Joy and Purpose: A Eulogy for Kevin Blake Graham-Caso
By: David Graham-Caso
Tags: Eulogy, Progressivism, Existentialism

Kevin Blake Graham-Caso was born on April 5, 1984, at Sharp Memorial Hospital, not too far from here. He grew up in the same house for his entire childhood, on Briarcliff Drive in Scripps Ranch, and Kevin was the proud product of Miramar Ranch Elementary School, Wangenheim Middle School, and Scripps Ranch High School.

Kevin grew up loving the San Diego Padres and San Diego Chargers (though watching the Chargers would turn into a purely schadenfreude experience for Kevin later in life). He adored all UCLA sports from an early age, but in his 30s, Kevin’s allegiance would be firmly pledged to the Liverpool Football Club.

Kevin was a natural athlete, playing little league and winning a championship as a star catcher, playing recreational and then competitive traveling soccer when young, and eventually making the varsity soccer team his sophomore year of high school as an outside striker and utility midfielder. Later in high school, Kevin would transition from soccer to serving as the football team’s kicker, where he proved ownership of an exceptionally accurate leg and was named “special teams player of the year” his senior season.

In 2002, Kevin was admitted to the University of California at Los Angeles — the college he dreamed about attending since elementary school, but something he always thought was a long shot. His grades weren’t the greatest and he knew how competitive one of the top public universities in the nation could be, but he applied and I will never forget the joy everyone in our house felt the morning he found out he was headed to Westwood. Kevin loved his time at UCLA and the friends he made there, in the fraternity that elected him president and beyond.

Kevin aspired to become a film producer and screenwriter, so like many people looking to get into the entertainment industry, he began working in assistant roles at production companies. Kevin would go on to work with prominent and successful producers like Oscar winners Brian Grazer and an abusive monster who I will not name here, directors like Robert Rodriguez and Jody Hill, musicians like Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh, and actors like Josh Brolin.

Throughout his life, Kevin lived at addresses in San Diego and all over LA, in New York and New Mexico, North Carolina and South Carolina, and eventually Munich and Berlin. He traveled across Europe, spending time in Ireland and England before seeing most of the continent. He obsessed over the vistas of Spain where they shot those spaghetti westerns he loved so much, got to know distant relatives in the Austrian Alps, got a tattoo in Copenhagen, and maintained a particular distaste for Stockholm after an unfortunate run-in with some rude Swedes. He made a trip to Russia to see the World Cup, he spent time in coastal Morocco, he drove across the continental United States both with friends and by himself, mostly with a check-engine light on in the rundown sedan he got at a Carmax. Kevin saw South Africa and South Korea, drove a Jeep through African deserts, and was in the airport waiting to board a flight as pro-democracy protests broke out in Hong Kong. Kevin had an unquenchable wanderlust, he was brave enough to explore new places and he was generous enough to share his experiences with people through beautiful photography and a few witty travel blogs.

In early 2017, while traveling through Europe, Kevin met Asma Derja. They were soon engaged, moving Kevin to Germany that summer, and they were later married.

Despite living on the other side of the world, Kevin kept involved in politics in his home country, and the amateur stand-up comedy independent radio show he produced and hosted in Berlin in 2020 would often feature his own humor and political commentary.

Kevin died on October 2, 2020, suddenly and voluntarily. We will never know for sure why.

There is a part of me that won’t ever forgive him for how he left.

But there is no part of me that will ever stop missing him and grieving his choice to go.

—

Kevin and my relationship was unlike anything that anyone outside of it could honestly understand. To have both nurture and nature so inextricably intertwined creates a kind of shared consciousness. We didn’t always agree, but we always understood each other, we were always instinctively empathetic. He was a part of every part of who I was, of who I always have been — and that makes delivering his eulogy both surreal and a bit excruciating. Even when writing the account of Kevin’s life you heard just now, I needed a second pass to replace plural pronouns with third-person singular descriptors.

As difficult as this is, it is important to me — it means the world to me — that you are all here today. It is important to me because it means I can try for a few minutes to tell you about the Kevin I knew, in the hope that you can help me remember Kevin’s authentic self. It is also important because as I look out on this room, I see Kevin’s life, represented by characters from the various different chapters of my brother’s story.

I see childhood and high school friends, a lot of friends he met in college, his entertainment industry colleagues, the friends he made while living in New York, members of Kevin’s extended family, and even some people who never met Kevin, but who care about someone who did. Kevin, more than most other people I’ve ever known, siloed his life. Not only did two of the groups I just mentioned rarely ever intermix, but Kevin wasn’t always the same person with each group. There was so much to who Kevin was, that so few people ever got to truly see him holistically. But I did. I got to know, to share, in every part of him.

