Brian Leonard Berdux (09/17/1991 - 09/08/2023):

Brian was born in Mission Viejo, California, to Barbara Love Goldman Berdux who was born in Newark and raised in Hillside, New Jersey and William James Berdux, Jr. who was born in San Diego and raised in Lakeside, California. Brian entered this world on a Yom Kippur and left it just sixteen days before another Yom Kippur. He was greeted by two older sisters, Sabrina Michelle and Chelsie Love. Being nine years younger than Chelsie and ten years younger than Sabrina, Brian grew up with three mothers. Sabrina teased him with the nickname "Booger Butt" throughout his life and her two daughters grew to fondly call him "Uncle Booger." Brian spent time playing with and reading to his pre-school nieces and nephew. He thoroughly enjoyed bringing smiles to their faces. He made a powerful, positive impact on their lives and left them with very fond and loving memories of their uncle.

Just as he turned one year old, his family moved to the rural town of Penngrove, California, in Sonoma County, where he spent the next ten years growing up among dairy farms, horse stables, vineyards, orchards, redwood groves, open fields, lakes and streams.

At 3 years of age, Brian was enrolled in the Congregation Beth Ami preschool in Santa Rosa.  Here he showed his true nature. His teachers were amazed with his kindness and caring. In his first week he befriended a boy who was being ignored and ostracized on the playground. Sam had no friends because of a severe speech impediment that prevented him from being able to communicate like the other children who did not have the patience or desire to try to understand him. However, Brian befriended Sam, patiently listening to him and figuring out what Sam would try to communicate.  Sam had this one friend, Brian. Sadly, the two boys lived in different school districts and over time,  the distance and involvement in different groups of friends caused them to grow apart,  over the years. However, Brian never lost his sense of compassion and always listened carefully to others without criticism or judgment.

It was in Penngrove where, Curtis, Michael and Paul became Brian's valued lifelong friends.

Brian's formative years included playing on T-ball and soccer teams, climbing the ranks of Tae Kwon Do, learning to play guitar and clarinet, ice skating, roller blading, fishing, plinking with his BB gun and pellet rifle in the yard and exploring an idyllic countryside of rolling hills and rocky outcrops. He and his friends loved to swim in his backyard pool. His dad taught him to ride a bicycle on the Sonoma State University campus. Of course, he spent his share of time playing Mario Brothers, Pokemon and Transformers video games and collecting action hero characters and trading cards.

Brian moved with his mother and father to Las Vegas, Nevada as he was about to start junior high school, in 7th grade. During four years in Las Vegas he attended public schools and the Milton I. Schwartz Hebrew Academy. He chose the Adat Ami Congregation where he studied with Rabbi Gary Golbart and celebrated his Bar Mitzvah with his Jewish community, under his hebrew name, Benyanim ben Kalev. As years passed, Brian often recalled his fond memories of the family's "magical" times at Adat Ami. He continued to take guitar lessons and he joined a boxing gym in old, downtown Las Vegas and took boxing lessons in a rundown facility like Rocky Balboa would have trained in. (One of his great uncles had been a professional boxer.) He also enjoyed driving the family's Nissan Pathfinder off-road and trying out golf. In Las Vegas he made two more exceptional lifelong friends, Mike and Morgan, who he met online, playing Ragnarok and World of Warcraft video games on their home computers and face-to-face in the nearby Summerlin Library. This is where he got the handle (gaming nickname) "B-Dog."

After four years in Las Vegas, Brian and his parents moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area, to Walnut Creek. Here, Brian completed high school and enrolled in college. He got his first job in a barbeque restaurant at the age of 15 and continued to work part and full time ever since. While living here, Brian took horseback riding and SCUBA diving lessons and enjoyed downhill skiing. One summer he went on vacation to his Uncle Paul Berdux' home in Picayune, Mississippi where Paul took him fishing on his boat, to New Orleans and showed Brian what life in the deep south was like. Years later, Brian said that this was one of the most fun things he ever did. He also met two more lifelong friends, Andrew and Tim who turned out to be two very special young men dedicated to their friendships with Brian, up to his final day.

After four years in Walnut Creek, Brian and his parents moved to Oakland, into a duplex residence where his sister Sabrina and her husband occupied one unit while Brian and his parents occupied the other. Here, Brian met his last lifelong friend, Hannah Nicole. The relationship never blossomed into a marriage but, for over ten years, the two would share their joys and sorrows, their successes and failures, the loves found and the loves lost.

