Watts, Bradley Duane
Obituary
Bradley Watts died on January 30, 2021 after a 20 year long battle with Multiple Sclerosis. He was surrounded by his family in his final days.
Brad was born in Okinawa, Japan on a military base. His father was in the Air Force and he moved around much of his childhood. He graduated high school in Lompoc, CA, then joined the U.S. Army. After three years of service, Brad started college and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. There he studied Political Science. From there he attended Tulane University Law School. It was there that he met his wife of 22 years, Jessica (Farmer) Watts.
After graduating law school, Brad clerked for a circuit court judge and then joined a plaintiff’s firm in Lafayette, Louisiana. In 2000, Brad and Jessica moved to the Dallas area. There he also worked representing plaintiffs’ personal injuries, until he was placed on permanent disability due to his MS.
Brad and Jessica have two sons: Samuel (17) and Daniel (14). Brad was a loving and kind husband and father. He enjoyed time with his family, and they formed many wonderful memories over the years. Even severely disabled in a wheelchair, Brad managed to travel for family vacations to Disney, New York and the Black Hills of South Dakota.
Brad will be greatly missed for his humor, intelligence, clever quips and love of living. Brad’s ashes will be scattered on family property in the Black Hills of South Dakota in a small family gathering at a later date.
Instead of flowers or donations, the family requests those who knew Brad over the years share a memory of Brad.
Please leave the family condolences and share memories on this website.
Arrangements under the direction of:
Aria Cremation Service and Funeral Home
19310 Preston Road
Dallas, Texas 75252
(214) 306-6700
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Let me tell you a story about
Brad, who would have mocked any notion of pathetic mourning about anything, least of all himself.
The summer of 1989 was special in many ways. And at least one of those ways goes down to the Brad that I knew then.
It was the time when you wanted to, in fact almost had to, describe people to someone else, if you wanted them to get an idea about them. When you felt you needed to describe a song, and how cool you thought it was, to them. Or needed someone to explain to you a concept or thing that was unfamiliar in dialogue and discussion. Scratch Social, Spotify or Wiki. The physical presence of another person was inseparable from understanding, feeeling and sharing.
Brad, in more way than one, was an epitome of all of this. You had to be there. Had to go through the motions of the endless mock debates with him that frequently transformed into whole- and warmhearted mock peace. Before a next round of this natural phenomenon of buzzing conversation inevitably began. Beaming with energy, no matter how impulsively fast he could also fall asleep in the early morning hours of wherever it was we dropped in. Equally lighthearted, driven, amicable, provocative and never more than an inch away from Brad pointing out, what insane luck we were enjoying to be there and then, sitting in warm evening breezes, enjoying this blast of a life and everything we hoped it still would have in stock for us. Unless, of course, there wasn’t that next upcoming party, which “seriously”, had to be dealt with first, be it in terms of logistics, pick-ups or any other given element of proper logistics.
The meandering, joyful and alive talks with Brad, for me, stood right at the end of a decade and, with it, an entire era that, arguably, still revolved around people and states of mind rather than technology and states of being.
I could easily mourn, together with mourning the man, the fact that I lost sight of him right after this summer. But it seems all too natural in retrospect. The iron curtain was mere weeks away from beginning to fall. Grad school in Berlin awaited me. And a crazy ride for all of us into what would become the 1990s.
Still, I occasionally thought about Brad many years after. And most commonly, those occasions were strangely connected to those that had brought us together by chance in that summer in Santa Barbara: leaning back onto the beach at a sunset-lit lake in Berlin with a beer in hand, during a catch of air on a terrace in the late hours of a party or driving through the warm evening air, with rolled-down windows somewhere at the mediterranean seaside.
They were lacking the natural and omnipresent, curious mix of playful authority and earnest play in Brad’s voice from the day I left California that summer. But never the ability to enjoy a moment, without taking myself too seriously, that Brad has probably played a good part in instilling in me.
And, god, would he have mocked my germanumically long and convoluted sentences.
Soar well, buddy!