You need only listen to the excessively eclectic playlist we put together for today with some of Kevin’s favorite artists to get a glimpse of the different sides of my brother. You’ll hear everything from classic rock to grunge to hardcore punk to complex hip hop and rap to show tunes to twangy-ass banjo-driven country. Also, because he was a white guy in his 30’s, you’ll hear Radiohead. But it was more than just the kind of broad taste in music that could unironically create a playlist including Johnny Cash, At the Drive In, Run the Jewels and a track from the Pitch Perfect Soundtrack. He had different sides that didn’t often emerge simultaneously.

His entertainment industry colleagues might know that Kevin loved spaghetti Westerns, modern auteur filmmakers, and the Criterion collection; but I bet most didn’t know about the literal days at a time we spent with our friend Devin in high school, playing everything from Mega Man to the nerdiest role-playing, Dungeons and Dragons-adjacent video games you’ve never heard of.

Most of Kevin’s high school friends knew of him as a fun and social guy, an eager participant in whatever mischief there was afoot; but most didn’t get to see the politicking side of Kevin that came out when we simultaneously served as presidents of the two largest fraternities at UCLA. Kevin orchestrated a takeover of the school’s inter-fraternity council by forming a small slate of officers from large houses to outvote the block from smaller houses. His scheme allowed us to dictate Greek policy for the school for the entire year, absolutely infuriating the faculty advisor.

Most of the friends Kevin had in college and after would know him as a cool ladies-man, with a few incredibly serious girlfriends, and more than a few less than serious girlfriends; but I doubt many of you would have known about how much of a computer and video game-playing, comic book reading, Doctor Who, Star Trek the Next Generation and Star Wars-loving nerd he was. If he were here today, he would swear that most of it was just on my behalf, but I was there. He loved it.

I’m sure that most of the members of Kevin’s extended family who are here today would have known Kevin as the sweet and considerate son to our mom, the loving kid who struggled some after she got sick and left us too soon; but not many of you would have had a chance to experience firsthand Kevin’s enormous intellect, his incredible curiosity and constant need to know more about most things. Even in recent years, there wasn’t a YouTube and internet research rabbit hole too deep for Kevin to plunge down and he lost nights in fascination about everything from mythology to the rise of the alt-right in America.

That’s what I’ll miss most. That complete, holistic, complex individual. That full package. Kevin was the kind of brother who would recognize the solemn moment we are in right now, be there for me emotionally when I needed him, but still make sure to find a way to point out that my phrasing when I said: “that full package” just now probably veered a little close to an unintentional entendre.

That was Kevin’s sense of humor — dark, witty, sarcastic, and biting. Often over the top, crude or inappropriate. He loved nothing more than taking the piss out of someone. In fact, he felt that “taking the piss out of someone” was a quintessentially, if ironically because it is a British term, American trait. It was something of which he was oddly proud (not to mention uncharacteristically patriotic) whenever we discussed the topic. He wasn’t violent, and as far as I know, the closest he ever came to throwing a real punch in a fight is the one time I did it for him. But my god he loved to provoke. He loved to needle, to dunk on someone, to devastate a deserving subject with words that would wound. (In retrospect, it was amazing that he wasn’t in more physical altercations.)

Since Kevin died, there hasn’t been a moment I haven’t missed him, and one of the ways I’ve tried to feel close to him in his absence is to go back and re-read the emails and texts we traded, the draft screenplays, outlines and pitches he prepared and asked me to review. Everything we did was collaborative, but especially writing. As I read back through the draft sets and stand-up bits Kevin was considering delivering at an open mic in Berlin last year, it was more than clear that Kevin was funny. He knew how to write a joke that set you up and subverted your expectations. But something else was clear. Underneath that humor, just an inch-deep really, there was a lot of anger. Kevin’s humor was, in part, a way for him to process a lot of what I think was pretty justified rage about the world he saw around him. Forgive me for how partisan this is about to get, but there are some things that Kevin cared about deeply that I’m not sure anyone else would mention here because it wasn’t always part of himself that Kevin broadcast (though as you’ll see later, he literally did exactly that once).

Kevin was deeply, deeply progressive. He would sometimes joke about wanting to be more open about supporting Bernie Sanders, but that like the show Rick and Morty, white, bearded 30-somethings on the internet ruined it for the rest of us by being toxic assholes. Though he didn’t always wear it on his sleeve, Kevin cared about people — a lot — and he was furious about what he saw as a social contract broken and his millennial generation left holding the bag.

