Brooklyn Memorial: Eulogy

 

 

Felix Brow-Westbrook was born on September 26, 1989 in Nashua, NH. From the moment he arrived into this world, Felix was a calm and easy-going person. That calm baby grew into a thoughtful child who was creative and caring.

 

 

 

When Felix was just two his family moved to New York so his parents could attend SUNY Purchase. For five years Felix lived on the campus there surrounded by artists. Throughout his childhood Felix spent time around creative people all of whom surely helped inspire his love for the arts and his deep concern for the beauty of things.

 

 

Just before his eighth birthday Felix moved to Concord MA where he continued to be surrounded by art, creativity and history. In sixth grade Elizabeth told me she began homeschooling Felix. This was a time of great growth for him. It helped solidify his interest in art and architecture. He was smart and precocious.

 

 

 

He participated in local children’s theatre productions, won awards for his architectural sketches, and his Lego recreation of Falling Water complete with running water. He made lasting friendships with people of all ages.

 

In 2006 Felix moved to Brooklyn for the first time with his father and step-mother. New York was a place of great artistic grow for Felix. Here his identity as an artist coalesced

 

Felix was an artist. From the time he was small, it was an integral part of his life. He was a creator, a maker. But he also saw the world in a different way than many of us do. He looked at the world through an aesthetic lens. His experience of the world was with an attention to beauty, form, construction. He lived and breathed art. His love for art and beauty led him to pursue it as a field of study at SUNY Purchase, from which he graduated in 2011 with a degree in Design Technology, with a concentration on Scenic Design.



Felix painting a backdrop for a Ralph Lauren holiday window

His degree prepared Felix for a career he loved in set design, costume and prop design, and the development and creation of window displays. He particularly loved doing design work for operas and for window displays as they tended to require research in order to be resonant and accurate. Felix loved research. Every Spring beginning in 2010 he would head to Charleston to the Spoleto Festival USA for two months, to be part of the community that grows there each year.

 

 

But Felix’ work creations were temporary. He was keenly aware of this. The window displays would be up for a season and then destroyed. When the opera ended, the sets and costumes and props reached the end of their usefulness. Felix wanted to be part of making and preserving things that would not be destroyed. That would last. His deep appreciation for history, and for the way art and culture can be maintained over time for the benefit of all us, stemmed, his mother told me, in part from having grown up on Concord where history is thick in every building and down every path.

 

 

 

His love of history and research, and his desire to be part of something that would keep, gave Felix the desire to pursue a degree in historic preservation. Had he lived, this was to be the next step in his life.

 

This love for the historic was also a love for the inherent beauty of old things—antiques, old buildings—that juxtaposed what was with what is. Felix found the decrepit, the forgotten, charming. As a child he loved the works of Edward Gorey, works that somehow join the cycles of living and dying. Felix hoped one day to live and work at the Wheeler-Harrington House, an historic house in Concord. He was full of ideas about how to revitalize the house using eco-friendly building techniques and materials. He longed to create programs that brought that historic house to life for all.

 

That was Felix, his mother tells me: quiet and unassuming, but full of ideas that would integrate history, life, preservation and environmental justice in ways that were beautiful and aesthetically pleasing. Even through his illness, Felix was thinking about ways that his skills could help the world: he was considering ways to improve institutional housing and health care facilities so that they would be more people friendly, more environmentally friendly, and more beautifully conducive to healing. Felix knew that the space we inhabit can affect not only our physical health, but our spiritual and mental health as well.

Felix was, from all his mother shared with me, an incredible human being with a capacity for creation and for love that was quite special. He was introspective, thoughtful, intellectual. Felix, even as a young person, had an appreciation for and an understanding of the cycles of life and death. He had an uncommon intuitive grasp of how endings are beginnings, and beginnings endings. His love for the infinity symbol and his affinity for Buddhism speak to his quiet and mature acceptance of the natural movements of life. Yet even with this understanding, Felix was a fighter who wanted to live and work and create and always dreamed about what would come next.

 

Felix modeling hospital gown fashions

Felix was diagnosed with Biphasic Pleural Mesothelioma just after his 28^th birthday. He died nearly one year later. He endured much during that last year, but what stood out as Elizabeth spoke to me about her son was that despite the surgeries and poking and prodding, Felix was unfailingly kind, thoughtful, grateful and hopeful. Felix’ illness and death do not define his life, but that last year of his life showed the world even more clearly who Felix was—a gentle, kind, creative and loving soul who maintained his strength and center even in the face of extraordinary challenge.

 

Felix died on December 12, 2018, just a few short months after turning 29 years old. Death is never easy, but there is a special pain that accompanies the loss of a young life. Felix was maturing and developing as an artist, on the verge of even greater things. The loss of potential, all the art he might have gone on to make and share with the world: it brings another layer to our grieving. It can be tempting to dream of what might have been. But I come back to the Edward Gorey quote in your program this afternoon: “What is, is and what might have been never existed”. What did exist, what we always remember, is Felix’ life. A life of beauty, heart, soul, love, compassion and strength. This is the legacy that Felix leaves behind.

 

May we each bring to our own lives an appreciation for beauty, an awareness of our place in the far reaches of history and future, and an acceptance of the cycles of life that come to us all, a commitment to history and preservation, and a desire to create. In this way, we will truly honor the life of Felix Brow-Westbrook.