We're talking about "Memphis."
In episode 16 of the first season, Randallwho has reconnected with his father, now dying of canceraccompanies him to the family home in Tennessee. There, Randalls father falls suddenly ill and is rushed to the hospital, where Randall is told he has hours to live. Then, calling him Dad for the first and last time, Randall says goodbye to his father. And his father dies.
Browns own father died of a diabetes-induced heart attack when Brown was 10, making the scene even more affecting. I would've liked to have been there to say goodbye, Brown told Andrew Lawrence for the Mens Health November cover story . And I actually think that This Is Us provided an opportunity for me in character to kind of do that, which is kind of lovely.
Brown remembers the day his own father, Sterling Brown senior, passed. He had come into the kitchen to find his mom on the phone with paramedics, crying. Browns father was upstairs. His bodys stiff and he [couldn't] really move his feet or toes, Brown said. His father had just suffered a heart attack. The paramedics arrived. I remember carrying him down the front steps, and I was looking down at the front door. And he hit me with a wink before he went, and that was the last time I saw him.
There are few overlaps with Brown and Randalls histories. (Randall was adopted into a white family after his addict father left him on the stoop of a fire station.) But Brown said he spends a lot of time in the writers room for This Is Us, hoping details from his own history could help open up his character just a bit.
And though Brown didnt go into detail about the dialogue for that hospital scene, the last few words from Randalls father seem to possess a deeper kind of resonance. When asked if hed like Randall to call his grandchildren to fly out and say goodbye, he shakes his head, saying hed already said goodbye to them when they were laying down.
I want them to remember looking up at me. Not down. Up.