Serious and Grim News: Brett

[dwenius]

My very dear friend Brett Summers is currently in Columbia University Hospital in Missouri, and his condition is extremely grave. He has been struggling with alcoholism for some time and developed Hepatitis over the past year. Several stints of rehab were only marginally successful and about a month ago he fell into a coma in his house. He has been in the hospital since then with acute liver and kidney failure. His family and doctors are unsure whether he will live a week, or a month,
or —

I'm flying out tomorrow and hope that he will be out from sedation long enough to know that I am there. If not, I'll play him the Orb, and read to him from Italo Calvino, and leave him the get well cards that Calvin and Rose made, and otherwise keep him company through midday Thursday.

Please send your love and good thoughts for him. Anything you post here, I will do my best to relay. I'll either read it aloud to him or print your words and leave them by his bedside, or both.

Comments

[catbear.livejournal.com]

Damn!

Brett: There's so much art, so much music, so much joie de vivre in you. So much curiosity, so much compassion, so much try-it-and-find-out. I want to hear more of that music, to see more of that art. I've been waiting for you to become grounded and stable so I could demand, kindly, that you share more of your pictures, more music. I want to hear more jams of you working with others, creating a concert that varies as the moods come and go. I want to learn about your life coming together. I want you to know that I've been following along with your adventures for years and always felt kindred, as if you were my rather wilder brother, doing things and taking chances I didn't quite dare. There's so much you have to share and I deeply, truly, selfishly hope you will share some more again. But more than anything, I hope you can find the health and inner peace you need to be whole again. I love you, get better.