This memorial website was created in memory of Aubrey Neblett Brown III. Please share your memories, photos, videos, and other documents for Aubrey's family and friends.
Tributes
Leave a tributeThank you Aubrey
Aubry taught many many things when we were young and also afterwords. He is always in my mind and I have a perennial nostalgia of hime
Daily I rehearse/remember our many wonderful adventures - and even some not so wonderful. I continue to miss you more than I would have thought possible. I teeter between gratitude for the years we shared, and regret that they could not have been longer. I have never forgotten Dr. Giverts' reminder a month before you left us, that you had already beaten all the odds! Forty years of cardiomyopathy was outside any of the known parameters. I just wish that his prognosis that we might have had you with us for another year had been accurate!
Thank you, Aubrey, for the many ways in which your life enhanced mine, as we were indeed life partners!
Thank you, Aubrey, for making possible my role as Granma Alice (without, as you smilingly reminded me, going through the usual apprenticeship!)
Thank you, Aubrey, for all the ways in which you lived a very principled life!
Thank you, Aubrey, for accompanying me to church - where you hummed the hymn tune harmonies, and remained silent during the liturgy.
I am eternally grateful that the last words we spoke to each other, just before you lost consciousness, were, "I love you, Aubrey. I'll be waiting for you when you leave the cath lab." "I love you, Alice." Then I left the ER cubicle, and they began to wheel you out. Suddenly, they pushed your gurney back into the cubicle (I later learned that you had gone into cardiac arrest.) I sat in the hallway as they worked on you. A woman came to tell me that you had a toxic level of potassium in your system. Bewildered, I asked: "are you telling me that my husband is dying?" "Yes, I'm sorry, but yes."
I called Jeanette to tell her what I had just learned. Then I called Burns and Lorraine, and Anne, to ask them to come watch with me. I called Syd to let him know what was happening (although regrettably I did not invite him to come accompany us.)
As the ER folk were trying to revive you, a woman asked whether I wanted to touch you. Of course I did. So I walked over to the foot of the bed, and held your ankle. When the ER folk gave up and left, I went to sit beside you - beside the shell which once held your living, breathing, loving, contentious, principled self!
Burns and Lorraine, and Anne, all arrived after you were gone. We sat together around your bed. Burns prayed. Someone asked whether I wanted your wedding ring - yes, of course I did. Burns and Lorraine took me home; Anne stayed over. I was in shock, could barely function. In the morning I sent an email to let friends know that you had left us. And invited them to come for one final songfest - which I thought of as "Protestant shiva!"
When I got back to the house that night I remembered that your parents had donated their bodies, so I tracked down information about MA recipients. BU
seemed right, since our friends Lorraine and Adrienne were respectively medical school doctor and statistician. I checked with Jeanette and Roy, then made the arrangements. More than a year later Jeanette, Lorraine and I attended the occasion to thank donors, met the medical students who had learned anatomy from your body (noting that your heart was of particular interest to the entire class!) - and received your cremains, which will eventually be scattered on top of Lookout in Montreat.
Once again I am full of gratitude for the gift of grace which led to the intersection of our lives. Once again I am overcome with grief that we were unable to spend our twilight years in each other's company.
i love you, Aubrey Neblett Brown 3rd!
We admired his social engangement but we admired his politness. He was a gentleman and a working class militant. We liked his conversation and now I like to remeber the time passed toghther and the exchanges of views.on everything, first of all our time at Columbia.
Rest well Aubrey Enridco and Sigrud .
Papá,
Today is the day I lost you—which suggests that part of the total ickiness I felt yesterday was no doubt to do with mourning.
I remember that day, three years ago. I was with Steve and the kids at a family-friendly Valentine’s Day party at Noam and Laura’s house that doubled as a birthday party for the Feb.13th-born Noam.
There were many kids, lovely food and drink, occasional near-complete conversations with grownups before inevitable kids’ boo-boos interrupted, requiring lavish kissing-away displays. And then there was a call on my cell that quickly rendered it all mere background noise.
I’d been with you just three days prior in Boston for a celebration of your 78th birthday, a party you proposed, having just been released from the hospital. You wanted to sing. And snowstorm be damned, your circle of Boston friends was going to be there to sing with you. It was a wonderful celebration, and sing you did—and dance, complete with Nigerian beads around your waist—delighting children and adults alike.
Just a day earlier you were sitting in a hospital room with your brother William, who had come to visit from North Carolina at my bidding (unbeknownst to you). I called on the phone, pretending to be in Philadelphia, and listened as you described how nice the nurses had been and some of the highlights of this, your most recent hospital stay. You were animatedly speaking into your flip phone as I rounded the corner and tiptoed into your room. The surprise-turned-to-delight on your face was worth every bit of subterfuge. Your laugh would have been a bellow if only you had the body mass for such a thing.
