College Sports Information Directors of America

By Melissa Isaacson
Chicago Tribune

Kent Brown's face was ashen, his expression painfully
blank.

Brown, assistant athletic director and media relations
chief for the University of Illinois, had just watched
as coach Bruce Weber rushed off to the hospital to
attend to his stricken mother. Another Illinois
official wanted to know if Brown was going to
accompany the group to Rush University Medical Center.

"No, I'll stay here," Brown said quietly, electing to
remain at the United Center where he could relay
updates to the media.

And then to no one in particular, he whispered, "I'm
not sure I can go to another hospital."

You could not blame Brown if he feared the worst. When
you have to tell your 6-year-old son and 9-year-old
daughter that their 38-year-old mother had died, and
then, barely six months later, break it to your father
that he has two to three months to live, you have come
face-to-face with the harshest life has to offer.

"I would never wish it on anyone," Brown said.

With loss, Brown, 41, has gained a perspective that
reminds him that even as Illini mania swirls madly
about him, it is not life and it surely is not death.
And yet, to observe how Brown has begun to regroup
from the death of his wife, Robin, and father, Robert,
is to see the perfect eye of an orange hurricane.

In his former life, he had been a fairly typical
husband and father of two.

"I went through a lot of years where I relied on Robin
to just tell me where I needed to be. I'd say, 'I'll
be at the event. Just tell me what time and where and
I'll be there.' And on the edge, I knew some of her
friends in more of the 'Hey, how's it going?' way but
not closely," he recalled.

They are now his dearest friends, his closest
confidantes and his family's lifeline.

Robin Brown was diagnosed 2½ years ago with breast
cancer. The Browns were told it had spread to her
lymph nodes, which meant there was no guarantee the
cancer would not return, but the couple was young,
strong and hopeful.

"She went through the normal thing," Kent said.
"There's the 'Oh, my God, I'm not going to see my kids
grow up,' to reality: 'It's here, now how are we going
to heal it? How are we going to fix it?'"

She had responded well to 18 months of chemotherapy
and in July, the family—Kent, Robin and their
children, Nicole and Ty—had a great week staying in a
cottage on Eagle River, Wis.

But toward the end of the trip, Robin told Kent she
was having trouble breathing and felt weak. An MRI on
the Tuesday after they returned home revealed that in
only five weeks, a mass had appeared and surrounded
her heart. Three days later, she asked her husband to
take her to the hospital.

They never did have that talk addressing the
inevitable, Kent said, until two days before she died
as doctors were considering surgery.

"Even the last weekend, I was still very optimistic
that things were going to turn around," he said.

He was called back to the hospital at 5:30 a.m.
Monday, Aug. 16. Robin survived emergency surgery that
morning, but doctors were unable to revive her after a
second cardiac arrest following the operation.

At the funeral, her husband told mourners about the
first time he saw her on the school bus in their
hometown of Atwood-Hammond, Ill. She was just
5-feet-1-inch to his 6-7, but Kent soon realized the
enormity of the void she left.

"You know but you don't know," he said. "You know
everything she does but you maybe don't appreciate it
until you have to do it."

The town of St. Joseph (pop. 3,000) rallied around the
family, setting up dinner schedules and helping with
the kids. At work, Brown's staff did not ask, they
simply did.

"Kent is just an amazing person in general," associate
sports information director Cassie Arner said. "I look
at him not just as a boss but as one of my closest
friends, and that's how he treats everyone in his
life. When we lost Robin, it felt like I was losing
one of my closest friends. For his office mates, it
broke us all up. We've tried to do everything we can
to make Kent's life as close to normal as possible."

Illini players have gone out of their way, Brown said,
to befriend his children, who idolize them in return.
And Weber, he said, "is unbelievable. Every once in a
while he'll drop an envelope off and it will have some
gift certificates for restaurants or something, and
he'll say, 'Hey, take the kids out to dinner.'"

Athletic director Ron Guenther, Brown said, simply
told him to take care of his children.

"If I had a role to play," Guenther said, "it was just
to relieve guilt that I know everybody has. The most
important thing I could do was tell him, 'Hey, we've
got it handled, we've got it covered.'"

In learning to shut off his computer by 5:30 p.m. each
day, Brown also started to figure out some of Robin's
organizational techniques and, maybe most important,
how to accept help.

"It's a tragedy that a 6-year-old and a 9-year-old
should lose their mother," he said. "Kids that age
should not lose their mom. But there are a lot of
single parents in the world and I've gained a huge
amount of respect for all the things that go on. In
some ways I'm very fortunate in that I have an
unbelievable help network of people who have stepped
forward knowing what I do and the schedule I could
keep, who have said, 'We'll help, we'll do whatever we
need to do, pick up kids, get them to Cub Scouts, take
them to soccer practice.'

"All of a sudden I have a whole set of new friends who
I've opened up my life to and gotten to know on a much
more personal basis than I'd have ever thought."

As Nicole and Ty returned to school and football
season eased into basketball, the family finally
seemed to settle into a routine. Kent's father had
surgery to remove a cancerous kidney in the summer,
but Richard Brown was out of the hospital in 48 hours
and soon active, able to help out.

But stroke-like symptoms turned out to be a brain
tumor, which was removed late in the fall. Again,
Brown's dad appeared to be recovered. But in February
he was hospitalized with pneumonia, and an MRI
revealed three or four more lesions on his brain and
the old tumor regenerated. While Brown's mother spoke
to the doctor, his father asked him if he'd heard the
results.

"He went through the same questions we asked the
doctor," Kent said. "He asked, 'Are they going to do
surgery?' Well, they can't, Dad, because there's three
or four of them. 'What about chemotherapy?' It won't
work. 'Radiation?' It's not an option. Then I watched
that realization in his eyes as all of a sudden he
knew."

The doctors had given him two to three months. Three
weeks later, on Feb. 28, Richard Brown died. Kent had
scarcely buried his father when he was consoling Weber
on the death of his mother.

Now they both must go back to work, a routine with
which Brown is well acquainted. And as the Illini
begin what they hope will be a three-week run through
the NCAA tournament, Nicole and Ty Brown are along for
the ride. But one way or the other, there are soccer
games and Sunday school and life to live.

"Now I worry about fixing lunches every morning and
making sure I have Ty's snack there, and this week I
have to finish his pinewood derby car for Cub Scouts,"
Brown said. "The derby is Friday night and I'm not
going to be there, but we have to finish painting the
car and putting the wheels on. So that's on my mind.

"When you have two kids, you have to move on. At some
point, I guess you have to think you have some good
things coming toward you, so you try to think positive
as much as you can. You just keep going."