death – Kevin Smokler

Remembering Brad Graham (1968-2010)…

Smokler on January 26, 2010

It's taken me the better part of 3 weeks to write something, anything, about the death of my dear friend Brad Graham. I looked forward to seeing him each spring at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival. He will not be there this March which feels to me like the entire month has been ripped from the calendar.

I had known Brad for nearly a decade. We met in the fall of 2001 in San Francisco when was new in town, largely going nowhere, trying to find community and a place to fit in. I came to an event I'd heard of but known little about, something called Fray Day, where strangers told true stories in front of a live audience.

I was good at that sort of thing. This Brad person seemed to know everyone there and apparently wrote some very funny stuff on a website a lot of his admirers at the event read.

I told a story, which went over fine, then retreated to a corner. A few minutes later, I ran into this Brad person on my way to the bathroom, who remarked that he had liked my story and that he and his friends at the event were going to brunch the next morning. Would I come?

I did. I'm still friends with many of the attendees at that brunch. Others I did business with or were collaborators and advisers on future creative projects. At at one time all have given me advice, job leads, set me up on dates, invited me to speak somewhere or simply inspired me to try something that before then had scared me half to death.

I trace the beginnings of both my professional life and life in San Francisco to that brunch. It would have never happened without Brad Graham and what made him so special.

To Brad, everyone counted. There were no A-groups and B-groups no "invitation onlys" or VIP lounges. There was "you make the party fun for others" or you don't. "You don't" meant you couldn't come. Everyone else was in. To Brad, the things he loved–the theater, gatherings, the internet–but a means to create a welcome place for everyone. A community.

Break Bread with Brad, the get-together he hosted on SXSWi's opening night marked
its unofficial yet spiritual opening, much in the way the Olympic torch
lightening signified the games are open rather than the host country's
president saying so. My own smaller, private event on the festival's last night ( Create Kookies with Kevin)
was stolen outright from Brad with his blessing. My goal was to create
the same warm, open environment in a more intimate setting as Brad had
done in a large jovial one. His constant presence at my event is the
best evidence I have that I succeeded.

Technology conferences do not usually attract extroverts and game show hosts. But the number of self-described geeks who made lifelong friends thanks to a simple "hello" and "quit standing out here in the rain" from Brad is too numerous to count. I count at least three who met their spouses this way.

I have no objection if your primary relationship with technology is
your cell phone plan or mad coding skills. I just think that's
limiting, like saying food is about metabolism. As Brad showed me,
technology can be about so much more. Brad was a journalist by training
(as am I) but saw social media as a method of connecting people, with
each other, with culture, with these they love and things they do not
yet know they love. Yes, he coined the term "blogosphere" but that
matters to me about as much as why Brad passed away so young. Which is not at all. What mattered to me was the power he saw in technology for us all to lead richer lives.

There are plans at SXSW this year for an honorary Break Bread For Brad. The hat is being passed for the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis where Brad worked as Public Relations Manager worked for so many years. Fray Cafe (the version of Fray Day that happens in Austin during SXSW) will go on as planned, with me hosting, and the event dedicated to Brad. My dinner this year will have an empty chair, right next to Kevin Lawver, where Brad always sat and made a lot of trouble.

It's all wonderful, moving and real. But it will never be enough. Maybe if I didn't write about this pain, I could lie to myself and say that Brad is not gone, that spring will come and with it Austin, old friends and another layer of memories. But then we quit lying because we are not children anymore and we cannot bring back last year any more than we can grow younger.

It is the morning after. Or three weeks after. Then we know that that there will be no more Bread Bread With Brads with Brad, that I will never again hear his laugh, which sounded like a football thrown into a copper barrel. That he will never again be my loudest dinner guest. That he will never both make me uncomfortable and crack me up with his broad come-ons. That I will never get share my newfound love of theater with an expertise like his. That he will never again serve as friend, mentor and inspiration to the hundreds of us who learned from him both how to be good and how to be better. And that he will never know my wife, who is coming to SXSWi for the first time this year, eager to share this vital part of my life with me and to meet everyone who makes it special.

I want this confusion, this sadness, this anger to go somewhere, anywhere but here. I want, sometime, some crazy way to turn it into something beautiful. To be as Brad always was…

"To be fabulous, to be unafraid, to be fearless, to hit that note"

We will try, Brad. You taught us how.

