You might have missed a poignant personal essay in the recent Double Issue of Seven Days. In “The Things He Left Behind,” writer Tim Brookes put into words why he fell for Burlington when he arrived from England half a century ago — and then, in 2025, made a decision he never could have imagined: to return to his homeland.
Embedded in his love letter to the Queen City was a crucial clue. He wrote, “The fact is, I’m not leaving Burlington, Vt.: I’m leaving America. As a 72-year-old who has to pay for his own health insurance, disaster is only one significant medical event away.”
I’ve known Brookes for 40 of the 50 years he spent writing and teaching on this side of the pond. We both worked for the Vanguard Press and the Burlington Free Press, and in the mid-’80s he was my editor at a short-lived publication called Burlington’s Entertainment Guide. He was a tough teacher, and I learned a lot from him.
Years later my partner, Tim Ashe, developed his own relationship with Brookes, who was the go-to goalkeeper on his coed soccer team, the Lakeside Dachshunds. Brookes also showed up for pickup games and played other positions. Although he was 30 years older than most of his teammates, “He was good for a diving header every time we played,” Tim said.
All of us at Seven Days will be forever indebted to Brookes for recommending Carolyn Fox, his former student at Champlain College, to be our full-time calendar writer. Seventeen years later, she is running the culture team with Dan Bolles and has become one of our most talented editors.
In short, Brookes deserved a party, and Tim and I resolved to throw him one. After his piece was published, we set a date and invited a bunch of people from his various social circles for a gathering at our place on Friday, January 2.
The Monday before, Brookes let us know he was really sick and unable to get out of bed. On New Year’s Eve, the day his supplemental health insurance was set to expire, he went to the ER. He was diagnosed with a respiratory infection, and the doctor prescribed an inhaler and some meds. But when Brookes went to pick them up at a nearby drugstore, which was supposed to be open until 7, it had closed early for the holiday.
“So today for me they will have jumped in price,” Brookes wrote in an email on the first day of 2026 to cancel the party. Without insurance, the out-of-pocket cost of the inhaler alone increased from $20 to $314. “These are the tiny happenstances that are going on all the time, and can doom people,” he wrote. “For me the dangers and expenses are bearable, but it’s alarming to realize how quickly for someone else they might become unbearable. This is, after all, one of the principal reasons I’m leaving.”
Brookes had feared a last-minute, suddenly expensive illness. As it turned out, he got one that almost thwarted his carefully planned departure.
He did manage to catch his plane out of Burlington International Airport on January 7 and emailed me the next day that he had arrived safely in Cambridge, “running on fumes.” The postscript to his essay is an unfortunate but fitting addition to this week’s Wellness Issue. No doubt Brookes will miss plenty of things about the U.S., where he has friends and children, but our broken health care system is decidedly not one of them.
This article appears in The Wellness Issue • 2026.
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