Brian George Pendleton, 72, of Seattle Washington died on July 30 2026 at home after living with ALS for the previous 13 years.
He is survived by his wife Darchelle Worley, his two sons Daniel Pendleton and David Pendleton, his ex-wife Susan Pendleton, his mother Alice Pepper, his sister Sarah Isberg, his half-sister Jennifer Pendleton and his stepmother Mazie Pendleton. He was predeceased by his father George Pendleton, his brother Eric Pendleton and his stepfather John Pepper.

Brian was born on August 17 1954 to George Porter Pendleton and Alice Wood Pendleton in Arlington Massachusetts but a few days later moved to Jackson New Hampshire where he spent most of his childhood on the former farm built and operated a half-century earlier by his great-grandparents. Growing up surrounded by woods, fields, streams and mountains, Brian developed a curiosity about the natural world and a love of outdoor activity which stayed with him throughout his life. With his mother he hiked the mountains and cultivated gardens; with his father he fished the streams and learned to ski. With his brother and one or two close friends he built forts in the woods, constructed dams in the streams and collected rocks during family hikes in the mountains, activities he would share with his own children 30 years later.
When Brian was nine his father relocated the family to Deer Lake Newfoundland but a year later the marriage ended and his mother moved the family back home to Jackson. Three years later she married John Pepper, a successful insurance executive and a kind and generous man who adopted Brian and his brother and sister as if they were his own children. He moved the family to Massachusetts but took them all hiking and sailing in the summer and skiing in the winter, driving every weekend up to the familiar farmhouse in Jackson and the familiar slopes of Wildcat Mountain.

John encouraged Brian to follow in his footsteps and attend Phillips Exeter Academy, believing it to be the best available secondary school education. That it probably was but for Brian it also triggered a latent perfectionism which prematurely terminated his Exeter tenure. Feeling overwhelmed by a writing assignment and afraid to ask for help, in November 1969 he ran away from school instead, a decision and pattern which would echo down through the next four decades of his life. Unacknowledged shame, and anger at himself, for having failed at Exeter inspired self-hatred and depression during his subsequent two years at Marblehead High School. The psychiatrist Brian saw during that time probably rescued him from serious self-harm but did not resolve the underlying issues. Fear of failure, shame about asking for help and anger directed inward accompanied Brian into adulthood and influenced his most significant decisions. His Exeter experience was by no means all bad though. There he met his closest lifetime friend, discovered what it felt like to be physically fit, learned to study hard, to love writing and to play squash and ping pong. Back in Marblehead he also formed lifetime friendships but otherwise mostly just smoked weed.
After high school Brian spent seven months living with his father in Sops Arm Newfoundland and another seven months traveling in Europe and the Middle East with high school friend Tim Fuller before attending The Colorado College in Colorado Springs Colorado. His four years at Colorado College were, if not the best years of Brian's life, at least in the top ten. He fell in love freshman year and inspired by his girlfriend, took up birdwatching and fell in love again, this time with birds. He took a few art courses and discovered he could capture the beauty of nature with oil paints on canvas. He studied geology and French, art history, ecology and Russian and loved them all. He did not take Freshman English or or any other course from the English department, an achievement he was proud of at the time but later wondered about, given his desire to write well. Most of what he learned about writing in college he learned from his ecology professor, who also took him deer hunting for the first time. Hunting deer and elk every fall became a highlight of the next few years.
Brian graduated Summa Cum Laude from Colorado College in June 1979 with a BA in Biology, a minor in studio art and a fascination with Peregrine Falcons. For three summers after college he pursued that interest by working for the Colorado Division of Wildlife on the Peregrine Falcon Recovery Project. Whitewater kayaking and oil painting consumed another two years before Brian decided he didn't want to be a wildlife biologist, a kayak bum, an oil painter or a house painter or even a physician. Or a pastor, a prospect he briefly considered after he was baptized into the Seventh Day Adventist church in November 1983.

"Baptized? Seventh Day Adventist?", you might be wondering. "What on earth inspired him to do that, to give up hunting and stop eating steak and lobster, to repudiate his beliefs about geology and the evolution of life on earth, to quit hiking and birdwatching on Saturdays, to forego a beer with supper. What went wrong with him?"
Ten years earlier, after he finished high school, Brian's self-hatred had begun to metastasize into a conviction that he was a bad person, incapable of love. That conviction grew stronger during his three-month stay with Tim's missionary parents and siblings in Lebanon, whose love for one another Brian contrasted with his own self-diagnosed selfishness. The logic was simple - Brian was bad but God was good and could make him good too. Hoping and expecting to become good, Brian had turned to Jesus and gotten saved during his freshman year in college but aside from initially inspiring efforts to convert his family and friends, his new faith had little impact on his college experience other than inhibiting him from having sex with his girlfriends.
After college his apparent inability to decide on a career and get a real job, his failure (as he saw it) to "grow up", inspired a resurgence of the shame and self-criticism he had felt after leaving Exeter. He was defective, unable to move ahead in his own life the way his peers seemed to be progressing in theirs. Embarassed once again to ask anyone else for help, he concluded that his problem was that after college he had turned away from God. Sometime in the summer of 1983 Brian decided that he would "let go and let God" take charge of his life again. For the next decade or two he did that and God did his part too, though there were times when Brian suspected that those who claimed to be God's representatives were self-appointed and their agendas for him more closely aligned with their own interests than with his. Or God's.
Still, as a life strategy Brian could have done worse. And also perhaps better, though with the structure provided by the church and the coaching provided by his wife, Brian did grow up.

