Deceased December 23, 1985
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In Memory
Brooke Willing died two days before Christmas, 1985. He was 37.
Members of our class did not get much of an opportunity to get to know Brooke. He dropped out of Amherst in the middle of his sophomore year, telling friends and family that he was in search of something more meaningful than academic pursuits. In academia he had already excelled: he is still remembered as one of the most remarkable students ever at Middlesex Academy in Concord, Mass.
After dropping out of Amherst, Brooke blended in with an emerging counterculture. To his family’s increasing alarm, he seemed to be drifting into madness. According to his two brothers and sister, Brooke was misdiagnosed as schizophrenic. In fact, Brooke suffered from a slowly growing malignant brain tumor that was diagnosed in 1974. Surgery prolonged his life for more than a decade. When he was well, he worked as a volunteer with the elderly and was an active member of several churches.
Brooke certainly had enough reason to go mad. When he was 5, his parents were reported missing while on a sailing vacation near Bermuda. No trace of them or their boat was ever found. He grew up in Maine, in the home of his mother’s sister and her husband, Catherine and George Pew.
Brooke’s sister, Mary Payson, who cared for Brooke when he became too ill to care for himself, said Brooke never stopped grieving for his parents. That loss, and the disease that was slowly killing him, were two unalterable facts of his life that caused him almost unrelieved pain. She said his suffering was lifted, however, by an intense faith in God and in people that provided an inspiration for those with whom Brooke came in contact.
“Brooke showed me how a man could have nothing, and still have everything,” said his brother, Kent, a banker in Philadelphia. “Even toward the end, when he couldn’t walk and had trouble talking, his many good friends were devoted to him. The sicker he got, the more his essential goodness shined through.”
David Sheldon ’51, his headmaster at Middlesex, remembered Brooke as a star who accomplished all that he set out to do: top grades, editor of the newspaper, class president and then president of the entire student body. “He went to Amherst with success assured for him,” Mr. Sheldon said. “No sooner did he get to Amherst than the tumor began, and with it an obsession with his lost parents.”
Mr. Sheldon stayed in contact with Brooke after he left Middlesex and Amherst. He described Brooke, despite is debilitating illness, as “a proven success in everything he did.”
Mr. Sheldon attended Brook’s funeral the day after Christmas, in a raw granite church in Falmouth, Maine, decorated with Christmas trees that gave off the intense aroma of pine. Scores of people gathered at the service. Some had known him well; others had only met him in a brief encounter. It was at the funeral, Mr. Sheldon said, that Brooke’s successful life became clear. People from diverse backgrounds stood one at a time to give witness to the impact Brooke had made upon each of their lives.
“It was quite remarkable,” Mr. Sheldon recalled. “Each person had a little story about how Brooke had changed them forever, something that described Brooke as the wonderful, giving person that he was. So sweet and caring. So firm in his belief in God. He made us all think about our lives in a new way because we saw—despite his pain—the quality with which he had lived his.”