The Opening

Welcome to the show…Please be seated

At the time I am writing this, grief is new to me. I cannot say that I have not lost people who were dear to me in very real ways, but I can say that I had only attended two funerals until March of 2018: when my brother died.

Call me Ethan; it’s my name, after all. I’m a graduate student in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Ole Miss. On March 3, 2018, I turned 22. Five days later, I stepped out of class to answer a phone call from my mother. She told me that my brother had had some kind of seizure, but she didn’t know more at the time. “Keep me posted,” I said. She called back 15 minutes later to give me the news.

Ethan, he…he didn’t make it. I….I can’t believe it. It’s not real.

Cheerful stuff, huh? Well, that’s kind of the problem here. I had to drive four hours from Oxford, MS to Laurel, so melting down wasn’t really an option. Then, it wasn’t an option at the hospital with the nurses awkwardly silent, or at my house later with 20 people and mountains of food, or on the day of the funeral with my mother in agony, or the week afterward with me running around and trying to set up an estate, or when I had to return to school with all of the work that I had missed. Breaking down wasn’t an option.

I had a simple response, though. Any time I felt a rise of emotion, I pushed it into the proverbial bottle and hammered the cork down. Now the bottle is so full that I’m not sure how to let it out. This website is me trying to do just that.

Brandon Davis: The Maverick of Laurel

• Brandon Davis was born on May 2, 1986 to Mark and Sonya Davis, though they are now divorced.
• He grew up (like my sister and me) in Gitano, MS surrounded by a natural world that he took a liking to.
• He was hell on wheels in high school and pitched for the baseball team.
• He tried college for a few years, but it didn’t work for him. So, he moved to Nashville. There, he had his first experiences with design and production, which would become his career.
• After TN, he traveled for a while.
• He eventually moved back home to Mississippi and married Brooke Cole Davis.
• He was remarkably talented when it came to athletics and always claimed that he could be a professional at anything he tried.
• He began working at Crosspointe Community Church soon after he married Brooke.
• He had bouts of obsession with hobbies that came in cycles, sometimes every year, sometimes longer: hunting, fishing, tennis, and disc golf to name a few.
• He saved my life no less than four times. And I mean that literally.
• Two years ago, he and Brooke welcomed a son, Kingston Rhodes.
• He started video work at Crosspointe out of necessity. If I’m honest, his early work was shitty. But he quickly improved.
• He started Black Horn Productions in 2015 and turned it into a profitable business affiliated with HGTV.
• He died on March 8, 2018 at around 2 p.m.
• The funeral took place the following Monday. Hundreds of people came.
• He was laid to rest at Lake Park Hills in Laurel, MS. His casket was, of course, Legacy Black.

Feel free to stick around

If you’ve made it this far, you’re practically family. It’s been a hell of a ride, but there’s more to do. I’ve got memories to share and stories to tell and emotions to process. It won’t all be this depressing; I promise, but it will be as honest as I can make it. This will be about the journey I take through my grief (The Exploration), with the good days and the bad, and a few mediocre ones, I’m sure.

Brandon Davis always said that good enough was never good enough. In the process, he made me believe it, too. This is the story of his death and my life, how one impacted the other and the attempt to uncork the bottle.