Posted on 03/19/2005 8:30:22 PM PST by My Favorite Headache
Mom Tries to Rationalize Prodigy's Death
By SHARON COHEN He started reading as a toddler, played piano at age 3 and delivered a high school commencement speech in cap and gown when he was just 10 - his eyes barely visible over the podium.
Brandenn Bremmer was a child prodigy: He composed and recorded music, won piano competitions, breezed through college courses with an off-the-charts IQ and mastered everything from archery to photography, hurtling through life precociously. Then, last Tuesday, Brandenn was found dead in his Nebraska home from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head.
He was just 14. He left no note.
``Sometimes we wonder if maybe the physical, earthly world didn't offer him enough challenges and he felt it was time to move on and do something great,'' his mother, Patricia, said from the family home in Venango, Neb., a few miles from the Colorado border.
Brandenn showed no signs of depression, she said. He had just shown his family the art for the cover of his new CD that was about to be released.
He was, according to his family and teachers, an extraordinary blend of fun-loving child and serious adult. He loved Harry Potter and Mozart. He watched cartoons and enjoyed video games but gave classical piano concerts for hundreds of people - without a hint of stage fright.
``He wasn't just talented, he was just a really nice young man,'' said David Wohl, an assistant professor at Colorado State University, where Brandenn studied music after high school. ``He had an easy smile. He really was unpretentious.''
Patricia Bremmer - who writes mysteries and has long raised dogs with her husband, Martin - said they both knew their son was special from the moment he was born. The brown-haired, blue-eyed boy was reading when he was 18 months old and entering classical piano competitions by age 4.
``He was born an adult,'' his mother said. ``We just watched his body grow bigger.''
He scored 178 on one IQ test - a test his mother said he was too bored to finish.
Brandenn was home schooled. By age 6, when many little boys are learning to read, he was ready to tackle high school. He enrolled in the Independent Study High School in Lincoln through the University of Nebraska, taking most of his courses by mail.
``He was such a breath of fresh air,'' recalls Lisa Bourlier, associate principal at the school. ``It's unusual to find a student 6 years old willing to shake hands with adults and say, 'Hi, my name is Brandenn, this is what I want to do.'''
In a college preparatory program, Brandenn took his classes in clusters - all science at one time, all social studies at another - and ``zipped through,'' said Bourlier.
His mother said his mind was so facile that if a topic interested him, he could complete a semester's work in 10 days. She sometimes worried she couldn't keep pace with her son's intellect, and the family hired tutors.
``He set the pace,'' she said. ``We only did what he wanted. (We might say) 'Instead of taking three classes, why don't you take one?' We let him make his own choices from the time he was an infant. ... He always made good choices.''
For his senior class photo, Brandenn temporarily darkened his hair, wore a red cape and round wire-rimmed glasses and posed with a suspended broom - the spitting image of Harry Potter.
At age 10, he became the youngest graduate of his high school and he delivered a commencement speech, saying he was so unusual he practically ``qualified for the endangered species list.''
``He carried himself very well,'' recalled Bourlier. ``He did just a very nice job for being 10. During the ceremony, he gave this excellent little speech. He was just so composed. ... Then afterward, he was running around with his nieces and nephews just a few years younger than him.''
Brandenn was taking biology at Mid-Plains Community College in North Platte, Neb., and had recently decided he wanted to become an anesthesiologist. He also studied for years at Colorado State, polishing piano skills that had won him state competitions and a table-full of trophies.
Brandenn turned away from his classical roots and started writing his own spiritual, New Age-style music, passing on a demo of one piano piece to the musician Yanni at a Nebraska concert. He released a CD called ``Elements'' and gave concerts in Colorado and Nebraska. He was booked for a concert in Kansas next year.
His music will live on - the Bremmers plan to release his second CD for fans who range from nuns to cancer patients to the owners of a New York restaurant where diners can listen to the soothing melodies of Brandenn Bremmer.
His family, meanwhile, wonders why he is gone.
``We're trying to rationalize now,'' his mother said. ``He had this excessive need to help people and teach people. ... He was so connected with the spiritual world. We felt he could hear people's needs and desires and their cries. We just felt like something touched him that day and he knew he had to leave'' to save others.