Especially in recent years, Kevin and I spoke about how he felt self-consciously emblematic of many of the generational traumas millennials have had to endure. And while the phrase “generational traumas millennials have had to endure” sounds like something tailor-made to trigger Tucker Carlson, it is an unfortunately undeniable truth that Kevin lived in, and it absolutely permeated his creativity.

And while the phrase “generational traumas millennials have had to endure” sounds like something tailor-made to trigger Tucker Carlson, it is an unfortunately undeniable truth that Kevin lived, and it absolutely permeated his creativity.

One of the best screenplays Kevin ever wrote was titled “Good People With Guns.” It told the story of a young woman who survives a mass shooting and decides to do something drastic to disprove the myth of there being such a thing as “a good guy with a gun.” It was exceptional. It was emotional and witty and exciting and poignant. It was nearly award-winning, making it all the way to the quarter-finals of the Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowship hosted by the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences. But most of all Kevin’s screenplay had exactly zero fucks to give about the straw man arguments that allow gun violence to persist in America. And for Kevin, having been a sophomore in high school when Columbine happened and part of the generation that saw active shooter drills become part of daily life, it was how he expressed his fury about gun violence in our country and the apathy that allows it to continue.

In 2014, Kevin wrote the teleplay for a pilot episode and then sketched out a detailed show bible for “The Nation,” which would have been an hour-long drama that told the story of a family caught in the onset of a second American Civil War. I can’t tell you how angry I was on January 6 — not just because of the traitors storming the Capitol in Washington, but because Kevin wasn’t here to see his terrifying imagination play out live on CNN. Kevin loathed Trump and the alt-right insurrectionists who helped him rise to power. As a history major in college, he was hyper-aware of the historical context of the return of unbridled and unabashed fascism in America, and Kevin was definitely guilty of an occasional diatribe about how much it sucked to have a front-row seat to the decline of the American democratic experiment.

Shortly before moving to Europe, Kevin sketched out a film about the Ludlow Massacre — a mass killing of striking miners in Colorado in 1914, which, in case you aren’t sensing the theme here yet, was entirely sympathetic to the working women and men who were brutalized for standing up for their rights. Ludlow was going to be part of an anthology Kevin was pondering, where he would have used the same cast to tell stories of labor uprisings throughout American history. He and I had been discussing the Pullman chapter for years but never got around to writing it together. The labor focus shouldn’t be a surprise to those of you who knew our picket-line marching parents. Our summer vacations used to be wherever the annual teacher’s union conference was that year, and the constant exposure to a bunch of liberal educators most definitely took its toll.

But even without their influence, Kevin’s life experience would have made him a died-in-the-wool progressive. My brother was very, unfortunately, personally aware of how rising costs and stagnant wages have doomed most millennials to consider homeownership or a savings account a pipe dream. He slammed head-first into the same career-stifling brick wall as other millennials who entered the job market right as the greed-fueled financial collapse tanked the economy in 2008. And my god did my brother have a tragically up-close view of the failings of the American healthcare system. Working so many different jobs in the entertainment industry, Kevin rarely had health insurance, and by the time Obamacare finally allowed him to afford it, it was too little, too late. Due to a condition I found out after his death was most likely created by a congenital problem with his kidneys, Kevin suffered frequent excruciating trips to the ER and required a series of procedures to remove kidney stones. He was furious that unavoidable emergencies became inescapable bankruptcy, but more than that, he knew that he was far from the only one to wind up indebted to both their parents, hospitals, and insurance companies through no fault of their own.

Like many other millennials, as Kevin grew up he saw the cracks in the American dream we were all promised become wider, and by the time Kevin had traveled some, he realized that the largely white upper-middle-class suburban bubble he grew up in wasn’t just isolated from a lot of injustice and inequity in the world, but a product of it. On June 20, 2020, Kevin opened his radio show by talking about last summer’s protests against police violence, his past ignorance and privilege as a white guy, and how comedy can be a useful tool in breaking down barriers and fighting racism. As part of the opening, Kevin beautifully recounted a story he wasn’t able to find audio for but wanted to communicate anyway, about how Dave Chappelle responded to a racist heckler with a history lesson and then made a point of graciously forgiving the heckler in a touching example of the hope for change that a medium like comedy can inspire. Kevin then spent the remainder of the show playing Black comics from around the world, selecting a series of comedy sets talking about racism, intolerance, and injustice, emphatically proving his point from the Chappelle anecdote.