After Brian's passing,  Hannah shared a text message from Brian in which he told her how his sister Chelsie had taken him out to dinner once for his birthday. He explained how happy he was to be able to take her out that evening, in return. Chelsie didn't know how important that night was for Brian because he always kept his deepest feelings inside.

Brian started working at the age of fifteen, as a busboy in a barbecue restaurant, clearing tables and mopping floors. He worked his way up to being a server in an upscale restaurant founded by a celebrity chef. He developed a following as he paired vintage wines with appropriate entrées and main courses. His favorite job, however, was during the COVID-19 pandemic when he hired, trained and supervised a staff for pop-up coronavirus testing booths that were located throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. His major achievement was saving the operation from closure due to its inability to meet government reporting regulations. To meet record keeping and reporting requirements of state and federal agencies, he developed a system and procedure for online processing and reporting of laboratory test results. As a result, he received personal recognition and thanks from the president of Northern California's largest chain of emergency care clinics.

Brian never lost his love and concern for his true friends. In conversations, he would regularly bring up memories of them and, from time to time, he would reach out to them, always concerned about their wellbeing. Even though his memories of Lone (Lonah), his Danish au pair, had faded in childhood, he thought of her often and reached out to her even though more than twenty years had passed. He truly appreciated everything that others had done for him, over the years.

Brian was a voracious reader and an eclectic thinker, well versed in a range of subjects including physics, computer science, artificial intelligence, nutrition, economics, politics, biology and much more. He was a skilled critical thinker who was not swayed by hollow, misguided rantings and diatribes. He understood the economic and social implications that governmental legislation would have on society and vigorously opposed proposals that would negatively impact the working class, LGBTQ communities, racial minorities and the dispossessed. He regularly completed college courses dealing with issues and subjects important to him.

After living in the Oakland home for nearly 7 years, Brian's mother unexpectedly passed away at the age of 62, following several years of serious health problems. Brian was with her in the hospital, holding her hand as she took her last breath. He never fully recovered from the grief.

Just a few weeks before Brian left us, the father of Alden, Brian's brother-in-law, was in the hospital where b NAlden, was sitting with him. Around 2:00 AM Alden learned that his father was not going to survive and Alden didn't feel that he could call a rabbi at that hour so, he turned to the only person that he thought could help. Brian, who was in his car at the end of a 10 hour shift, went straight to the hospital where, during his four hour visit, he read the Viduy, in hebrew, for Alden and his father. Later he took his tallit bag, with tefillin, to an Orthodox synagogue for morning minyan and, arriving early, introduced himself to the gabbai (sexton) and asked for help in wrapping his tefillin which he had not used since his bar mitzvah. That morning he recited kaddish for Alden's father, Mordecai (Martin) Cohen. This was Brian returning to his religious roots and values, when called upon to help a friend and family member.

Five years and seven months after loosing his mother, Brian took his own life in a tortured moment of intoxication. He left this world as a loving and dedicated friend, brother and son who was always there to help his loved ones. He never, not once, said a harsh word about anyone. He was a very private person when it came to his personal relationships. He always greeted others with a big, warm, kind, infectious smile and frequently enjoyed a loud belly laugh when sharing humor with others. He also gave back to his community by regularly visiting hospital patients, building homes with Habitat for Humanity, preparing and serving meals to the homeless, delivering mishloach manot (Purim gift baskets) to the homebound elderly, among other volunteer activities.

Brian and his father would frequently stand in their Oakland kitchen while talking for hours, into the wee hours of the morning, about any range of subjects. One such night, after the passing of Brian's mother, his father said, "Your grandchildren are going to ask you 'Papa, what is work?' " From this, an hours long conversation about the meaning of life and how individuals find purpose, commenced. Neither of them knew that Brian would not live to have a wife or children of his own.

Brian was burried, near his mother, in the Orthodox section of Gan Shalom Cemetery on Bear Creek Road in Briones, California, located between sheep pastures, oak groves horse stables and rolling hills, reminiscent of his childhood home in Penngrove, where he spent some of the happiest years of his life.

The world lost a kind, caring soul who still had much to give when Brian left it.

Send to someone

Share this obituary with others

https://everloved.com/life-of/brian-berdux/obituary/

Copy