How Beautiful Upon the Mountains: The Legacy of Charles Brown Senior

My grandfather's life and death have taught me about the kind of legacy I hope to build in this world.

When I received tenure at Wharton, I stood at a crossroads and was confronted by a profound question. What was next? What was the point of my professional life? I had grasped the brass ring, had achieved lifetime job security at the best business school in the world (whatever the good people of Palo Alto or Cambridge have to say about it). And now…more of the same?

Fortunately, I have some great models to guide me, none greater than my grandfather, Charles Brown. This week’s personal essay is a tribute to this man, my beloved mentor and hero, whose legacy has guided my sense of what I can and should be.

A Yellow Legal Pad and a Scratchy Recording

Some time ago, my sister found in an old box the handwritten eulogy my grandfather had written for my father. When she shared a scanned copy with the family, another sibling discovered the audio of the same eulogy. I was nine years old when I heard that eulogy live and remember only one or two of the jokes this hilarious and tender man told. Reading Grandpa’s swervy cursive on a yellow legal pad and hearing his broken baritone on that recording as an adult and a father myself was a painful and beautiful experience, giving me a glimpse into what an extraordinary many my grandfather was.

I have written before about my father and his difficult life. After my parents divorced his physical health, never strong, almost immediately started to deteriorate. Over the course of the next few years, organ failure put him in and out of the hospital. An experimental transplant failed, and in early December 1990—a little less than five years after my parents divorced—his hope for recovery was dubious.

The Christmas from Hell

Mom had moved on. She met a man, Terry, and married December 21, 1990. The next two weeks were intense for us all. Terry moved us from our home in Utah and to Oklahoma so that he could study at the University of Oklahoma in library science. They had scheduled the move for January 5.  Mom and Terry would be on a honeymoon for most of the time between.

While they were away, Dad’s health took a final turn for the worse. On December 30, 1990, we received word from Grandpa at the hospital that Dad would not recover. He had, at most, weeks to live. Given the inflexibility of the move and for other reasons, it was clear to us all that that day was the last time we would ever see my father again.

My brother, all of 18 years old and home on Christmas break, packed up my siblings and me into our station wagon, and drove us to the hospital for the final goodbye. Grandpa greeted us there and led us through that scene of exquisite grief, for him and for us, as we tried to put into words our complex feelings for this man whose life had been so full of unmet potential and who left behind so much devastation.

Dad died three days later, on January 2. Grandpa scheduled the funeral so that we could make it (the move could not be altered for reasons that I still don’t fully grasp; we parked the U-Haul in the Church parking lot so we could make our escape).

In those two weeks—Mom’s wedding, the goodbye to Dad, the death and funeral, the move from Utah to Oklahoma—aged us all by years. I barely remember celebrating Christmas or New Year’s; this was not a season of celebration, to put it mildly.

The Grandpa We Loved

No one, I think, suffered more than Grandpa Brown. From my 9-year-old perspective, he was one of the few sources of light during that traumatic and chaotic scene. He was, on his worst days, simply a joy to be around. On his best, no one could match the love that he shared so freely with us all. He told hilarious jokes, knew magic tricks, and thought his grandchildren were endlessly charming. He could spin stories out of nothing, entertaining us for hours. He could fold his handkerchief into animals. He even adopted the shirts, belt buckles, and boots of a cowboy, although he was an academic administrator from Utah and Southern California with no obvious connection to cowboys. He was just his own man, none like him on earth. He laughed easily, cried easily, and just loved being in the presence of his grandchildren.

And present he was. Every major life event was accompanied by Grandpa, with either a Dairy Queen Blizzard in hand or the announcement of a trip to the buffet for dinner to take the edge off of the slow-burning tragedies that he knew my family was experiencing. These were very hard times for us. His visits constituted almost the entirety of my exposure to restaurants for many years. They were extraordinary. To this day, I feel downright giddy in a buffet.