Soon after he was baptized, Brian met Susan Wichmann in a Bible Study group at church. They developed a friendship while putting on a cooking class together at church and she took on the project of getting Brian a job. Having seen in a vision that he would one day become her husband, Susan advised him that he should marry her. A few days after that conversation, while Brian was sitting in his kitchen praying that God would make him a better Christian, God told him that if he would love Susan he would be like God and God would save him. The very next Sunday when he met Susan for a picnic in Discovery Park, he discovered that he was in love with her. They were married in June 1985.
After a year of striving, for the most part successfully, to be a model young Adventist couple, she told him that they needed to either have children or get a puppy. Daniel was born ten months later. That same month Brian purchased his first computer, an IBM PC clone with a 10 Mb hard drive, and fell in love with programming. By the time David was born two years later Brian had graduated from North Seattle Community College with an Associate degree in data processing and was working as a C programmer with local firm Murphy & Associates.
Brian and Susan had moved to Auburn Washington to be the house parents for a dormitory full of young Seventh Day Adventist Bible workers. When being a new mother and a housemother became too much for Susan, she and Brian purchased the house on two acres of land where Daniel and David grew up. The boys baked bread and did school with Mommy, grew vegetables and went camping with Daddy and played in the back yard with their friends the local tree frogs.
After working for 11 years on assignments at various organizations including Weyerhaeuser Corporation, the State of Washington, the City of Seattle and Microsoft Corporation, Brian took a permanent position as employee #162 at the new travel company Expedia. There he discovered that he preferred writing programs himself to managing other programmers so while his peers moved up through the ranks, Brian stayed with what he loved for another 9 years before returning to Murphy & Associates to wrap up his career. He was known for working hard, sometimes sleeping in the office for several nights in a row, but he also took extra time off to enjoy camping and rockhunting trips with his boys while they were still young enough to want to go with him.

Brian ran his first marathon at age 48 as part of an Expedia employee morale event. The company CEO signed up for the 2002 Big Sur Marathon and offered to pay all expenses for any employee who wanted to run it with him. About 30 employees signed up, trained together and ran the race, although without their CEO who'd been too busy to train. Brian knew within the first mile that he wanted to do more marathons even though at the finish he was so sore he couldn't even sit down. He had a new goal - to run a marathon fast enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon. He tried and failed three times in the next three years before running into a handful of Marathon Maniacs at a local race and discovering a new running objective. Members of the Marathon Maniacs running club qualified to join not by running fast, but by running frequently, at least three marathons in three months. Two months later Brian joined the club.
In 2007, a year after joining the Maniacs, Brian created his own marathon at which he believed he would be able to finally run a Boston qualifying time. The Light at the End of the Tunnel Marathon course, descending at a steady gradient of 80 feet per mile for 23 miles, would be the fastest marathon course in the country. The first Tunnel Marathon had twenty runners but the course wasn't certfied yet so nobody qualified for Boston. A year later on his birthday Brian ran the second Light at the End of the Tunnel Marathon and this time, he qualified. By that point though, he had already qualified at seven other marathons including at Boston itself. Since then more than 1000 other runners have qualified for Boston at the Tunnel Marathons over the past 15 years.

Brian's diagnosis of ALS in November 2013 upended his stable if not entirely idyllic world. It did not come as a complete surprise. A year earlier he had noticed inexplicable weakness in one hand which had spread within a few months into his shoulders and arms. With the help of Dr Google Brian identified his affliction as ALS in late August and that's when the shit hit the psychological fan. Determined not to become dependent on his wife for care and appalled by the prospect of utter helplessness within a year or two, Brian researched suicide methods and settled on hypothermia. He envisioned a a one-way snowshoe hike into the mountains once the winter snow started to accumulate, but that was as far as he got. Anticipating a future measured in months instead of years, he reassessed his relationship to God and the wife God had chosen for him. His logic may have been colored by pain and anger but Brian was determined not to spend his few remaining months denying himself in order to comply with obligations imposed by others, be they human or divine.
After Brian and Susan divorced in 2015 Brian married his marathon running partner Darchelle Worley, who helped him complete his 223rd and final marathon in Portland Oregon in October 2016. Running may have brought them together but it was talking that tied them together. They delighted in each other, each finding in the other someone with whom they could share anything and everything, someone with whom they could safely know and be known, someone with whom they were truly at home. The social isolation of the COVID 19 pandemic and their increasing physical isolation as Brian became ever more dependent on Darchelle's care only served to give them both more time to be together with their favorite person. As Brian looked back on his journey with ALS he would say, with only slight hyperbole, that Darchelle saved his life.
Although Brian and Darchelle had to give up running together as the paralysis caused by ALS spread throughout his body, they continued birdwatching around the state and across the country and, while Brian was still able to walk, even overseas to Europe and Africa. After Brian was confined to a wheelchair he and Darchelle did a series of birding "big years" in Washington state and in 2022, succeeded in tying the all-time record for number of species recorded in the state in a single year. "Not bad", as Brian used to say, "for a non-birder and a cripple!".