A brother’s death, a discarded engine and a shared love for speed
Six months after my 45-year-old brother died, his beloved Ford Focus ST was towed away by a charity group. Kevin’s best friend, John, sent a photo — the yellow New York plates glistening in the spring sun, the silver paint still shiny after a long winter on a Manhattan street.
The picture knocked the wind out of me, opening a new wave of grief. I took many hair-raising rides in that car with Kevin — speeding up the Saw Mill Parkway, radar detector on the dash, his Marlboro ashes trailing out the wide-open window as funk or blues blasted.
Since the November 2020 morning when police found Kevin dead inside his apartment after an accidental overdose, his car had remained in the prime spot where he parked it. It stood sentry, a last vestige of my big brother in the Upper West Side neighborhood where he’d loved living for 14 years.
We left the car behind when we cleaned out his bachelor-pad loft. With 100,000 miles and thousands owed in parking tickets and taxes, the Focus and its turbo-charged engine wasn’t worth the trouble, a lawyer told our father.
We assumed it would get towed and junked, but it sat there collecting snow, then pollen and more tickets. Every few weeks, my father asked John to check on it. Dad doesn’t usually abandon anything with a motor — dead or alive.
Growing up, we had a rotating cast of rusted, ’60s-era convertibles in our driveway. In his free time, Dad dissembled cars for parts or restored them to their glory. Kevin was always game for the earbusting, bracing adventures that followed. I’d be white-knuckled gripping my seat, a third, terrified wheel in their outings. The originals didn’t have seatbelts, my dad shrugged. Besides, he and Kevin preferred the type of bounce that would send the wheels — and your backside — airborne simultaneously.
These days, the wildest ride Dad, 75, takes is a slow cruise in his truck. A former smoker, he has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and his only son’s death likely accelerated a steep decline in his health. By the time Kevin’s car was towed, Dad sold his motorboat. “My lungs are shot,” he said, a tube of oxygen snaking through his graying mustache and beard.
He had relied on Kevin to help with the boat, the last in at least a dozen he owned over the years as he grew up on Candlewood Lake in Brookfield, and where we later returned as a family to live. Starting at age 12, Dad pumped gas at a marina and out-ofstate friends entrusted him with the keys to their slick speedboat. If he wasn’t full throttle at the wheel, he was riding its wake on one ski.
Kevin inherited Dad’s love of choppy waves and high speed, but not his fix-it mentality or thrift. Dad indulged in an annual trip to Lime Rock Race Park in Lakeville. I would grudgingly go along, ears firmly covered, while Kevin and Dad attentively watched the vintage cars fly past. Later, Kevin upped the ante by taking up a passion for Formula One racing, a few times traveling to Europe to catch races at historic tracks.
As soon as he got his first white-collar job, Kevin bought a brand-new Subaru Impreza WRX. He was 26. My father, an elementary school teacher, didn’t purchase a new car until he was 61. By then, his tastes were practical — a pickup with room for his grandsons’ car seats, a boat with less horsepower.
But he and Kevin still enjoyed a fast boat ride on mornings when the lake’s surface was glassy smooth. I can picture the wind blowing their red hair — Kevin’s still bright, my dad’s faded. In a few decades, I imagined Kevin’s burnt, freckled skin would wrinkle and weather like Dad’s.
In recent years, as Dad’s breathing grew increasingly labored, he started to hit the brakes. Kevin stepped on the gas. In the summer of 2019, Kevin was hooked on prescription pain pills — a disease he once drove into remission for a solid stretch in his 30s. He was also drinking again, something he’d given up at 22 after he flipped his car and nearly died.
Despite the mushrooming chaos of Kevin’s life, Dad believed he’d again get sober. But Kevin was running out of jump-starts. “I don’t have another one of these in me,” he told me after his third, and final, trip to rehab in December 2019. I feared he was right. So I was grateful and proud of the ensuing eight months of sobriety he accomplished. I, too, began to feel optimistic.
But in late August, a broken shoulder required two surgeries — and opioid prescriptions. When those ran out in mid-November, he bought pills on the street. The last call he made was to Dad. They spoke for six minutes. “He sounded good,” Dad told my older sister,
Since the morning when police found Kevin dead inside his apartment after an accidental overdose, his car had remained, a last vestige of my big brother.
forever hopeful.
The death was quick and painless, the medical examiner told us. Still, I can’t help but picture how Dad was likely sleeping, the steady pulse of his oxygen concentrator pushing air into his scarred lungs, as Kevin stopped breathing and died — alone on his scuffed-up hardwood floor.
When the daffodils bloomed this spring, I thought about how Dad and Kevin should be scrubbing the boat in the driveway, preparing for launch. Instead, we sat on the front porch and stared at photos of Kevin’s car getting towed.
I blinked back tears, but Dad remained pragmatic. He couldn’t fix his son, but he did something I never thought I’d see — walk away from a perfectly good engine.