I first met Brett last September, and, throughout the fall, we bonded over the slow demise of the Eagles’ season. I had finally managed to corral the TV in DCC 150 into submission, and the first game of the Eagles’ season was now projected onto the screen, albeit already a few minutes into the first quarter. I had planned a watch party with a few friends and, earlier that week, I’d told some of the dining hall staff to stop by and watch if they wanted. I’m not entirely sure how Brett, who worked in the back washing dishes, completely hidden from view, found out about the watch party, but I remember he was the first one to join. And he didn’t come alone. He brought several coworkers along with him, some of whom probably had been planning to eat their lunch in peace but could be convinced to hang out, chat, and watch the Eagles if Brett was there. Brett told me later that he wasn’t even an Eagles fan (although he certainly enjoyed watching and, as an avid Steelers fan, sympathized with my investment in what became an increasingly depressing season). He told me that he came to talk with students and learn about our lives, to meet others who spend so much of their time at Swarthmore but rarely get to interact, to make new friends.
Last winter, Brett Day, who had worked at Swarthmore for 34 years, was terribly injured in a dishwasher accident at the DCC. He spent the next several months in the hospital, and, even after returning home in May, his life was not the same. On August 15, Brett passed away, leaving the lives of his loved ones completely changed: his wife, Katie, his five children (Angel, Cayla, Destiny, Zania Ann, and Brittany Nicole), his sister Naja, nieces and nephews, and many grandchildren. With Brett’s passing, the Swarthmore community too was changed forever. Brett started part-time in the dining hall when he was 16, and, when he graduated high school, he began working full-time. Over the past several weeks, I have talked with many of Brett’s coworkers and close friends, and I’ve learned how remarkable he was, how much they cared for him and he cared for them, and how important he was to so many who knew him.
Having listened to stories and memories from some of the people at Swarthmore who knew him best, what stands out is Brett’s ability to be at once constantly light-hearted yet also deeply supportive and compassionate. Many whom I talked to reflected that he had a way, whether through humour or sincerity, of making anyone feel welcomed and included. Alycia, a server who had gotten to know Brett well over the last couple of years, recounted how, “He was always supportive. He would be on my side, never even questioned it.” She told me about a particularly memorable moment:
“He would offer to do things without saying anything. He helped put up decorations with one of the checkers whose husband had passed away recently. He just overheard a conversation where she was talking about having put them up alone — he was walking by and offered to help. That’s just who he was.”
Alycia remembers once, when her sisters — who had jokingly nicknamed him “Mr. Bread” after mishearing his name once over FaceTime — came in to work for her birthday, how excited Brett was to go see them, to talk with them, and to make them feel welcome.
“He was just so sweet. Like he didn’t have to go talk to them or anything. He just did, and of course they loved him.”
Dan, who worked closely with Brett as a dishwasher, reflected that:
“He’s always there for people, whatever they need.”
Ashley, a cook who works at the salad station, told me:
“Brett was a guy who would talk to you like he’d known you for many years. He was someone you couldn’t really be upset with.”
Another server, Madison, shared strikingly similar thoughts about Brett’s kindness:
“He was just always helping everybody out. If he didn’t know you, he would automatically walk up to you and introduce himself. You know, he made you feel right at home.”
“He would see that I didn’t have bowls, and I’d just give him a look, and he’d get what I needed. He sees my trash or compost is overflowing? He takes them out. He’s doing anything he can to help us out.”
Madison was first introduced to Brett through stories. When she started working at Swarthmore, he was out for a knee replacement surgery, but his name circulated often throughout the Dining Hall. She remembers being told that, in anticipation of his return:
“You have to meet Brett. He’s an awesome person, and he’s awesome at what he does. He’s lovely to talk to, to work with, and he’s almost like a therapist sometimes, and you can always go to him with your problems, and he’s always got a solution for you.”