Hidden Pain

As an adult, Grandpa and I became very close friends and confidantes (fun fact: he played a singular role in my engagement to Nikki, a story for another day). At that time, I learned that there was so much more to Grandpa than cowboy shirts and comedian handkerchief mice. He carried deep pain for the way his life had played out. His father was Hugh B. Brown, a very prominent senior leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, making him something of a celebrity in the Mountain West in the postwar era. Grandpa took great pride in his father, but he had to grapple with the famous man’s long shadow in the insular communities of the Latter-day Saints. He also felt unhappy in his career, retiring as soon as he was eligible and looking back on his time as an academic administrator with a sense of frustration. I always thought he was modest when I heard him downplay his professional accomplishments. He was actually quite tortured by the legacy of his famous father and the sense that he might have done more with his life.

On top of it all he felt overwhelmed by grief for his children. He had five; three would predecease him. He had already buried one of his five kids in 1986, the victim of breast cancer. Dad’s death was a slow-burning disaster that began when he was a child, struggling with severe mental illness and behavioral problems that Grandpa could not cure, despite heroic efforts.

After decades of spending time and money trying and failing to discover what puzzle was missing from Dad’s painful life, Grandpa was now responsible for burying him. By the time of his funeral, my father had alienated almost everyone in his life, including his mother, Grandma Brown. Dad died, loved consistently by almost no one beyond Grandpa. But Grandpa never flinched, never held back, never waffled in his love for his child. He was the only constant in Dad’s tumultuous life.

Eulogy Amidst Tragedy

As Grandpa stood up to honor his boy who he, almost alone, loved with his whole heart, he also recognized that Dad left so many deep wounds in his wake. He looked out upon the somewhat grubby faces of his grandchildren, my siblings and me, who were minutes later going to leave to Oklahoma, far away from him, with a new stepfather none of us really knew. (The good news is that this stepfather did not stay with us for long.)

This was the challenge Grandpa faced, and this is how he faced it. I’m going to quote somewhat expansively from his eulogy.

One week ago, it became my painful duty to advise Charles of his true condition. This was necessary to give him time to take care of important but unfinished professional and personal matters. “Charles,” I said, “you are a very sick man. You have but a few weeks, not a few months to live.” “Whose verdict is that?” He responded. “Your doctors have both told me that, barring a miracle, your recent downward trend will continue, with the result being inevitable.”

He sobbed very briefly, then responded, “we will have to await the verdict of higher authority.”

Three days later, that higher authority sentenced him to freedom from his earthly travails and to life with his loved ones who have preceded him.

I invoke the spirit of that same higher authority upon us all to the end that my words will add to the beauty and comfort we have thus far enjoyed here today.

To his children, my beloved grandsons and granddaughters, your father died possessing great love and admiration for each of you.

He died full of gratitude to Diann for the magnificent job she is doing in raising, nurturing, teaching, and loving their children. He dictated a letter to me just a few hours before he died in which he wished God-speed to Diann, Terry, and the family in their new phase of their lives.

Charles Manley Brown, Jr., was a multi-faceted son of our Father in Heaven. Like all of us, he had his strengths and weaknesses.  He tried to wear the whole armor of God; but there were chinks in that armor. He could explain major and minor points of the gospel with authority and clarity. He also could rationalize some behaviors which were beyond the pale of that same gospel. He could drive you up the wall; and he could drive you on errands of mercy.

Because “the evil that men do lives after them, the good is often interred with their bones,” I will stress the positive.

Those among us who had the misfortune to be exposed primarily to Charlie’s weaknesses must learn to deal with the remaining scars. If we do not, those scars will fester and canker our souls.

Those among us who had the good fortune to be exposed primarily to Charlie’s strengths can thank the Lord he lived and that our paths crossed.

