Bob Garff (1942-2020)
Beetle
Robert Heiner Garff, 1942-2020 		This COVID-19 thing is real. I hate it. I didn’t really take it seriously until about noon on the 29th of last March, when a rumor surfaced that it had killed Bob Garff. I called Kathi immediately, and she confirmed that they had both been hospitalized, and she was recovering, but that the virus had gone “straight to his lungs” and carried him off.

If money, or merit, or the love and good will of others—or, one would pray, the tender protection of that Divine Providence of which I’m laboring to testify here—could protect a man from external evil, Bob, of all people, should have been spared.
I’m surely going to quit telling people I’m mad at him for releasing me as a sealer in the Bountiful Temple. He said he wanted me back, and I believe him, but with both Salt Lake and Ogden Temples down, he needed his full complement of 60 sealers to carry the ordinance load, and with a clot in my lung, I wasn’t much good to him.
From Bob’s Larkin Mortuary obituary:
Bob genuinely loved people. From across a room he would double tap his fist on his heart and then point to the person he wanted to reach. It was as if he were saying, “I believe in you!” or, “I love you!” or, “From my heart to yours!” He made everyone feel important.
If you want a summary of Bob’s full life and accomplishments, I’ll just refer you to that obituary. Everybody with eyes in Utah has to know his name—or at least his dad’s: every other license plate on the car in front of you in traffic bears the name of Ken Garff. Like many wealthy Latter-day Saints, he served without remuneration in an impressive variety of demanding leadership positions. I’m told he had as much as Mitt Romney to do with bringing the Olympics to Salt Lake, all those years ago.

When Kathi and I were both working in the Bountiful Temple under her husband’s direction, we got a kick out of telling folks of the genealogical distinction we share: she’s descended from Amos Herr Neff, brother to my Great-Grandpa Franklin Neff. Which makes both of us special in milling and Church-service circles, and also makes her a niece (as I a nephew) of the great Orrin Porter Rockwell. And third cousins to each other and to the also-great Gordon Bitner Hinckley and Joseph Bitner Wirthlin.

Each year that we served together there, Bob and Kathi hosted a barbecue for the sealers, up at their “cabin” in the Uintas, and we’ll always rejoice in the sweetness of that fellowship. The virus can’t take that away from us, nor make it any less eternal.
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