For Kevin, creativity was his advocacy. He voted in every election and he went door-to-door for the California Democratic Party the summer after high school, but beyond that, Kevin’s political activism wasn’t traditional. That doesn’t mean, though, that it wasn’t a major part of who he was. He used to give me shit when I worked at the Sierra Club that Avatar made more environmentalists than non-profits ever would, and he was absolutely, 100% correct. He knew the power of popular culture to shape opinions, and he wanted to create art that said something about the anger he felt at the world his generation had been handed.

“If the myth is tragic, that’s because it’s hero is conscious.”

Kevin had a righteous rage about the state of the world. That is part of who he was — it is part of who I will always remember and hold with me, and it is part of how I think we should all live in his memory. And as I close, I have a few thoughts about how we can do that.

—

When eulogizing his friend and Monty Python co-creator Graham Chapman, John Cleese repeated a line throughout the address: “Anything for him but mindless good taste.” Though it isn’t in very rare company these days as most things do, that quote makes me think of Kevin. It makes me think of how I plan to live my life in his memory, in his honor, in a way I think he might appreciate. I think there’s an expansion on the quote that can tell us how best to keep Kevin’s memory alive and thriving.

Anything for Kevin but mindless acquiescence. Anything for Kevin but quiet acceptance of injustice. Anything for Kevin but mindless good taste. That wasn’t who he was, and it isn’t who we should allow ourselves to be now that he’s gone. Kevin had a righteous rage about the state of the world, and I think that honoring his memory means sharing in some of that indignation on his behalf — and, more importantly, acting on it at every opportunity.

Yes, it means registering to vote and voting, obviously. That part is a given. But it means so much more than that. It means thinking empathetically and caring about people around you, including those who you will never meet. It means looking at the world and not just acknowledging that there is injustice and inequity and intolerance — but that you can do something about it. It means embracing the role that entertainment and popular culture play in shaping opinions and holding Kevin present in your mind as you seek out and support creators who are helping break down barriers and opening people’s eyes to ideas and concepts they might never be aware of otherwise. But most of all, it means maintaining a sense of humor, no matter how dark, sardonic or sarcastic, as you confront the world and try to make it a better place.

As you do that, though, please also remember the lesson Kevin has learned for us if we are just willing to listen. He has tragically taught us that we must always be aware of the blinders life sometimes tries to put up to block the good, the joyful, the things in life that make life worth living.

For Kevin, those things included playing pickup soccer and Liverpool’s historic run in 2020. They included every time he got to see the Bruins in the Final Four and every time he got to see the Chargers conservative owners squirm after the team blew another late lead. They included the great literature he loved and the inspiring films he proselytized to his friends about. He found joy in his dog Debs (yes, named after the socialist), in the friends who he loved dearly, and in the relatives who he cared about intensely. He found joy in his niece and nephews, who he loved playing with and buying creative and meaningful gifts. Kevin found happiness in his relationship with his sister, who he adored and looked up to. He found joy in the love of his father, who he revered. And always, no matter what, he had me.

And he had you. In the conversations I had with many of you in the wake of his death, it was very clear how much Kevin was loved by you as well. With all of that love in his life, even from the other side of the world, it seems impossible that Kevin would have been able to avoid awareness of the love we felt for him, to act either without thinking of us, or in spite of the consideration. It seems impossible that we would all find ourselves here today under these circumstances.

The only conclusion I have been able to reach about the tragedy that brings us all here today is that trauma in Kevin’s life put up blinders that blocked out the good, the things he loved, the people who loved him. I can only ever assume that those trauma-induced blinders limited his view enough to allow him to act on a tragic and permanent impulse, from which I don’t think any of us will ever truly recover. The blinders hid the joy in his world and left him only seeing the pain and the strife. Left him without the balance, the duality, the variety of different sides of the guy that it felt like only I ever really, completely, and holistically knew. The popular jock and the hidden nerd, the ladies man and the progressive firebrand, the wry and angry comic, and the kind, gentle and caring brother, who I miss every single day.

Kevin’s last lesson to us is that the entire panorama of each of our worldviews has to include both the joy and the pain, that we cannot let blinders allow us to ignore any part of what’s in front of us. Kevin taught us that we are all better when it is all in view — that we are all better when we ignore neither the injustice in our society nor the joy in our lives. That we are all better when we embrace both the opportunities to make the world better for everyone and the people who make the world better for us.

I believe that Kevin was at his best, his most creative, his happiest when he held present both joy and purpose. Joy and purpose — that is how I will always remember him. It is who I will hold in my heart as I live in his honor. It is who I will hold in my heart as I act at every opportunity.

Anything for Kevin but mindless acquiescence.

Anything for Kevin.