Quite the contrary. We helped you dress and headed back to the house in Jamaica Plain, but you’d grown so thin that as you walked—assisted on each side by Alice and William—up the back steps, your pants had other ideas. They plummeted to your ankles, leaving your little sticks of legs poking out from blue flannel boxer shorts for all to see. Fortunately, the snow drifts were already more than adequate to prevent any neighbors from having any idea of what had transpired.
Uncle William and I would share several shoveling shifts in those days together as relentless Mother Nature kept burying Boston in ever more snow.
Snow shoveling aside, it was a magical visit and a special time. As I needed to depart for the airport, you stood to bid me farewell. You lost your footing somehow and fell to the ground—fortunately not hurting yourself. You quickly and instinctively sought to right your frail, frail body. But somehow it was in that instant that I knew I was seeing you alive for the very last time.
I carried that feeling with me to the airport—probably desperately attempting to shove it down into my toes with the help of a cinnamon bun or some other something I surely didn’t need.
But it was precisely that feeling that leaped into my throat when my cell phone vibrated in my pocket at the Valentine’s Day party at Noam and Laura’s. Your almost imperceptible voice on the other end of the line—explaining that you were just so cold—fulfilled my deepest sense of dread. I probably asked some silly question about adequate blankets, when really what I wanted to say was how very much I loved you and how you were the perfect father for me despite your many failings that compounded so confoundingly with mine. Instead I talked about blankets. You talked about being so cold. I did tell you I loved you, and you told me you loved me, too. I felt so very far away. Because I knew the end was so very near.
It would be an hour later, maybe two, when Alice called to say that they were rushing you to the hospital by ambulance. Syd, who’d literally just arrived from Chicago, got to see you before you were whisked away. I know you still weren’t ready to go.
Just the day before you’d shown me the pully set-up you intended to use to keep doing your daily exercises. You only very reluctantly agreed to a few modifications made by me to make it so you could continue to do the things you wanted without traversing those treacherous steps to the basement.
You still had plans, I know. An inveterate agitator, you simply weren’t ready yet to give up the fight. But I also believe in my heart that seeing Syd, even for such a tragically short stint, did help you feel a little bit more ready to let go.
Alice called again…who knows how much time had passed. She was at the hospital now with you, and a friend had come to be with her. It was in that call that she said to me that she knew I wasn’t the praying sort but that now was the time for prayer. Was it because I didn’t know how to pray that her next call was to tell me that you’d died?
Valentine’s Day, forever bittersweet. I miss you, my Papá. I love who you helped me become.
As many probably well remember, Aubrey was famous for saying "I'll have to get back to you about that." After numerous invitations where he left this inviter in the lurch until the 11th hour, a remedy was found by invoking a particular deadline, which he, amazingly respected and abided by.
We all miss you, Aubrey.
Love, Ele
Love to Jeanette and Alice.
Norm
Suddenly a broad grin appeared on his face that did not immediately fade and he said after a minute or so, "I see you went to Davidson College." Yes, I added, wondering what he might know about Davidson. "Some members of my family went to Davidson," he added, still smiling.
"I was the black sheep of the family" (confirming my suspicions at that point for my West Virginia coalminers in blue coveralls), and then he turned and started out the door, adding over his shoulder as he turned the handle on the door into the waiting room, "I went to Harvard."
It took me a few minutes to pick my chin up from the floor, I was so flabbergasted, but delightfully so as I began to unravel the complexities that made up Aubrey Brown and subsequently learn of his many gifts and dedication to helping those less fortunate.
Miss you
Love, Bruce
In Nigeria, Several of us played some slightly? drunken early morning basketball games, in which Aubrey's brawn served him well. He was so smart and well educated, that while we were driving somewhere in Nigeria and at my request, he gave me a brief history of the Kings and Queens of England.
I met up with Aubrey twice after the Peace Corps. Once when He was active, as was I, in the Committee of Returned Volunteers (CRV). CRV’s one purpose was to work toward ending the Vietnam War.
The other time was when he lived in Raleigh County, West Virginia, about 60 miles south of where I lived. He was an underground coal miner working on politically educating the other miners.
He was brilliant and dedicated to his truths. He was one of those unique people who have amazed me. And in Nigeria, under the influence of some beer, he walked on his hands--probably didn't need the beer.
Leave a Tribute
Thank you Aubrey
I remember Aubrey as a fiery fighter for workers rights and as a grateful patient who always had a good word and greeting for those who worked with him. I was fortunate to be able to serve as one of his doctors when he lived in Maryland.
Sam Goldberg
One History Teacher to Another
I'm sharing this lovely remembrance, shared with me today by my junior high school U.S. history teacher, Cynthia Mostoller:
I remember your dad asking me--when I was in my second year of teaching--if I intended to teach pablum or the truth in American History. I could have kissed him for this question. By asking he was giving me his permission to go boldly. As I became more active in shaping history curricula from Deal and then for DC and for other agencies where I freelanced, I thought about your father. His engagement as a parent at Back to School night resonated far beyond that one simple question. I remain grateful.