For just a little bit longer, Brian Carroll’s family and friends tried to stave off their sadness.
They stood in small clusters at the home of Jennifer Lane Bockius – the youngest of Carroll’s children – less than 2 miles from the Old Hopkinton Cemetery.
They told stories about a man who was not just a doctor, but a craftsman, a father and a friend. A man, according to his brother Jack Carroll, whose best attribute was that: “He was a special man who didn’t know he was special.”
They laughed as the stories flowed. Outside, children laughed as they played in the yard.
As skies continued to gray, the time finally came to go to the cemetery to say goodbye.
“It’s been hard,” Bockius said, blinking back tears, three months after her father lost his fight with cancer. “These are the things that are hard to talk about.”
Brian Carroll was born in 1938 in Ann Arbor, Mich., and grew up in Newton, Mass. After attending the University of Notre Dame and Tufts Medical School, he served briefly in the U.S. Air Force before beginning his medical career as an anesthesiologist. He moved to Hopkinton in 1972, where he took on the role as chief of emergency services for Concord Hospital.
In 1980, he left to start Family Physicians in a small house on Dolly Road in Hopkinton. That little practice would grow and grow, until it reached its current size at Farrington Corner Road; later, it would become Family Health Tree after it was acquired by Concord Hospital.
Carroll is survived by his wife, Lois Carroll, and his four children.
One of Carroll’s best-known attributes was a willingness to help others, regardless of the hour of the day.
One of his sons, F. Brian Carroll, remembered sneaking into the Hopkinton Middle High School at night to play basketball. To do so, he and his friends had to go in through the roof, a practice that one night resulted in a friend falling off the roof and hurting himself. Terrified, Carroll’s friends drove to his house in the middle of the night.
“He opened the door and said, ‘You guys are idiots! You gotta go to the hospital!’ ” F. Brian Carroll recalled. “But people would come to us, that was our life.”
Bockius said it was not uncommon for her father to field phone calls during dinner, sometimes to the detriment of her family’s appetite.
“He’d get up, and you’d hear him say, ‘How long have you had that rash?’ ” she said.
Bockius noted this attitude extended beyond his patients. She recalled coming home from college and finding former classmates of hers who were homeless settling in for dinner or staying overnight in a spare bedroom.
“He wouldn’t think twice, you know?” she said. “He wanted to take care of everyone.”
But Jack Carroll, Brian Carroll’s brother, said Brian wouldn’t have had it any other way. He recalled a pivotal conversation they had with their father, who was also a doctor and who Jack Carroll said raised them with an iron fist.
“He said, ‘I don’t get you – you’ve gone from one of the most lucrative professions in medicines, to this,’ ” Jack Carroll said. “And neither one of us had ever really said anything back to my father. But Brian looked at him and said ‘Actually, you’re the one who doesn’t get it.’ … He wanted to work directly with people.”
For all his love of practicing medicine, there was another, artistic side of Carroll that found outlets in everything from boat-building to making musical instruments.
“You never knew what he was going to be working on,” F. Brian Carroll said. “You ask him, and he’d be in the middle of learning to build stone walls. He really liked to immerse himself in a subject.”
He added: “It was like working annoyed him, because he had so much he wanted to do. … We used to say, inside the doctor was the soul of a carpenter trying to get out. And everything he did turned out great.”
But for all his talents, Brian Carroll was quiet, a modest man who never bragged.
“You could travel from the East Coast to the West Coast and never know he was a doctor,” Jack said.
It was this simplicity, perhaps, that shaped his burial.
As the Rev. Marcel Martel of St. Theresa’s Church in Henniker stepped away from the simple, low-lying headstone located near the back of the Old Hopkinton Cemetery, F. Brian Carroll laid the smooth wooden box containing his father’s ashes down. His mother, Lois, stepped forward, and laid a small rounded stone on top.
One by one, Carroll’s children and grandchildren did the same, until the top of the box was covered with stones. The quiet, final taps of the stones all conveyed the same message the family wished they didn’t have to say: “Goodbye.”
(Caitlin Andrews can be reached at 369-3309, candrews@cmonitor.com or on Twitter at @ActualCAndrews.)