Recently while in China, I had the opportunity to reconnect with Chris Hickey, a good man who I’d gotten to know while at St. Brendan’s. He shared with me a hard story of the death of one of his good friends, Brad Ipema, who died too young. Chris forwarded on to me his reflections on Brad’s life, and to honor Brad and inspire us to deeper, better living and loving, I’m posting it here. Among other things, there are three important lessons Chris lists from Brad’s life that will help all of us live well while we live.
I remember the first 13 words Brad Ipema ever said to me.
It was January 1997. My wife, Paige, and I had just walked into the Christian Reformed Church of Washington, D.C. for the first time, and we were getting to that part of the service where visitors are encouraged to stand and introduce themselves. By coincidence, we found ourselves sitting in front of Brad and Kirstin. Then, from the row behind, a light tap on the shoulder, and a dry, knowing whisper . . . “Dude– this is occasionally awkward . . . and always optional.” And then he mouthed, as I looked back, “You can totally skip this.”
With these words, and his other hilarious running commentary throughout the service, I knew this was a guy I needed to get to know. Further conversations that day with Brad and Kirstin made it clear to my wife and me that we needed to make serious efforts to become friends with these people.
And we were fortunate enough that Brad and Kirstin felt the same, and so, over the course of the next several months, we developed a wonderful friendship with Brad and Kirstin, along with Eric and Kitty Muller.
Though he was five years older than me, in Brad I found a kindred spirit. We were both Gen X-ers with roots in the Windy City . He had just enough of a remnant of a Chicago accent to make me make me feel at home. We both grew up in church denominations that valued tradition, and came from decidedly ethnic roots— mine Nordic, his Dutch. We both had significant connections with urban ministry, and a passion for the city. We shared a love for life, for reflective, thoughtful faith, good food and drink, travel, art, music, and just generally sucking the marrow from life. We both did our undergraduate degrees at small liberal arts schools in the Midwest . We had both married East Coast brunettes who were probably smarter and more articulate than we were, and definitely more stylish, sophisticated and lovely.
As important as those various elements were in providing a common platform and vocabulary for our friendship, it was obvious to me that Brad didn’t require such an abundance of overlap in life experience to be a great friend. Brad’s biography (which included movement in and out of many different social worlds) and personality (so extroverted, so adventurous, so warm, so welcoming) meant that he navigated seamlessly through engagements with a broad range of personalities, across economic, social, and racial categories. When Brad interacted with you, you felt you were the most important person in the room. You didn’t need to be a Gen X-alt -rock-loving-liberal-arts-educated Chicago native with connections to an obscure ethnic Protestant denomination. When you interacted with Brad, you were smarter, more insightful, more authentic, more kind, more loved, less cynical and more human than you had been just the minute before. I’m not sure that there are many higher goals to which a person can aspire— to be someone who, through his humility and love, habitually recognizes and calls out the dignity in people in his day-to-day interactions with them, and makes them better people through those interactions.
The most active years of our friendship were 1997 to 2001— when we lived in Washington , then subsequently paid visits to their beautiful home in North Carolina , then met on a few weeks’ notice for a wonderful week traveling together in the south of France . In those years, I now realize, much of what I was learning from Brad was how to be an adult, how to be a man. When we first met, I was 27, had only been married two months and was halfway through the coursework for my doctorate. By the end of that time, I was 32, just months off from finishing my Ph.D., transitioning to a new professional life, and to thoughts of fatherhood. In many ways, everything I needed to know about being a grown-up I learned from Brad during those years.