Charles has influenced many lives for good. Over and over during the visitations last evening and today I heard sincere appreciation expressed for his help, his willingness to help, his contributions, his knowledge and insight. One couple said, “We would never have made it through our difficult time without him.” A friend of another faith, who shared group counseling with him, said, “He was the best representative of the LDS church I ever met.”

His fighting spirit during his long illness will inspire me forever. At the last he exclaimed, “Oh, Dad, how long will this go on?”

“My son,’ I said, quoting scripture, “peace be unto thy soul”—and he finished the quote and more, “this adversity and thine affliction shall be but a small moment; and then, if thou endure it well, God shall exalt thee on high.”

Charles is now on high, with his grandparents, one of whom he never met in this life; with an uncle, my brother, who died before Charles was born; with his youngest sister, who preceded him 2 ½ years ago.

Grandpa then, his voice convulsed with tears, grief, love, regret, but also steadfastness, paraphrased Shakespeare’s send off to the Danish prince: “Good night sweet prince. May choirs of angels sing you on your way.”

Blessed are his feet

When I heard those words the first time, the feelings I felt as I clung to my six-year-old sister were too big for me to process. When I read them again as an adult, I wept as I gained perspective that was not available to me at age nine.

I wept for several reasons. I wept because I could see my father’s broken and fallen life through the eyes of this gentle storyteller whose magic tricks and puns and Dairy Queen Blizzards were all part of an ethos meant to inject joy and meaning into a world that was often cruelly deprived of it. At the time, I knew no grief but my own. Today, I see this awful scene through the eyes of a father who had tried so hard and could not forestall the tragedy that now lay before him.

I wept because I could see, from Grandpa’s perspective, that his own life was crashing down upon him. His son gone, his daughter dead from cancer two years before, his marriage under stress, his grandchildren—the very ones he longed to embrace and comfort through the very difficult months we faced ahead—leaving at the worst possible time.

And I wept because, in spite the complicated legacy that my father left behind, Grandpa stood to offer extraordinary magnanimity to all who heard his voice—to my mother, to me and my siblings, the doctors and nurses, even my stepfather, whom he had met for the first time at the funeral.

Perhaps especially, he offered grace to my father himself. He needed it. No one else could give it. But Grandpa knew his task and accomplished it a beauty and power I have seen few times in my life, if I have seen it at all.

One of my favorite verses of scripture comes from the Hebrew prophet Isaiah: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace.”

Grandpa published peace deep into the creases of that chaotic scene. How beautiful are his feet.

The Legacy of Charles Brown

Fifteen years ago, twenty years after giving that eulogy, Grandpa died. In the week before he died, in the delirium of strong palliatives and increasing dementia, he was overwhelmed with worry over two things: he felt that he had failed to honor his famous father’s legacy and he worried that he had failed his son, my father, because of all of Dad’s many problems.

As I ponder the meaning of his life and of mine, I ache for those lingering doubts that plagued him. I feel only awe for this great giant of a man. He is not as famous as his father, that is true. But his legacy is so much more important, at least to me and to my family. He did not ultimately save my father from an early grave, nor did he spare his grandchildren from some rather extraordinary misery at his hands. But this difference he made in Dad’s life and in ours is unmatched. Dad would have almost certainly died years earlier, forgotten and homeless, had it not been for Grandpa’s constant love and care. I may well not have been born, coming as I did in my father’s late thirties. The toil of that care meant that he had to forego any number of conveniences.

And in that chaotic day on January 5, 1991 at the funeral, with the U-Haul in the parking lot and the whole of his family buckling under the weight of the pain we were enduring, Grandpa stood tall with the angels, publishing peace from the mountains of Utah that has reverberated to Oklahoma and Pennsylvania and beyond.

I am not done with the work that got me tenure at Wharton. I have many books to write, conferences to host, interviews to give, policy to inform, future leaders to teach.

If I am honest, though, what I do in these spaces will not be the legacy I want to leave. Grandpa Brown shows me what more I can be. He was one of the greatest people I have ever known, a legacy that will light my path forever.