The heartwarming eulogy Dan Le Batard gave for his brother, artist David ‘Lebo’ Le Batard
The eulogy Dan Le Batard gave for his late brother, the artist David “LEBO” Le Batard, at Saturday’s celebration of life ceremony.
What an honor and an anguish to do this on behalf of my beloved little brother, forever my little brother. I am going to try to get through this without breaking down, and I am going to fail.
I stand before you splayed open, as vulnerable and heartbroken as I’ve ever been. The anguish has upended me at all sorts of unexpected moments over the last year and especially the last couple of weeks, so much so that I’ll often bend over, put my hands on my knees and sob with sounds I have never made and do not recognize. I had only one sibling, one love like this. I will only ever have one. So what has been placed deep inside me is a pain unlike any I’ve ever known.
Grief, I know now, is the price we pay for loving most deeply. And I am here to tell you, broken as I may sound, that it is well worth the cost. What a bargain I got on this lifetime LEBO deal, man. I’ve got exactly zero buyer’s remorse. Because there is something else inside me now, too, entangled with all that hurts ... but so much larger and lighter. It is a gratitude unlike any I’ve known, too. My God, what an eternal gift to have loved him and been loved by him.
I will never replace it. And I will never have to. Because, perhaps in a way that only the people in this room can know, my brother is not actually gone. I see him in the tears in your eyes. I hear him in the laughter of the stories you tell. I talked to him on the way over here, in something that would sound a lot like prayer. And I very much feel him all around everything that aches, soothing me. With time, I know the size of this pain will shrink. With time, I know this gratitude will only grow. That’s how the biggest and most special loves always survive death ... in the aches, in the reminders, in the laughter, in things that remain so very alive within you after you’ve left this room. How can he be gone if, all over, everywhere I look, everywhere I feel, I can still feel his touch?
People talk in times like this about having things put in the proper perspective. But it is not merely my perspective that has been changed. It is all of me. The last thing my brother did before heading toward the light was open a portal for me, a lifelong repressed person, to feel more deeply. To love more deeply. And, yeah, to hurt more deeply. But to somehow make the most unfathomable loss of my life feel like a gain. I love my life and my wife more today, and better, for having lived through the last year of this horror with her and with him. I love Brenna, Evan, Lena, my parents, Ziza, all the Mellos harder than I did because I am eternally grateful and indebted for the profound and unending care they showed in gently walking my kid brother through the cancer ward and all the way home, holding his hands til his very last breath, til the machines said his heart had stopped because the machines are not advanced to know that we can still feel it beating here today.
My life becomes richer from having known him, not poorer from having lost him, because life becomes so much more precious when you put that overt a clock on it and let in all the biggest love, the kind that always risks this kind of loss. That’s something your mind can’t really know. It must be your heart that relays that information to it, after it is felt, and so it must hurt. But how is that for a parting gift from my beloved little brother, huh? What a wonderful present. The present. The knowledge that now is the only guaranteed treasure chest that we have, and we must open it up with conscious and ravenous joy and wonder and delight … and share that bounty with those we love the most. Life is but a brief moment, LEBO used to say all the time. It is a tapestry you’ll find in so much of my brother’s art work, and his life work ... that soulfulness, that spirituality, a prayer made of color and light.
He lived so big and joyously, dancing so much all of one night and morning that a toe nail fell off. He loved so big and joyously, draping Brenna in romantic love ceremonies, gifts and drawings. He laughed so big and joyously, creating alter egos to entertain himself. There was, for example, Mysterio. Mysterio wore only a wrestling mask and — please don’t ask me too many questions about this part — a big plastic double penis. Mysterio didn’t like football, but he did enjoy interrupting the football viewing parties of my friends by sprinting unexpectedly past the windows in the backyard as I heard befuddled “What was that?” and “Was that your brother?” What Was That? He was also there one night on one of my brother’s first dates, a woman my brother took to a Taco Bell with a sock full of change to test if she was in it for the right reasons. When they came home, my brother disappeared to the other room for a moment and Mysterio, with that mask and double dong, then brought her a drink and wordlessly left. Soon thereafter, my brother returned dressed as himself and with another fresh drink for her as if she hadn’t just gotten one. She asked why he had done something so weird, and his response was ... “Done what so weird? Where’d you get that drink?”
