My friend IB Browning has died. He was 65 and had a heart attack. I don’t know where to begin processing my grief.
Last summer, I left a writing seminar early to head to West Virginia to visit IB and his wife, Rebecca. We couldn't remember how long it had been since we had seen each other. 15 years, at least. We reminisced and ate and talked at length about getting older and how we might live out the latter half of life.
I was 15 when we met, and he was 34. Thirty years on, we were definitely older. It didn't seem that way, though. He was as I had always known him: funny, wry, highly intelligent, curious, and living in a house with elements he and Rebecca designed and built. That’s what I remember best about IB: he could build, repair, or invent damn near anything.
Some history: In 1992, IB’s mother, Mary Bell, took a shine to me and hired me at Microsystems, a small computer store in Buckhannon. It was IB’s venture, and Mary ran the front-end. She was in her 50s, then.
Mary was a shrewd businesswoman, a beautiful pianist, and a voracious chain smoker who filled Microsystems with clouds of tobacco smoke. IB was in and out selling computers, networking, programming, and inventing a first-of-its-kind CNC controller that would eventually afford him the ability to retire early and sail the Caribbean with Rebecca.
In January 2005, ten years after my last day at Microsystems, my dad died. Mary came to the viewing. She invited me back to Microsystems to work at my original wage that summer. I was by then a doctor, but agreed without hesitation. The store needed a fresh coat of paint.
The plan never materialized. Instead, I went to Mary’s funeral. Like IB, she was in her 60s when she died suddenly. It took the piss out of me.
I visited IB and Rebecca a few years later at their house outside Buckhannon. We reconnected and toured Microsystems and saw Mary’s empty desk in the front room, just as I remembered it. It helped us to mourn and remember her together. He introduced me to Patrick O’Brien novels and gave me a souvenir of Mary’s—an enormous ashtray the size of a hubcap with a letter “B” in the middle.
On that occasion, IB told me he would die young. I didn't believe him, but it bothered me because he was usually right about things. That night, he had some friends over, and they stayed up and played music. He was an amazing trumpet player.
By 2022, IB had long since sold Microsystems and moved to Morgantown. He renovated and rented properties through Air BNB in his so-called retirement. Mary had been gone nearly two decades, and few people remembered her or the computer store as it had been in the late 20th century.
Microsystems had a revolving cast of characters and regulars, most of them old, most of them gone. There was a D-Day vet, George, who would break the filters off his Marlboro reds and smoke with Mary while he learned the internet.
Dr. W—, who was in his 70s and walked with a cane, would venture in on his morning perambulations to drink coffee and mumble nonsense to Mary. His teeth appeared to have been pried from the mouth of George Washington. His bulbous nose sprouted hair. Mary would see him coming through the large divided-light window in the front of the store and hide in the back. That the store smelled like a fresh cigarette gave away her presence, and he would sit in a chair in front of her desk and wait until she returned.
At Christmas, we'd make hot wassail in a crock pot and put out Christmas cookies for customers, though I'd consume most of the bounty. I'd decorate the store and spray artificial frost on the front window. On Christmas Eve, I'd go to the store and clean it top to bottom with Murphy Oil Soap. I don't know why, but it was my tradition.
IB would lament that he was paying me to drink wassail and decorate instead of repair computers (or, on one occasion, the toilet), but Mary refused to let me go because I made her laugh.
Last year, IB and I remembered customers and struggled to remember others, and laughed over the details.
IB lost his brother at a young age, and a daughter when she was in high school, and we both lost Mary together, and something about all the loss forged a connection. Now, I’ve lost IB. I wish I could visit and talk to him about how much it sucks.
IB was always doing or reading or engaging with something interesting. I have no other friends who used to go hang gliding and replaced it with sailing. When I wrote a lousy short story about sailing, he was the first person I turned to, to assess the technical details.
He was not only a friend, but my last connection to some of the most formative memories of my youth: my first job, Mary, Buckhannon and its denizens, and a mutual love of Pink Floyd.
Some might look at his obit and say “65 isn’t so young.” Yet, it is if you’re IB. I mourn the loss of the voluminous knowledge and intuition he brought to this life, and I mourn his being and presence and losing a friend. I simply can’t believe he’s gone.
What beautiful writing about a special friend, and time in your life. I'm sorry for your grief.