Kent Brown Copes with Losses
College Sports Information Directors of America
By Melissa Isaacson
Chicago Tribune
Kent Brown's face was ashen, his expression painfully blank.
Brown, assistant athletic director and media relations chief for the University of Illinois, had just watched as coach Bruce Weber rushed off to the hospital to attend to his stricken mother. Another Illinois official wanted to know if Brown was going to accompany the group to Rush University Medical Center.
"No, I'll stay here," Brown said quietly, electing to remain at the United Center where he could relay updates to the media.
And then to no one in particular, he whispered, "I'm not sure I can go to another hospital."
You could not blame Brown if he feared the worst. When you have to tell your 6-year-old son and 9-year-old daughter that their 38-year-old mother had died, and then, barely six months later, break it to your father that he has two to three months to live, you have come face-to-face with the harshest life has to offer.
"I would never wish it on anyone," Brown said.
With loss, Brown, 41, has gained a perspective that reminds him that even as Illini mania swirls madly about him, it is not life and it surely is not death. And yet, to observe how Brown has begun to regroup from the death of his wife, Robin, and father, Robert, is to see the perfect eye of an orange hurricane.
In his former life, he had been a fairly typical husband and father of two.
"I went through a lot of years where I relied on Robin to just tell me where I needed to be. I'd say, 'I'll be at the event. Just tell me what time and where and I'll be there.' And on the edge, I knew some of her friends in more of the 'Hey, how's it going?' way but not closely," he recalled.
They are now his dearest friends, his closest confidantes and his family's lifeline.
Robin Brown was diagnosed 2½ years ago with breast cancer. The Browns were told it had spread to her lymph nodes, which meant there was no guarantee the cancer would not return, but the couple was young, strong and hopeful.
"She went through the normal thing," Kent said. "There's the 'Oh, my God, I'm not going to see my kids grow up,' to reality: 'It's here, now how are we going to heal it? How are we going to fix it?'"
She had responded well to 18 months of chemotherapy and in July, the family—Kent, Robin and their children, Nicole and Ty—had a great week staying in a cottage on Eagle River, Wis.
But toward the end of the trip, Robin told Kent she was having trouble breathing and felt weak. An MRI on the Tuesday after they returned home revealed that in only five weeks, a mass had appeared and surrounded her heart. Three days later, she asked her husband to take her to the hospital.
They never did have that talk addressing the inevitable, Kent said, until two days before she died as doctors were considering surgery.
"Even the last weekend, I was still very optimistic that things were going to turn around," he said.
He was called back to the hospital at 5:30 a.m. Monday, Aug. 16. Robin survived emergency surgery that morning, but doctors were unable to revive her after a second cardiac arrest following the operation.
At the funeral, her husband told mourners about the first time he saw her on the school bus in their hometown of Atwood-Hammond, Ill. She was just 5-feet-1-inch to his 6-7, but Kent soon realized the enormity of the void she left.
"You know but you don't know," he said. "You know everything she does but you maybe don't appreciate it until you have to do it."
The town of St. Joseph (pop. 3,000) rallied around the family, setting up dinner schedules and helping with the kids. At work, Brown's staff did not ask, they simply did.
"Kent is just an amazing person in general," associate sports information director Cassie Arner said. "I look at him not just as a boss but as one of my closest friends, and that's how he treats everyone in his life. When we lost Robin, it felt like I was losing one of my closest friends. For his office mates, it broke us all up. We've tried to do everything we can to make Kent's life as close to normal as possible."
Illini players have gone out of their way, Brown said, to befriend his children, who idolize them in return. And Weber, he said, "is unbelievable. Every once in a while he'll drop an envelope off and it will have some gift certificates for restaurants or something, and he'll say, 'Hey, take the kids out to dinner.'"
Athletic director Ron Guenther, Brown said, simply told him to take care of his children.
"If I had a role to play," Guenther said, "it was just to relieve guilt that I know everybody has. The most important thing I could do was tell him, 'Hey, we've got it handled, we've got it covered.'"
In learning to shut off his computer by 5:30 p.m. each day, Brown also started to figure out some of Robin's organizational techniques and, maybe most important, how to accept help.
"It's a tragedy that a 6-year-old and a 9-year-old should lose their mother," he said. "Kids that age should not lose their mom. But there are a lot of single parents in the world and I've gained a huge amount of respect for all the things that go on. In some ways I'm very fortunate in that I have an unbelievable help network of people who have stepped forward knowing what I do and the schedule I could keep, who have said, 'We'll help, we'll do whatever we need to do, pick up kids, get them to Cub Scouts, take them to soccer practice.'
"All of a sudden I have a whole set of new friends who I've opened up my life to and gotten to know on a much more personal basis than I'd have ever thought."
As Nicole and Ty returned to school and football season eased into basketball, the family finally seemed to settle into a routine. Kent's father had surgery to remove a cancerous kidney in the summer, but Richard Brown was out of the hospital in 48 hours and soon active, able to help out.
But stroke-like symptoms turned out to be a brain tumor, which was removed late in the fall. Again, Brown's dad appeared to be recovered. But in February he was hospitalized with pneumonia, and an MRI revealed three or four more lesions on his brain and the old tumor regenerated. While Brown's mother spoke to the doctor, his father asked him if he'd heard the results.
"He went through the same questions we asked the doctor," Kent said. "He asked, 'Are they going to do surgery?' Well, they can't, Dad, because there's three or four of them. 'What about chemotherapy?' It won't work. 'Radiation?' It's not an option. Then I watched that realization in his eyes as all of a sudden he knew."
The doctors had given him two to three months. Three weeks later, on Feb. 28, Richard Brown died. Kent had scarcely buried his father when he was consoling Weber on the death of his mother.
Now they both must go back to work, a routine with which Brown is well acquainted. And as the Illini begin what they hope will be a three-week run through the NCAA tournament, Nicole and Ty Brown are along for the ride. But one way or the other, there are soccer games and Sunday school and life to live.
"Now I worry about fixing lunches every morning and making sure I have Ty's snack there, and this week I have to finish his pinewood derby car for Cub Scouts," Brown said. "The derby is Friday night and I'm not going to be there, but we have to finish painting the car and putting the wheels on. So that's on my mind."
"When you have two kids, you have to move on. At some point, I guess you have to think you have some good things coming toward you, so you try to think positive as much as you can. You just keep going."