William "Jeffrey" Roche III

It's so hard to write about Jeff, not only because the pain of losing him is still so raw and unpredictable and unfairly uncompromising, but because he was a unique and complex man.

There are so many memories. I clearly remember the morning of August 27, 1991, when my very pregnant wife Didi woke me in the early morning and told me she "felt funny." I said maybe we should go to our post hospital on Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, a couple of miles from home, just to be on the safe side. A few hours later Jeff was born. I so remember bringing him home, amazed and joyful but stunned and terrified that this small life depended so on me and Didi -- two completely unprepared and unskilled new parents. I remember my parents Roderick and Geraldine Roche (deceased in 2003 and 2004 respectively) and Didi's mother Nora (deceased in 2014) and father Arthur (Joe) Gratzl being so proud and happy to be grandparents. My other strong memory from that time is that when Didi went bowling weekly while I watched Jeff at home, that I had to walk nonstop holding him because he would cry immediately if I stopped.

Not long afterward we left Missouri for the first of two spans living in Germany, from the time Jeff was 1-3 years old and for several more years from the time he was 10. His pride and joy for living in and touring Europe remained strong all his life. In Worms (our first home in Germany) we watched his fright and amazement seeing his first fireworks show; it was sad and charming all at once. I held him on my shoulders to watch a festival parade. And we couldn't help but laugh when he landed face-first (but unhurt) at the bottom of a slide and came up with a mouthful of dirt. I took him to stay at my cousin's house in Mannheim while his sibling was being born in Heidelberg. We smiled at his excited joy when he caught a small trout in a German pond. We visited so many places with him. In England we stayed with good friends in Kent, toured London, and the kids climbed St. Michael's Mount in Cornwall. In Luxembourg we strolled through the capital city and its high bridges over steep ravines. We took photos of the two of them posing in ridiculously oversized wooden shoes in the Netherlands. We saw how sincerely moved he was by the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, and how he loved Germany's Christmas markets. He posed for selfies under the Eiffel Tower at night and laughed at Disneyland Paris. We walked in gorgeous green hills and lovely small towns in Austria and rode the train and slide into the salt mines in nearby Berchtesgaden in Germany. He and I rode the bus to Prague with friends (and he threw up all over me!). In Ireland he surfed and kissed the Blarney Stone and we ate (and actually loved) haggis in a castle cottage in Scotland. He rocked and danced to favorite bands Green Day along the Rhine in Mainz and U2 in the Olympic stadium in Munich. He went on Boy Scout trips to the amazing German and Swiss Alps. He shared a wonderful Italian Christmas dinner with close friends in Bergamo (who told me just weeks ago that their son, now grown, still has the gift Jeff gave him when he was a toddler), and did all the tourist things that tourists do in Cinque Terre, Milan, Pisa, Florence and Venice. The kids put on mock bullfights in the bull ring at Ronda in Spain. And so much much more. We still laugh at the memories of Jeff walking into my colonel's office in Heidelberg, dropping onto the couch, putting his feet up and saying, "Hey, colonel dude", and the day we suddenly realized that in his garbled child's voice he had been calling my black work colleague (who laughed harder than we did) "Mr. Chocolate." He developed passions for skateboarding and joining with fellow graffiti artists to (legally) paint an underpass in Heidelberg.

We returned from our first tour in Germany to Fort Eustis, Virginia, and lived in Williamsburg for several years. During those years we smiled at Jeff's amazement at seeing the Easter Bunny's "footprints" in our house and ears (seen above our back fence as he ran away). He and I saw Disney's "Toy Story" in Jamestown the first day it was released, and we took him many times to play and ride at Busch Gardens, just a mile or two from home. Didi and I cheered him on at his T-ball games. And I gained my absolute favorite Jeff memory: riding through the forest on the Old Williamsburg Road with him in his seat on the back of my bike, continually shouting loudly, "Go, Dad, Go!" But there were hard memories, too. The rest of the family stayed in Williamsburg while I completed a yearlong tour in Egypt, and while I was away, he crawled under his bed with a lit candle, setting set the house afire and terrifying his mother and grandmother Nora who thought his sibling was trapped in the blaze. Fortunately, everyone was safe and no one was hurt. After Williamsburg we went to my last Army tour in Atlanta, where my favorite memories of Jeff were playing and laughing with him in the neighborhood pool and in the street in front of our apartment during a torrential downpour.

After I retired from uniformed Army life we returned to Germany for more good memories and touring. But during those years things also got very hard with Jeff. As he grew into a teen, he became increasingly rebellious. Without going into the awful details, his bad behavior got pretty out of control. He exhausted and worried and scared us, was in constant trouble of some kind, and literally caused us to come within days of being back to the States from Germany, and so we made the very very difficult decision to send him to America alone, to Boys Town in Omaha.

He and I flew to Nebraska from Germany. We toured Boys Town, got him registered and indoctrinated, and then he and I went to see the film "Nacho Libre" (a silly movie we both enjoyed immensely) before I had to do the second-hardest thing I ever had to do with Jeff -- say goodbye and return to Germany without him. I nearly gave in and brought him with me.

But Jeff did well at Boys Town. He enrolled in JROTC in Boys Town High School and became the highest-ranking cadet in the school. We all flew from Germany and joined his maternal grandparents to see him graduate from high school with honors.

Unfortunately, Jeff endured more difficult years after leaving Boys Town. We tried to send him to college, enrolling him at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. But he couldn't adjust to his studies and a year after he began, he was thrown out of his dormitory for stealing from a roommate and left the school with no credits and no real direction. From then on, he worked a series of jobs in retail positions and cooking at area restaurants.

He developed a passion for cooking, in fact, as well as for skateboarding, the outdoors, movies, photography, rap music (he supported several local rappers in Omaha) and pet snakes, lizards and fish. And he found perhaps his greatest passion: his girlfriend Nikki, with whom he lived the last 13 years of his life. Unfortunately -- regretfully -- because of all the tough times and because I wanted him to mature and stand on his own, I intentionally didn't see Jeff for the last 10 of those years and spoke with him nearly not at all. We did begin to reconnect and talk again in his last year, and I was with him continually for his last two days.

But while Jeff could be difficult to the point of infuriating during his teens and later years, he eventually mellowed somewhat. And he always -- even during the toughest of times -- had a kind and gentle soul capable of fierce loyalty and nearly limitless love for those he cared for. Many people have heard me say time and again that the worst thing Jeff ever did was make you love him and care deeply for him.

Jeff is survived by his parents William (Bill) Roche and Danette (Didi) Gratzl Roche (currently residing in Evans, Georgia); his sibling Amelia Lawless, residing in Fredericksburg, Virginia; his maternal grandparents Joe and Donna Gratzl of Siloam Springs, Arkansas; Aunt Janet Gratzl in Rogers, Arkansas; and several more members of his mother's family in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas and Florida; his beloved paternal aunts Judy Haskins and Dori MacDonald in Florida and several cousins and family members there and in Connecticut, New York, South Carolina and Texas; and perhaps most of all, his longtime girlfriend Nikki Plagge in Omaha.

Following a lengthy illness, Jeff left this world on December 19, 2024 at the age of 33 -- far far too soon. He is, and always will be, terribly missed.

Jeff said many times that he didn't care if he had money and that he wished money wasn't a necessary part of our society, he just wanted to help people. For those who would like to make a gesture on Jeff's behalf, it would have pleased him greatly if you made a small contribution to the American Red Cross, whose blood services program helped Jeff in his final days and help so many others.