My Uncle Barry: (1909-2001)

Smokler on July 1, 2001

I’ve been avoiding writing this. I’ve got a few other pieces that need finishing and my energy needs to be targeted toward getting everything ready. Then something happened. And now it’s harder than I thought to do this.

On Wednesday afternoon, my uncle, Barry Jeffery, died at the age of 92. My youngest brother Daniel had been with him at the hospital in Florida. He called me that night from back in New Haven and I got the message when I came home from celebrating Suzan’s birthday. It was after midnight when I found out that my uncle said he wasn’t scared of dying, that he had no regrets about his life and that it meant a lot to him that we had talked on the phone the day before. Even though he couldn’t hear me through the oxygen mask, I had told him that I loved him and that I hoped to be something like the man he was someday. Daniel, who seems to be on top of every situation, could barely speak. I hung up the phone, then looked at myself in the mirror while I cried.

My Uncle Barry was an old man who recognized his time had come. In his letters and phone calls from the past few years, he talked about spending his days painting, writing, and shuttling back and forth to “various doctors, you know how it is.” Then he’d laugh.

Last week, his aeorta started collapsing on itself and his lungs filled with blood. He took excellent care of himself, still swam laps well into his 80s. But his body was imploding, one vital piece at a time. This probably has a scientific name, but to me, it just sounded like plain old aging.

Nonetheless, I can’t say that made me any more ready for it. He was in his early 70s when we became friends and he gave me a silver dollar for cleaning the leaves off the bottom of his pool. The net was twice the size of my eight-year old frame so he held the handle. He wrote letters to newspapers on current events throughout his retirement, winning several awards from the Florida Sun Sentinel and the Miami Herald. He painted western scenes and vignettes inspired by the cowboy movies he loved as a boy. He was very close to Daniel, who would come by at Christmas time and discuss politics and world events for hours. Daniel got Barry an AOL account and before long, my 90-year old uncle had a pen pal, a 25-year old graduate student in Japan.

Barry knew he was going to die someday, probably someday soon, but saw it as an afterthought. He had a lot to do before then.

Daniel and I talked several times this week in preparation for the eulogy he would give at Barry’s funeral. Our uncle was a dreamer saw himself as a cowboy, an English gentleman and always a hawk-eyed witness to history. But he spent most of his life in the textile business, paying bills, raising kids. He wasn’t a social guy but loved heated conversation. He knew his end was near but lived as though it would never come.

When you meet someone in the twilight of their life, you have all images and no backstory. You have their memories, once removed, after their kids are grown, after they’ve made most of their big decisions. If you’re lucky, you get to see them do what they’ve always wanted to, because they know there isn’t much time left. But you also have to be content with the mystery, the seeming contradictions. You weren’t there to see them grow.

According to our Aunt Teddy, Barry saw us as his adopted grandsons, a relationship Daniel took seriously and I probably didn’t. Barry would Instant Message me while I was working and I’d put him off. I’d send him pieces of my writing when he asked and I resented that he didn’t understand my sarcastic tone or my “Gen-X-isms.” I neglected to email him back because I felt like I’d spend most of the letter explaining who I was. I was in my early 20s and barely knew myself. I didn’t have to time to justify it to some old guy. Even when my Aunt Teddy told me he wasn’t well, that I should send him an email, I didn’t write him. He understood if I was busy. “You’re a businessman now,” she said. I didn’t think I would run out of time.

I felt some of that this week. My Uncle was gone and I was too busy to grieve, two major deadlines on Thursday, a trip away for the weekend, a relaunch in less than two weeks. Twice this week, I looked up and it was too late to call Teddy, to tell her how sad I was, that I was there for her if she needed me. Is this what working for myself, molding this dream from fresh clay, means? That sometimes being human has to wait until my schedule frees up? I didn’t go to Florida this Christmas because of work. I almost didn’t see them both last year but I made a stop, grudgingly, on the way back home, dragging my old friend Justin along. What is the matter with me?

I still didn’t know when I knelt in front of my window and prayed for the soul of my Uncle Barry, that he was somewhere with more time on his hands, where it didn’t hurt to breathe and where I would see him again someday.

Moving into my professional life, I will have to create, produce, manage and decide, faster and with more conviction than I’ve ever had. It scares me every time I think about it. But I’m going to continue on here and dedicate the next chapter of this story to my late Uncle Barry. He taught me that people can know you through your dreams and desires, and that sharing them without expectation or judgement means sharing your joy. That it’s not in competition with the rest of your life, but perhaps the most enriching part of it. And that we often have more time than we think.