Regardless of outward appearances, life has not been all Champagne needs and caviar desires. Victor was born in Okinawa, Japan, to a Filipino mom and an American father, the fourth of 5 youngsters. He spent his early years in Honolulu. When Victor was eight, his household moved to Silver Spring, the place his dad, a second lieutenant within the U.S. Military, labored for the Navy’s Bureau of Yards and Docks, and later the Washington Space Transit Authority, supervising the acquisition of actual property for the subway system.
When Victor was in center college and his brother John was in highschool, John was identified with schizophrenia. Later, when his youngest brother, Bob, was in school, he, too, was identified with the uncommon illness that strikes roughly one % of the world’s inhabitants. “The NIH needed to review the household and their genetics,” remembers Lynne.
Victor discovered solace and salvation by means of sports activities, first at Silver Spring Boys Membership, then Silver Spring’s White Oak Junior Excessive, and Springbrook Excessive Faculty. Athletics provided an avenue, at a time when anti-Asian sentiment ran excessive.
“We have been folks of shade in a completely white group, not lengthy after WWII. Sports activities have been a means for us to show ourselves—and we proved ourselves very properly,” says Victor. “My brother Merrill performed soccer and basketball and ran observe, I performed basketball and ran observe, and John was a runner.”
Regardless of their heartache, the stress, and, in Victor’s phrases “fixed disaster administration,” the Bricks stayed sturdy as a household unit.
“We’re agency believers that robust occasions don’t construct character, they reveal it,” says Victor, his background as a motivational speaker evident in virtually all the things he says. “John pulled our household collectively. We rallied round John due to my dad and mom. I noticed how my mom was dedicated to John each bit as a lot as she was to Merrill and me—and I adopted go well with.”
It was tough for Victor. There was one time when he needed to come to the rescue when Bob landed in jail after a psychotic episode in Canada. And he struggled watching John wreck automobile after automobile, unable to carry down a job, often discovering himself homeless. Nonetheless, Victor lights up when he talks about his brothers.
“John was all the time completely different,” he says. “He was all the time socially inappropriate, and I hardly ever ever keep in mind him being joyful, however he was good, and he handed on his love of studying and historical past to me. He wrote this quick story as soon as, and I’ll always remember, he described this character as ‘marvelously gifted and tragically flawed’—that was my brother. I took all the nice issues from him, and I realized from them—and I attempted to assist him together with his flaws.”
By means of the turmoil, Victor says, it was Lynne, a former nurse on the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Heart on the College of Maryland, who was his “rock.”
“I understood that it was psychological sickness,” says Lynne. “And with my nursing background and my DNA to take care of different folks, I knew that he couldn’t assist it. When he had his points, everybody within the household rallied—and I used to be a part of the rally workforce to encompass John with love.”
Victor and Lynne inspired John to dwell a wholesome way of life, as a companion to his medical care. “He didn’t get assist or encouragement in that route, not from the medical occupation and never even from my dad and mom, as a result of that wasn’t deemed as very efficient or necessary,” says Victor. Provides Lynne, “We tried to assist John with way of life selections, getting sleep, train, diet—these have been issues he might have management over, however it bought to a degree the place he refused to hear.”
By 2005, John was 62 years previous and residing in a trailer park in Port Orange, Florida, simply outdoors of Daytona Seaside and three miles down the street from his dad and mom. “He started to withdraw from society and from contact with the surface world,” says Victor.
As John slipped deeper into psychosis, he started to imagine that his sickness was his punishment for sinning. “He blamed himself and felt he wanted to do penance, and one of many methods he tried to absolve himself was to get rid of all of the conveniences of contemporary life,” says Victor. “He had no radio, no tv, then he removed the fridge, and then you definitely’d go to see him, and he wouldn’t come out and must discuss by means of the door. Lastly, he removed an air conditioner in a steel trailer residence in Florida in the course of summer season.”
On June 13, 2009, Victor’s father discovered his son’s physique on the ground of that trailer. The temperature inside was 115 F.
“We predict he died of warmth stroke or a coronary heart assault,” says Victor. “My mom refused to do an post-mortem, however it was actually schizophrenia that killed him. He fought it to a degree after which gave up—that was the saddest factor for me, to see my brother hand over.”
A number of days later, at John’s funeral, because the household gathered contained in the church, one thing shifted inside Victor. “I used to be simply overwhelmed with emotion,” he remembers. “I used to be weeping inconsolably within the church. I appeared across the church and there was nobody to weep for my brother however my mom and our household. It was so unhappy. He was this lovely particular person and but he handed, and nobody even knew that he existed. It was at my brother’s funeral that I mentioned, ‘I’ll be certain they keep in mind John and that others don’t should undergo what we’re going by means of.’”