He was always mischievous that way, as an adult and as a child. My mother can tell you. She was driving him to grade school once, stopped at a corner and looked in disgust at a wall that had been graffitied, wondering whose terrible parents would possibly allow their child to desecrate the neighborhood like that ... as my kid brother shrank into a postage stamp in the seat next to her. To this day I don’t know why she’d initially think some other neighborhood skateboarder had both the terrible parents AND innate need to express in giant letters on a wall the single word LebaShred.
He did not get cheated at life that way, or at all; he put his imprint and name on things very literally, his faded Lebo emblem stickers still on Miami bus stops from a quarter century ago. In high school at Chaminade, he went on stage during graduation and received much applause and fanfare for being declared the prestigious Mr. Chaminade. Only one problem with that. There was no such award. My brother invented it by having his friends write him in during voting for the real awards and then bribing the speaker to announce it. Mr. Chaminade. Ridiculous. It really was an honor and a blessing to be so close so often in the passenger seat when his inspirations would begin to take shape before flight. His imagination, bringing things to life, bringing light to life, always felt like watching dreams grow legs and begin dancing.
He gave of his love and time so freely. Teaching inmates how to draw in prison. Working with veterans. Saving a poor village by giving it so much art labor. Always drawing with kids who showed any interest in art. He and Brenna essentially adopting a young lady just because she didn’t have support at home. I was always so, so proud of him. I am always so, so proud of him. His personality was, like his art, a colorful cartoon. But let me tell you about his art because I don’t think people have any real understanding of the unfathomable degree of difficulty in what he pulled off, turning his childhood imagination into an international career that would allow him to see the world.
There’s no safety net when you choose that as a living. There’s no health insurance or employer. He still had the fear into his late 20s that he was going to live under a bridge one day. He made it look easy, but it most assuredly was not. No holy man reached into his crib with the gifts of color and craft. I’ve watched him draw his right hand again and again for 18 straight hours. His talent was very much learned ... and very much earned. To go from years of street graffiti to doing live paintings on stage in front of tens of thousands of people with Willie Nelson and the Beastie Boys? To go from selling art out of the trunk of your car to painting all of Miami (hospitals, schools, ships, the side of 10-story buildings). He was prolific. Do you know how hard that is? That career? Do you have any idea? To have a blank canvas on a stage in front of tens of thousands of people? Waiting for the music to move you? He was braver than I’ll ever be. Some people choose a cubicle. He chose to sail the open seas. I was always so, so proud of him. I will always be so, so proud of him.
I told him all this over the last year. What a blessing that was, that time, even as it brought me to my knees. In a hospital room, with only half of his body functioning, I saw again and again that the love Brenna and my brother had for each other could live anywhere and would live everywhere. We should all be so lucky at the end. He was peaceful, I promise you, even in pain. Somehow tranquil and content, believe it or not, even though he knew he was dying. He promised me that he was ready to go. It’s important that you know that. And lest you think I’m exaggerating about the serenity that surrounded his sickness, you should know that doctors, plural, kept coming in with their kids on off days to draw with him. Even doctors who were no longer treating him. Do you know how rare that is? For doctors to return to the stale and sour smell of sickness by choice on days off? My brother was always a magnet like that, IS always a magnet like that. Maybe that’s why the entire staff gave him a parade that stretched two stories the day he left for home. Maybe that’s why so many of his care givers will be here today. Maybe that’s why no fewer than 12 nurses rushed in to resuscitate him one day even though only a couple were even able or needed to get their hands on him. You should have seen the one final art exhibit he did for the care givers, festooning his room with caricatures that took him a month between surgeries. I was in awe at the sheer number of joyous workers who streamed into his room from all over the hospital, and the childlike delight of discovery when their caricatures were unveiled. I couldn’t tell what was the more moving work of art ... the faces he had drawn or the human ones I was looking at. I don’t imagine that cancer has ever looked or felt quite that happy in that room.
I love you, Lebo.
I will always love you.
And, across the cosmos, forever, that’s not something that I will ever let die.
