Lou Brizzi grew up in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Son of John Brizzi, who owned the Star Produce Market on Paterson Avenue. Son of Margaret, who held the family together.
He graduated from East Rutherford High School in 1959. He was part of the 1958 Wildcat Championship football team. For Lou, the game was only part of the story. It taught him commitment, accountability, and integrity. He carried those things forever.
He was not a loud man. He was not a man who needed the room to know he was in it. He was a man who showed up. Every day. For decades. Without narrating it.
He worked at Baptist Hospital in Pensacola until he was eighty-three years old. Eighty-three. With a pacemaker ticking in his chest. I asked him once why he kept going.
What else would I do? Sit at home and feel sorry for myself?
That was the whole answer. That was always the whole answer with Lou.
In 1986, he adopted a boy from Mexico City who didn’t speak his language, didn’t know his customs, and didn’t understand why the world had suddenly changed. He gave that boy his name. He gave him a family. He gave him an example of what it looks like to choose someone and never stop choosing them.
I was that boy.
Lou didn’t have to adopt me. He had three kids already — Jon, Lisa, Joel. A full life. A full house. But he looked at a situation that wasn’t his responsibility and made it his responsibility anyway. Not once. Every day. For the rest of his life.
He came to every wrestling match. He drove me to tournaments before dawn. He sat in bleachers in gymnasiums that smelled like sweat and rubber and never once looked bored. When I won the county championship at seventeen, he didn’t make a speech. He just put his hand on my shoulder.
That hand. I felt it my whole life.
When I was at my worst — two DUIs, unemployed, alone in an empty apartment in West Palm Beach — Lou got on a plane. He rented a U-Haul at the airport. He knocked on my door. When I opened it, he didn’t scan the apartment. Didn’t look at the mess. He looked at me.
Let’s get some sleep. We’ll get going in the morning.
No lecture. No inventory of what I’d cost him. Just a plan. Practical and quiet and final. The way Lou always was when something was decided.
He found out in January 2024 that the cancer had come back. Stage 4. Lungs and lymph nodes. Chris was getting married in February. Lou decided — quietly, completely — that his son’s wedding was not going to be about his diagnosis. So he showed up. He danced. He celebrated. He held it all inside.
He kept the secret for months.
Lou died on Christmas Day, 2025. He was eighty-four years old.
I work in hospice now. I sit with families every day who are losing someone they love. And every time I walk into a room and pull a chair close and stay — that’s Lou. That’s what he taught me. Not in a lesson. In a life.
He didn’t have to. And he did anyway. Every day. For the rest of his life.
That’s not a story about an extraordinary man. It’s a story about what love looks like when it decides to be a verb.