Having recently relocated to North Carolina to be closer to eldest daughter Madison Brush, son-in-law Caleb Brush and their kids, “I was traveling back to Flagstaff,” the Sister Wives star reflected on the May 4 episode of the TLC reality series.
At the time, she and Arizona-based Garrison were “texting all day long,” Janelle noted. “And this was not unusual because he and I talked probably three times a day.”
In fact, the mom of six—she and Kody also share Logan Brown, Hunter Brown, Gabriel Brown and Savanah Brown—made it a point to respond to all of Garrison’s missives.
“I knew he was struggling,” Janelle said of her middle child’s battle with anxiety and depression, “and I always just picked up the phone and I always make it a point to just talk to him.”
Their conversation didn’t involve anything particularly remarkable, she detailed, “it was just, I think he needed the connection.”
Nor was she particularly alarmed when he stopped responding to her texts. But since she knew he’d been drinking—”He would go through periods where he was really good and then he just would have a binge just as part of the cycle,” Janelle explained—as she laid down in bed around 8:30 p.m., she called Logan and Hunter.
“Because we’ve tag-teamed,” Janelle explained of how the family continued to rally around the Nevada National Guard staff sergeant, “I said, ‘Will you guys see if Garrison will repond to you?’ And so they were on it.”
Confident her baby was in good hands (“They said, ‘Mom, we’re on it. We’ll just kind of check on him and make sure he’s OK'”), the 55-year-old fell asleep.
She could have never imagined the wake-up call she received.
“Gabriel had found him,” Janelle said of Garrison, who died by suicide. “He’s like, ‘Mom, he’s gone.’ I mean, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘He’s dead. He killed himself.'”
The moments that followed were largely a blur.
“I don’t remember the next few minutes,” Janelle admitted of her shock, “but I got in the car and drove.”
She made her way to Garrison’s home, calling daughter Maddie along the way. And at some point, members of their expansive family began to rally around her.
“I called Janelle,” Meri recounted on the May 4 episode devoted to Garrison’s passing, “I said, ‘I’m stopping, I’m getting food and I’ll be over in a little bit. I didn’t know what else to do.”
Because, as a family, they’d fought with every fiber of their beings to avoid this type of outcome.
“He had anxiety and depression,” Janelle explained to her younger sister Carrie of Garrison’s mental health struggles, “and then he started drinking as a way to sort of soothe that.” Instead, she continued, it “became the animal he couldn’t get a hold of.”
Though she and the rest of the brood did their best to wrap their arms around him.
“We knew he was in a bad place,” said Janelle. “We were doing everything we could for him, but he just, he just couldn’t get on top of it.”
As their grief began to replace the shock, Kody and Janelle went about the business of burying their baby boy.
“Kody and I decided that we would cremate him,” Janelle detailed. “I knew that that’s what he wanted, so we did that. And that way it gives us the opportunity to have the funeral in a better time of year.”
His final resting place is on the family’s plot in Wyoming. “He loved it there,” said Janelle, “so it felt appropriate.”
In this, she and her former husband were in lockstep.
“I remember sitting there with Janelle and I was just going, ‘Hey, I really just want to take my boy home,'” he reflected in the episode. “And so I said, ‘Let’s take him back to Wyoming and let’s bury him next to Grandma Cheryl. We just totally agreed that would be the right thing.”
As Garrison’s family mourns his tremendous loss, keep reading to familarize yourself with the outsized Brown brood.