And it was true. Madison recounted that one of Brett’s most striking qualities was his ability to listen openly and his desire to help however he could:
“If I ever had a problem and needed somebody to talk to, or if I needed someone to go do something for me, he would always be there. He would just say, ‘No, I’ll just do it myself.’ And he was always a good person to talk to for therapy reasons too; like, if there were troubles at home, or if I had troubles here for some odd reason, he would calm me down. He’d say, ‘Hey, it’s gonna be okay. Take it a day at a time. We’ll work it out.’ Yeah, he was always good to talk to.”
Alycia told me how, even before the two got to know each other well, Brett insisted on driving her home when she had no ride:
“I remember I first really got to know Brett when he started driving me home from work. When he found out we live near each other and I didn’t have a ride, he immediately said, ‘Whatever you need, it’s fine, don’t worry about it.’ Whenever I needed a ride after that, he’d always say, ‘I’m going that way,’ like every single time. I can hear him saying it just like that. ‘I’m going that way, don’t worry about it.’ He never even let me give him gas money or anything.”
Alycia’s family returned the favor whenever they could, and she remembered how Brett’s lightheartedness and playful teasing quickly won her mom over — as he did everyone:
“He met my parents too, because there were a couple of times he didn’t have his car, so my mom would give him a ride. And my mom obviously loved him. She would say that the moment she knew she loved him was when he would start bickering with me in the car and giving me grief over me not giving him the front seat, because I was in the car first. But I would always tell him, ‘No, I was in the car first. That’s not how it works.’”
Everyone I talked to emphasized Brett’s love for joking around. He was a serial prankster and was especially good at sneaking up on and scaring his friends and coworkers whenever they least expected it. It was clear that everyone I talked with thoroughly enjoyed recounting their many stories of being terrified by Brett.
Madison described an especially memorable story:
“One night, when my sister had come to pick me up, Brett was going out to get his cardboard done, and he saw that she was sitting there in the car. He went over and opened her door — I guess it was unlocked — and screamed, and she was completely terrified. And he was just standing there laughing and he goes, ‘There’s lesson number one: never keep your doors open, especially at night.’”
“We were always scaring each other like that,” Madison remembered happily. “We’d always come up behind each other, or be hiding around corners, and just generally always joking around. He was like a father figure to a lot of us.”
Alycia, who told me of the many times she’d been successfully jump-scared by Brett, recounted how once she was finally able to help give him a taste of his own medicine:
“People like to scare me, which is fair because it’s very easy and definitely entertaining, and Brett was one of them. It was so hard to get him back. But we did manage to do it a couple of times, and it was so funny. I remember once one of the prep cooks, Karen, and I were hanging outside by the loading dock, and Brett, who was driving a van, parked nearby and said he had to go inside quickly and grab something. But he’d left it running and a minute later our boss comes outside, gets in it without saying anything, drives it to the other side of the building, and says ‘Let’s see how long it takes him to find it’.
“When Brett came back out to see the van had disappeared, me and Karen just said nothing, and let him search for it frantically. I still have a video of him yelling at us when he finally found the van. ‘Neither of you decided to call me or text me, while I’m over here panicking, thinking I lost the van. That’s just messed up man.’ He was so upset with the two of us. Of course it was all in good fun.”
But he couldn’t deny they got him. Jean, a cook who works in the salad bar, had perhaps the most satisfying story of revenge. She told me:
“He’s always scaring me, and I’m always telling him, ‘I’m gonna get you back.’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah, whatever. You can’t scare me, whatever.’
“So a few days before Valentine’s Day, I had the idea to order a Ninjagram in order to scare him when he would least expect it.”
Jean enlisted the help of coworker, Patty, to help carry out the scheme. Patty needed no convincing since she had been the victim of Brett’s pranks many times and, like Jean, had been looking for a way to give him a taste of his own medicine.
After setting the scene, Jean recounted excitedly how her plot unfolded:
“So I told Patty that I’m gonna get the ninja and hide them in the storage closet, and she should just ask Brett to go inside and get some decorations for the Dining Hall. And, without hesitation, Patty is like, ‘Oh, this is great. I love this. Let’s do it.’”
