. Yar’s deep love for Bonnie and Brandy was always without question, but his memoir really brought it all into sharper focus. It was wonderful to read how important they were to him, and how important Adalynn was too.

Something not included in Yar’s memoir was the concept of scanxiety – that anxious feeling one has while awaiting the results from the latest scan that you’ve endured. Well, Yar wrote a song about it, and when a live recording didn’t happen as hoped, Yar took to AI to bring it to life. While I’m no fan of AI, I am thankful it allowed Yar’s lyrics to be heard and that then 68-year-old Yar, dying of cancer, figured out how to make it happen. As far as I know this was the only song he ever wrote, and I truly wish he had written more.

In closing I leave you with Yar’s poem I Am Alive, written on Sunday, June 29, 2025

I am alive
And I live as I always have
With a few differences
Day to day

It's not a life particularly to be envied
Either one or the other of us is sick
It's her turn now
And I take care of her

I had my own time of illness
She babied me
In moderation
And we managed

 There was a brief period
Just a month or two I think
When we had our lives back
And made plans 

We booked hotel rooms
Put dates on calendars
Debated insulin care protocols
And anticipated life 

It's funny how life can flip
Now we're both sick
But there's nothing they can do for me
While I mostly feel okay 

And she was feeling great
Until she started chemo again
And now she is sick
Sick in cycles only chemo can do 

And I'm on nurse duty again
And it's good to be here again
I feel strong doing this
It's a rhythm that sustains me 

It is a mystery
The day I will cease to be
I'll hold to what I have 'till then
And delight in every day

Thank you for joining us, and for helping to make this, the day that Yar wanted it to be. I hope you all agree that Yar achieved his wish for a beautiful death. You being here is testament to that. Yar loved all of you, and I know you all, we all, love him still. I miss him. In addition to the many ways Yar influenced and shaped me throughout my life, in the last year he provided a roadmap for how to have a beautiful death with grace, peace, love, and yes, happiness. I love you Yar.