Donald Phillip Lowther. December 14th, 1970 - November 10th, 2025. I've never lost someone this close to me, and while the grief is still fresh, I wanted to try and capture some of what I'm going through, and share some thoughts about his life, and the impact he had on mine.
I want to provide some caveats. In my pondering my brother's life, I have come to the realization that I knew a lot about him from certain perspectives, and from others very little. What follows is a narrative of what I know and remember, and I wanted to present it without edits or correction from people that may know better about some of these details. My reasoning is thus; I want you to read exactly what I have in my head. This is by no means intended to be a comprehensive outline of his life, but simply what I would share if we were sitting around a firepit on a crisp fall evening and you asked me to tell you about my brother.
You may be wondering why my brother's last name is Lowther, especially given my last name is in the URL of this website. I didn't know Don was my brother until I was eight, and while the full tale is an interesting one, rather than walking you through the confusing and somewhat sordid histories of our forebears, I'll just leave this super simple family tree for anyone that cares to know more:
Donnie is largely responsible for my interest in entrepreneurial pursuits. The story of his life is far from normal, and his drive and grit are the stuff of legend. Not in an over-used tiktok buzzwordy sense, but in a very real sense.
Donnie's life would play out on the big screen as a fascinating and difficult-to-believe tapestry of survival, drive and against-all-odds success. I'm not going to share all the details here, but he was out on his own for the first time at the age of 14, and had a rough go of things as a young man. Statistically speaking, it's a miracle that he didn't end up involved in gangs, the drug scene and worse.
Don made it through school and eventually to the military at as early an age as was legally allowed (though I wouldn't have put it past him to lie about his age to get in sooner), where he served in the Navy on the USS Sturgeon.
For a bit of insight into his personality, while in bootcamp, he and a friend would intentionally fail to complete pushups they were doing as a group, resulting in the group being forced to do more. He told me this with no bravado, but with more than a dash of mischeviousness; if you knew him you'd understand he didn't do it because he thought he was cool - he just wanted to get stronger.
He married while still serving in the Navy, and eventually made his way through college (the first time) and into a profession as a physical therapist.
He visited elderly patients in their homes and various schools, and during this time he also happened to informally apprentice to a magician (yes, really), where he picked up a love for sleight of hand tricks that he used in his work to entertain kids while he helped them recover from whatever issues they were dealing with.
I begged him to teach me, and he told me he would if I learned how to Coin Walk. I was determined, and spent time every day for more than a month learning the skill.
True to his word, he taught me a few tricks that I can probably perform very poorly to this day.
From this stage of this life, Don began to hustle. I don't have the time or honestly the patience to try and be thorough here, but I'd be remiss if I didn't at least try to outline some of his pursuits - his energy and drive really shine when it comes to his career - he was just wired differently.
Donnie flipped houses, buying severely run-down homes and remodelling them himself, turning them for a signficant profit and relatively quickly. I was fortunate enough to spend time with him during a summer while he was doing this and was somehow allowed to wield a sledgehammer for a couple of these projects.
This isn't a pertinent detail, but I always grin when I think about it; during one of his renovation projects we were working on a roof. He offered me $10 if I would leap from the house we were on to a neighboring one. I'm sure he thought his money was safe, but I did it. I'm not sure if I was more surprised or he was, but we both suddenly realized that I had just jumped quite loudly onto the roof of a house that was potentially occupied in an area of town that wouldn't have cared even if the state we were in hadn't already had quite flexible gun laws. We both survived, and the story continues.
Don acquired an interest in health and fitness at a really early age and pretty much never let it go. He was among the healthiest and most fit people I know, with a rare combination as a body builder and endurance athlete. He ran multiple marahtons, Tough Mudders, and various other races, and told me from a young age that his weight training helped him stay sane. He and my brother Josh were always in competition. They are both much bigger than I am, both having a passion for weight lifting that I have yet to wrap my head around.
Don formulated health-supplements that were sold on the shelves of GNCs and health-food stores, and at one point in time he was the global distributer for a major health-supplement to Vitamin World. I'm avoiding labels for a reason here; he did this out of a normal house. I'm not sure how he convinced them that he was a distributer, but his house was suddenly full floor-to-ceiling with health supplements that he and his family (including me), boxed up and shipped every day from their local post office to Vitamin World locations all over the U.S. This was a multiple-trip per day operation and looking back I'm shocked he was able to pull this off in addition to the other things he had going on.
At some point along the road, Donnie discovered an interesting law regarding replica vehicles. Past a certain age, it is apparently legal to create replicas and use original brand logos. He discovered a few niches in the market, and was personally interested in WWII-era BMW side-car motorcycles. He found a place in China that would build and ship a perfect working (and street-legal) replica of these bikes to the U.S. for a reasonable price, which he then flipped at a solid margin. He had a show-room for these bikes, and sold them alongside classic cars for a few years.
But wait, there's more.
This is where it gets a little crazy. Don was doing his best to manage relationships with manufacturers and had discovered that the company he was using to produce replica motorcycles could product almost anything. He found another interesting niche in replicated ancient Roman street tiles (No, I have no idea how he figured out people would pay for these). There was one paint-point: the language barrier. So he decided to break it.
In short, he spent three years in school learning Mandarin, eventually travelled to China multiple times and began to liason with the manufacturers directly. It's difficult to explain how insane this entire endeavor was at the time, as it was still in earlier stages of the internet (25+ years ago).
