Dan Le Batard began his show Tuesday on a somber note by announcing the death of his younger brother, David, who had suffered from an undisclosed illness for the past year.
He was 50 years old.
“My little brother, my only sibling, my closest family member in a very small family, responsible for all the art around here, and my best friend for 50 years passed away last night at 2:00 a.m.,” Le Batard said on “The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz.”
“I don’t have a lot of experience with grief, but I have been grieving him for a year because when he was diagnosed more than a year ago he’s been steadily deteriorating since, and it’s been brutally hard to watch a poison eat him up from the inside, and one of the biggest spirits I’ve ever seen consumed by illness.”
A Miami-based artist known as “LEBO,” David Le Batard created all of the artwork that has adorned his brother’s studios over the years, as well as the show’s merchandise.
The Le Batard brothers are sons of Cuban immigrants who fled the country during Fidel Castro’s rule.
As Le Batard, 54, continued his tribute to David, he quoted the song “If We Were Vampires” by Jason Isbell, which has the lyrics, “Maybe time running out is a gift. I’ll work hard ’til the end of my shift.”
“The hospitals and the sickness, and basically I’ve worn one of those X-Ray-leaded vests draped on me for over a year with something I’ve never imagined that I would encounter. I was preparing for the death of my parents, so to have my father whisper to my brother last night, ‘We’ll see you soon,’ was a special kind of heartbreaking, because this is inconceivable to me,” Le Batard said, eventually tearing up.
“It’s something that I never considered possible. But I would tell everyone listening here, when you put a clock on it, because you hear about all these things changing people and life perspectives when you put a clock on it and you value moments you get because you don’t know how many you’re gonna get in a way that’s uncommonly present, what you get is the gift of gratitude that I had for the past year I have spent, because it wasn’t a sudden finality of a car accident, I’ve spent the last year saying all the things — getting the chance to appreciate him and say good-bye and ask for forgiveness for the family stuff and pour out my heart to him.
“There was grace and freedom at 2 a.m. as I’m watching the monitors go down, to be in his ear and physically mouth to his ear, telling him that it was OK to go, that he was safe, that he didn’t have a reason to be scared, and to see him stop suffering, and to see him peaceful. Amid the horror of that was a seismic and great beauty that I’ll forever be grateful for.”
David was a street artist and muralist who created the famous “Welcome to Miami Beach” mural in 2016, the largest mural that the city of Miami Beach has approved, according to the Miami Herald.
He also enjoyed the pursuit of converting old camper vans into works of artistry.
“There’s a couple reasons,” David explained on Instagram why he liked to do this.
“The first is loving the idea of a compact vehicle you can explore and live in — either for short trips or extended adventures. The second reason is that every old van tells a story and telling stories is one of the aspects of being an artist that has always interested me the most. Taking an old dusty van with solid bones and applying a creative touch to it is the perfect balance of form and function.”