Three lessons I gleaned from that time with Brad:
**80 percent of life is just showing up**
As a friend, Brad was ridiculously reliable. Only a few months after my wife and I first met Brad, we moved house for the first time. It was just a local move, from the Maryland suburbs of DC into the District, and we were a young couple without much money, so were doing the move ourselves using a U-Haul. Brad and Eric were the only non-family members that came to help. This was indicative of Brad’s wider ethic about how you build community. You show up. You log time and miles together. That day and scores of other times, and in many different ways, Brad showed up, for us and for others. (I would be remiss if I didn’t briefly note that this particular moving day included Brad climbing a wrought iron fence, precariously balancing himself atop, and passing a queen-size mattress overhead to our second floor apartment patio, then vaulting himself up onto the patio itself. When I learned this week of Brad’s unicycle team days, all of this balancing and acrobatics started to make sense.)
**You don’t have to have it all together**
When I first met Brad, I had two things nagging at my self-confidence. I was a so-so Ph.D. student and a so-so husband. I was used to being good at everything I did. Brad told me— and more importantly, showed me— that you didn’t have to have it all together. No one did. And anyone that said or acted otherwise was full of it. It was especially helpful and meaningful to me to see in Brad and Kirstin real, live, opinionated human being who disagreed, sometimes strongly, but stuck with it, and worked at it. From Brad and Kirstin, I learned that marriage was hard, but eminently worthwhile, work. And the Ph.D.—Brad’s strategy was clearly to simply encourage, encourage, and then encourage again.
**Never lose touch with your inner child**
Brad believed strongly—and lived out— the Biblical admonition to always remember that in the end, we are children of our Heavenly Father. And he took seriously the importance of remaining child-like. His sense of joy, his readiness to smile, his love for play, for dancing, for music— all stemmed from this. I recall the day in June 1998 that Brad and I attended the Tibetan Freedom Concert at RFK Stadium in Washington . As we rocked out to Dave Matthews Band in the heat, Brad reflected to me that he was twice the age of many of the concertgoers, and I was . . . well, close to twice their age. We mentioned this to friends several weeks, who shot back— with something of a condescending tone— “Um, does that tell you something?”, implying that perhaps our concert going days should have been long-since passed. “Those nutty young people,” Brad shot back, “have great taste in music is what it tells me.” There’s a line in the song “When I Grow Up” from the current musical *Matilda* that, for me, crystallizes what I enjoyed so much about Brad’s character in this area. The song, sung primarily by children (student characters who suffer under the rule of a harsh British headmistress), highlights all the things these kids will do when they grow up— among them, eating sweets everyday on the way to work, going to bed late, and watching TV “’til their eyes go square.” And then there’s the line: “When I grow up . . . I’ll play with things that Mum pretends that Mums don’t think are fun.” We adults become so guarded, so often lack spontaneity and joy because we’re afraid we’ll look foolish. We pretend. In the days since Brad’s death, I’ve seen a number of Brad’s nieces and nephews recall how greatly they valued Brad’s embrace of his inner child, how many hours he logged playing with them, and how clearly it demonstrated love to them.
I’m really glad that after many years of not seeing each other, in the last two years, we were able to connect again. Twice, we were able spend weekend afternoons together on the margins of a business trip. My last visit was in April, and Brad and Kirstin were what they’ve always been: wicked smart, welcoming, gracious, engaged, curious. Over some great food and microbrews in River Forest , we jumped right back in where we had left it off. How was work? Was it possible to have a meaningful existence with reasonable life-work balance in the modern world? What were the most important priorities in the next 10, 20 years of life? How does being a parent change you? What level of gratification was reasonable to expect out of one’ profession? Where was God in the middle of all of this? How was life without Brad’s mom? (“I hate it” was Brad’s brutally honest response.) What travel could we plan together in the next few years?
If the first words Brad ever spoke to me revealed his humor, his intuition, his capacity to put himself in others’ shoes, his last words to me revealed his heart: “Love you bro. Travel well.” Same to you, Brad.
In the early fall of 2013, Brad’s heart failed him. But over the course of the last 48 years, it did not fail us. His heart, his mind, his soul were poured into every conversation, every interaction he had with us, and we were the beneficiaries. We celebrate his life today, but also mourn the loss of that heart, that soul that brought so much love into God’s world.