And so, she said, Brandenn's kidneys were donated to two people, his liver went to a 22-month-old and his heart to an 11-year-old boy.
Patricia Bremmer said in the days since her son's death, she and others have felt his presence. Her husband, she said, was comforted to find a message under his computer mouse pad their son had written six years ago: ``I love you dad. No matter what happens, I'll always love you.''
She wished that she, too, could have that sort of solace. She started rummaging through drawers to stay busy and came across five handmade cards from Brandenn with the same loving message.
Finding them, she said, ``just made it so much easier.''
03/19/05 13:45
good post...
I could go on and on, but there is no point. Children sometimes come with drives that mystify us, and all we can do as parents is to pass along what we know. Sometimes we do not know enough. And, sometimes we make the mistake of thinking we know it all.
You have a good heart yourself, and obviously full of God-given compassion for others. I'm sorry you've had to experience this sort of tragedy in your own life. Yes, God is good, loving and forgiving, and no one whould speak for Him.
It depends on one's mental state. God does not hold a person morally culpable for an act that is done without willful intent towards evil.
Besides, a person throwing himself on a grenade to save his fellow soldiers would be a righteous act though still a choice to kill oneself.
Ping to post #83
Thanks, ishisnickcool. :) I haven't had to deal with tragic deaths as much as you have witnessed, but I do understand exactly what you're saying. In a three year period, our small town struggled with the grief of losing 5 of our young people. Two were accident related, one was an undiagnosed illness, and the other two were suicides. I was torn between sadness and anger....knowing that three would have chosen life, and two just couldn't deal with their lives. Too sad.
"I don't think this kid or his method of schooling fits the traditional home-schooling model."
"Besides, when looking at home-schooling vs. public schooling, it is broad trends and statistics that we must look to, as in any inquiry, rather than simply isolated incidents and anectdotal evidence."
"There are alway exceptions on both sides."
IMO, very true indeed.
This is a different article from a different source; does that violate FR's "duplicate thread" rule?
More to the point, this article has a lot more information and insight than the one you posted.
I don't think suicide is a decision made in the intellect. A lot of brilliant people live miserable lives and a lack of intelligence is not their problem.
There are issues of life that cannot be solved by the mind.
Oh yeah, try living with the monicker 'streetpreacher' around here!
"What street are you preaching on?", etc. ad infinitum, ad nauseaum...
"Children sometimes come with drives that mystify us, and all we can do as parents is to pass along what we know. Sometimes we do not know enough. And, sometimes we make the mistake of thinking we know it all."
Wow, you couldn't have hit the proverbial "nail on the head" any harder. Very well spoken. :)
say what? You preach to streets? LOL
The key word being, 'rationalize'. And that last sentence suggest the boy's mother was part of the problem.
Very troubling indeed...
Some of this might even suggest a "Messianic complex" on the part of the mother.
I had a friend with a son whose IQ was 170 and he was really, really difficult to be around. His mother was the one who told me of the burden of parenting such a child and its psychiatric ramifications. When driving, he would tell me the odds of having accidents at every intersection. He was absolutely preoccupied with what could go wrong. When he was three, he had a two-year-old friend who drowned. Apparently, he was an absolute basketcase for months because he had an nihilist adult-type of understanding of death that, regardless of what the mother said, logically concluded that his friend was rotting in the ground. One night he had a dream and told his mother the next morning that his friend came to him and told him that he really had wanted to be a girl so he had died and now come back as a newborn girl. It was really weird to hear stuff about reincarnation coming out of a three-year-old's mouth.
I don't know what happened to him, but whenever I hear about child prodigies, I get a chill up my back remembering this boy.
Yes and since the scientists who said that have never used more than a small portion of there brains, how would they know the result of using the rest of it since it is outside their cognitive abilities to comprehend?
I personally believe that we use all of the brain that God designed for us to use and many scientists don't even use that (especially the portion that regulates common sense).
There's a lot of people posting on this thread that need to pitied as well.
Hillary Clinton? The Smartest Woman Who Ever Lived?
Nope. Condi Rice, who was also along the way a championship ice skater and concert pianist.
This kid was as fallen as the rest of us, vast intellect notwithstanding.
Might as well; they're the only ones who listen to me and that don't run away...
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