Sir Purr
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- Mar 16, 2019
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“All that stuff wasn’t close to the real adversity that I had to face throughout all that,” Bonnafon said Saturday. “I was dealing with way heavier stuff outside of football.”
Three games into Bonnafon’s freshman season, his world changed forever.
His phone rang on Monday morning after a loss to Virginia. It was a call from the emergency room.
“Are you related to Wallace Bonnafon?” they asked.
“That’s my dad,” Reggie replied.
Wallace started dialysis treatments for kidney disease in 2013, so this wasn't completely out of the blue. Reggie picked up his mom on the way to hospital and arrived thinking there was some minor issue that needed to be addressed at one of his routine appointments.
“I wasn’t thinking nothing of it. With dialysis there could have been a minor malfunction,” Bonnafon recalled. “But we get to the ER and started getting a little scared.
“Doctor comes and said my dad went ‘code blue’ seven times.”
Bonnafon said he still doesn’t know exactly what “code blue” means. He knows enough.
“My mom was hysterical. We went back and saw my dad with tubes all down his throat. It all happened so fast,” Bonnafon said. “I was having a conversation with him 12 hours ago.”
Wallace Bonnafon died that day. He was 51.
His son, a wide-eyed freshman, was stunned.