“But when the ninja comes, it’s break time and Patty has to come up with some excuse to get Brett to interrupt his break and go into the closet. So she goes to Brett and says, ‘I’m sorry to bother you, but Linda McDougall really wants us to get the decorations out right now.’”
Brett, of course, would not say no to this request, as Patty knew well — if one of his coworkers or friends needed something from him, he was there. This time, though, Brett didn’t know that his generosity was leading him into an expertly-laid trap. Jean continued:
“So Brett says, ‘Oh, all right, fine, Patty,’ and goes into the closet to get the decorations. As soon as he did, they scared the crap out of him. He jumped so high. He was about to punch somebody. He was so scared. It was great.
“After that, he was constantly plotting to get me back. For ten years he was plotting, but he ain’t never got me back for it.”
That Jean managed to escape Brett’s plots relatively unscathed from then on is certainly remarkable, because, when he put his mind to something, he could almost never be deterred.
Dan remembered a hilarious story when “a bunch of us from the kitchen got together, got some beers, and rented the Transformer movie — the one with the Dinobots.”
Brett lived in Chester then and the last bus was leaving soon, but of course no one wanted to watch the movie without him — and he certainly didn’t want to miss out. So he made a deal: he would watch until the Dinobots appeared and then head out to catch the bus. Dan told me that none of them had watched this movie before — they’d just heard rumors that the Dinobots were featured — so they all assumed it wouldn’t take too long for the Bots to show up. As they kept watching though, the Bots were nowhere to be seen. Brett ended up staying for the whole movie, until the Dinobots finally appeared in the last scene. Brett missed the bus, of course, but Dan gave him a ride home, and he remembers Brett insisting throughout the evening, as the movie dragged on with no sign of the Dinobots, “I ain’t leaving until I see them.” I don’t think anyone was surprised that once Brett had his mind set on seeing the Dinobots, he wasn’t going to leave until he did.
Alycia and a fellow server, Violet, told me about Brett’s stubborn persistence revealed itself not only in his insistence on spending time with and helping out his friends but also in his everyday quirks and fixations.
Violet recounted:
“He was obsessed with getting the closest parking spot to the building. Like he would go out and smoke and move his car three spots down to be as close as possible.”
Alycia added:
“Yeah, he was also very anal about parking in general. Like even if he was 99% straight in the spot, he’d still have to adjust the car to make it perfect. He never just pulled in in one shot because he would always say, ‘Nope, it’s not straight. Nope, I’m not in all the way.’”
When it came to desserts, too, Brett had a particular obsession: chocolate chip cookies. Violet told me that he only had eyes for the chocolate chip cookies and absolutely nothing else (even M&Ms).
“He despised M&M cookies. If we didn’t have chocolate chips, but had M&M’s instead, he would get mad at you if you said they’re basically the same thing.”
Brett’s idiosyncratic passions, his persistence, his playfulness, his genuine kindness, and his reliability in moments of crisis were the reasons that he was so beloved and will be so missed. Jocelyn, a cook who was quite close to Brett, shared these thoughts on their friendship and final moments:
“He loved my cooking so much that even on his days off, he’d stop by just for my fried chicken or buffalo wings. Outside of work, we shared countless hours playing Call of Duty, sometimes alongside his oldest daughters. Those moments created a friendship I’ll forever treasure.
“What I’ll hold closest to my heart is our last conversation. We spent hours gaming, laughing, and talking trash, never imagining it would be our final time together. The very next day, he was gone. I truly believe God blessed me with one last laugh and one last beautiful memory with him.”
At the end of my conversation with Madison, she reflected on what Brett meant for her and for the many others who knew him well.
“He was just an amazing leader. Everybody looked up to him. Everybody would always ask him for help. And he never said no. He was always coming to help other stations, to pick up slack when needed, to work midnight breakfast when no one else could. He was always there, always there. Now there’s just a cloud where he used to be.
“It’s a big family, and it feels like we lost our family member.”
Brett is gone, and the mark he left is irreplaceable, but it’s clear that his support, his laughs, his quirks, and his friendships will live on in stories and memories.
