My dad's obituary

My dad died two days ago, on November 19, 2025. He died from cancer caused by a lifetime of smoking, plus old age. Needless to say, it’s been a hard week for me. It’s also been a hard few years for me, ever since he was diagnosed in 2022 and ended up in the ICU (I wrote about that a while ago). There’s been a lot of ups and downs.

I have a lot of personal thoughts about this that are hard for me to process right now. Biology/health-wise, I have a few main thoughts:

1. Keytruda is a miracle drug. It gave my dad another few years when chemotherapy and radiation totally failed. I’ll be writing about cancer and the PD-1 inhibitors sometime soon, as they really are pretty amazing. That being said…

2. My dad never fully returned to baseline after his ICU visit. He had so many problems, cancer and otherwise, including a nasty bout with COVID and a totally baffling bout of anorexia. Each of his illnesses individually had a cause, with smoking being the proximate cause of his cancer, but it seemed so obvious that his failure to fully recover from these illnesses was aging-related. It’s made me more convinced of the need to fix aging, as well as greater mystery as to what aging actually is. More on that later.

3. Hospitals suck. I don’t mean that in just the fact that it was always sad when my dad ended up in a hospital. I mean that hospitals were literally always terrible for his recovery, as they continually poked and prodded my dad, woke him up at all hours of the night, and wouldn’t let him do his daily routines. He was left scarred by them in more ways than one. There are incredibly obvious ways to make a hospital better for patients, which I think are mostly impossible due to overregulation. I’ll discuss that more later.

Anyways, here’s the obituary I wrote for my dad, with his and my mom’s input.

Hugging my brother Jared at his wedding. Love you, dad.

Brian was born in Boston, MA to a 24-year-old medical student, Gerald D’Arcy Klee, and his young, immigrant wife, Elizabeth Grace Klee. Over the next 10 years, Brian would be followed by four siblings: Ken, Sheila Grace, Susan (deceased), and Louise.

Brian only spent a year in Boston, as his father moved to Missouri after graduating medical school to work as a prison doctor. This was the first of many moves in Brian’s young life. Over the course of his childhood, Brian would live in Boston, Missouri, Staten Island, Baltimore, and Pennsylvania, before heading off to Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA.

College was one of the most formative experiences of Brian’s life, as his major in philosophy taught him “how to think.” He especially found his course in mathematical logic incredibly edifying, and he would like to note for the record that he got the only uncurved A in the entire class. He would also like to note that he received a prize for the most outstanding philosophy student in his graduating class.

Brian decided that he was not interested in being penniless, and followed his philosophy major by getting an MBA at Columbia. He then became a corporate man, first working as a CPA at Price Waterhouse, and then as an internal auditor at Bristol Myers. At that point, Bristol Myers had an unlimited corporate travel budget, which Brian took full advantage of, seeing all that was fit to see and then some in Paris, Bangkok, and other exotic cities. Brian left Bristol Myers, got a CFA, and went to work as a portfolio manager at Scudder, Stevens, and Clark. After rising to the rank of Vice President, he struck out on his own as a money manager until effectively retiring at age 45 or so, depending on your definition of retirement. He did still manage his own investments, which he did so with aplomb.

But Brian’s real love in life was his family. He met the love of his life, soon-to-be dermatologist Diane Davidson, in November 1986, and married her May 15, 1988. With his emotional and financial backing, she set up a dermatology practice in Groton, CT, which is right around where they ultimately built their life.

Brian is survived, and missed, by their children: his daughter (and Diane’s stepdaughter) Alex, and their sons Jared, Justin, and Trevor, along with their respective partners. He was delighted to find that they all found the loves of their lives as well as fulfilling careers. It was his great joy to see the next generation before he passed: granddaughter Nora, and grandsons Liam, Henry, and Logan.

If his life and death has any advice for the next generation, it’s that you shouldn’t smoke cigarettes, and that a low-cost index fund like Vanguard’s is by far the best investment choice for almost everybody. The family is accepting political and religious debates at dinner in his honor.