My oldest brother John was the brightest in our family and definitely the funniest person I knew. It seemed like he was in school most of his life — first at Vanderbilt as an undergraduate with a business major, then at Belmont, where he studied before taking his CPA exam and also obtained an MBA. At the time of his death in 1992, he was working on his Ph.D. in business from Purdue University in Indiana. He used to say that he wanted to have more letters after his name than in his name.
In between periods at school, he worked as an accountant for a major firm in Nashville, but really seemed to like the academic life. His hobbies included building things like his first record player, model airplanes and rockets. He had a very dry sense of humor that could sometimes be a little biting, although he never meant it to be too critical, and would talk with anyone about almost any subject. Nobody escaped his sharp wit, including his little sister, and we often stayed up late in the night discussing various themes and cracking jokes about whatever we were talking about. Nothing was out of bounds in our late-night talks.
He was also one of the bravest people I’ve known. If asked how he was doing, like most Southerners, his answer was always “fine.” He never complained about feeling ill or getting the short end of the stick, even when he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in his early 20s, at the beginning of his professional and personal life as a CPA, husband and, later, father.
My brother was diagnosed in the early 1970s, before most of the new, promising treatments had been developed. He had a very severe case of MS, certainly not the normal progression many patients experience. As his illness worsened, he had to use a cane, then a walker, then a wheelchair, all by the time he was in his mid-30s. He eventually experienced the disintegration of his marriage. He didn’t complain, even as he had more and more difficulty working, first as an accountant, then a teacher. He was eventually bed-bound and unable to work at all.
I remember in one of our many late-night discussions about random issues, we started talking about people who had committed suicide, and I apprehensively asked him if he had ever thought about it. He looked at me as though I were crazy and vehemently said that he had never thought about it. I think that to him, that would have been giving up, something he never did.
I got a call one day in 1992 while I was away living in Texas and John was still living in Nashville with family. They said that he had apparently thrown a clot that traveled to his lungs. He was gone very suddenly, just shy of his 40th birthday. People who are largely immobile and have diseases like multiple sclerosis are prone to such occurrences, even though MS is not a fatal disease in itself.
I flew home for his funeral that day with very little sleep, feeling quite depressed. But later that night, after the viewing, a few of us gathered at my mother’s house and stayed up laughing and joking about all the funny things my brother had said and done. As sad as we were that night, it still felt like John was with us, enjoying the late-night talks as he always did. After all these years I still feel like he is with us, especially when I hear something that makes me laugh.
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