I'm sure at this point my previous statements about Donnie hustling and inspiring me toward entrepreneurial pursuits are starting to make more sense.
Throughout all his crazy (and largely successful) business endeavors, Don became skilled at business administration, finanance, strategy, etc. He came accross a job posting for a financial director of St. Francis hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and after resisting (he confided later that he felt underqualified), he decided on a whim to apply.
The absurdly summarized version of his next phase of life is thus: He landed the job, was perhaps unsurprisingly amazing at it, and while working and managing a growing family, threw himself into advancing his academic credentials.
He ultimately found himself in a position as Chief Financial Officer of the Osteopathic Medical Education Consortium of Oklahoma (OMECO), and along the way had earned himself a BSBA, MBA, MHA and eventually a PHD in Health and Human Performance. My brother was pretty much successful at everything he did.
Donnie is survived by my sister-in-law Misha, his oldest son Gavin, his daughter Sophie, his daughter Zoey (adopted after my late sister's passing), and his grand-daughter Hazel (Sophie's adorable little girl) and Jaden, my late sister's older son, who my brother took in as ward.
This is another area of Donnie's life I don't have time to go over thoroughly, but he loved his family. He was their rock, and from everything I witnessed, they were his reason for pushing so hard in everything he pursued. He wanted them to have a better life than he did growing up.
To say they are grieving his passing would be an offensive understatement. The void he has left in all of our lives, and especially theirs is significant, and if you find yourself reading these words, no matter when it is; immediately after I posted it or for some reason ten years from now, please say a prayer for Donnie's precious family.
I was sharing some stories about Donnie with a friend recently and he replied, "it's obvious he was a hero to you." I hadn't really thought about it that way until my friend said it, but it's certainly true. So much of Donnie's life was an inspiration to me. He just kept moving forward, no matter the obstacles in his way.
Every time you fail, at least you're getting your feet wet.
This was his way of encouraging me to see my failures in a positive light. He implied with these words that many people wouldn't even get close to the figurative waters of challenging pursuits, let alone dip their toe in.
Donnie took the time to encourage me with ideas like this one, and not passively. When I was much younger (starting 30 years ago now), it seemed like he felt a responsibility to teach me. I will forever be grateful for his words of wisdom and encouragement. He really drove home with me that it's good to fail, and that at least in failure I have evidence that I tried, and that the best thing I can do in response to a failure is learn something from it, dust myself off and try again.
He also had a deep-seated loathing for anything even close to substance abuse. His proximity to the devastation wrought by addiction left some serious scars in his life, and he was downright aggressive with his advice along these lines. No judgement or shade thrown at all toward anyone who has struggled with addiction (or does), but one of the most frequently uttered phrases that I remember coming out of his mouth while we were going about our time together was in response to anyone he saw smoking: "Look at that big fat pacifier in his mouth."
I share this not to make anyone feel judged, but to instead show how much influence he had in my life. If I ever even thought about picking up smoking as a habit, my brother's voice would be so loud in my brain my ears would bleed.
If you've made it this far, you've officially reached the not-so-fun part of the story where I find myself wrestling with regret. The fact of the matter is that Donnie and I have drifted apart in recent years. Both of our lives became much busier as life tends to do, and while we still stayed in touch, various changes in both of our lives resulted in our conversations becoming much less frequent and often much more shallow than they once were.
More often than not, when he called, he was charged up about something political that engraged him, and while I'm no stranger to being tilted out of my mind about various topics of the day, I have worked fairly hard to pull my head out of the endless toxic noise of mainstream doom-and-gloom garbage in the news, and perhaps due more to cynicism than anything, have worked to intentionally ignore whatever political rage-bait we're supposed to be shaking our fists at.
That doesn't mean I think the political arena is entirely worthless, but I've spent enough time in tech and around the sentiment analysis that news and social media groups employ to know that we're all at least a little bit manipulated by what we read. Research shows that you pay closer attention to information that results in anger vs. almost any other emotional response, but I digress.
My personal faith has also changed. For pretty much all of my life I have called myself a Christian. In the last two years, my faith has become a life-altering reality that was previously only patterns of behavior or lip-service to things I claimed to believe.
Enter the regret. I didn't really share my life with Donnie. When he called, it was often to provide commentary on something in the news, and I didn't really engage. I tended to listen and respond with "uh-huhs" and "I agrees," but never took the time to tell him how I actually felt. I didn't share my faith, the details of my struggles, and certainly never really pointed at things in his life I thought might be dragging him down.
I think I held back because I projected a perspective from him onto myself. That's perhaps a confusing way to say that I let myself believe he only looked at me as that little kid he took under his wing, and that I wasn't qualified to reciprocate.
Donnie's passing has caused me to reflect deeply on what really matters.
Don't waste time. Forgive readily. Don't hold grudges. Hold your loved ones close, and if you have perspective about someone's life that you think might help them grow, don't hold back, even if you think they might not like what they hear.
I loved my brother deeply. I will miss him for as long as I'm still breathing, and I hope that you're inspired by his story. But I also hope you can learn from me, and take some time to think about the people in your life that you love, and probably if you're like me that you take for granted you'll be able to talk to "some other time" or that you'll see "after x, y, or z." Tomorrow certainly isn't promised, and we've only got the time we have. Use it well.
-Philippians 4:8
Love you, bro.