Paraag Marathe always had a way of making things make sense.
It showed in school and an undergrad in Berkeley and as MBA earner at Stanford.
It showed in Silicon Valley when he worked there, and it’s showed in his role with the 49ers as San Francisco’s chief strategy officer and executive vice president for football operations,
He had trouble making it show on a much more personal level as he dealt with the death of his sister, Shilpa, a victim of anorexia. She was his big sister, but she was down to weighing less than 50 pounds at the time of her death in 2005.
It’s taken the better part of a decade for Marathe to get through the grieving process, deal with regret and come to terms with that happened.
In 2011, six years after Shilpa’s death at just 31, he thought he was ready to speak about it at an event sponsored by Andrea’s Voice, a nonprofit that educates about eating disorders.
He wasn’t.
“Not only did I break down a little bit during that speech,” Marathe, 39, told The New York Times. “It was also one of those weird moments afterwards. I emotionally collapsed in the arms of somebody there who had lost her daughter.”
He wondered why he hadn’t been able to do more to help a sister who had succumbed to self-destructive thoughts and starvation binges. He’s only now able to talk with authority about the disease that haunts 30 million people in the U.S.
Now he’s become a spokesman for Project HEAL, an organization that raises money to cover care of those with anorexia from diagnosis to recovery. While thought of as a women’s disease, both genders can succumb, and it can be a subject not much discussed.
“He told me, ‘I’m your perfect spokesman: I’m a male, I’m a minority and I’m in football,’ ” Project HEAL’s Kristina Saffran said.
While Paraag, the younger of the siblings by three years, was drawn to sports as much as to books. Shilpa hated sport, but was bookish and a straight-A student. She also had, Paraag told the Times, compulsive idiosyncrasies. She insisted on eating her meals at the same time every day, her brother said. After dinner each night she would walk around the house for half an hour listening to her Sony Walkman.
A graduate of the UCLA law school, she was just 55 pounds when she tried to join the workforce. Getting interviews was no problem. But as emaciated as she was, Shilpa couldn’t get hired. She would spend the final 10 years of her life living with her parents.
It would take 10 more years for her brother to shed the secrecy of the disease that had taken his sister.
“I was a kid,” Marathe said. “I was in my early 20s, and I used to convince myself that I was just a protective little brother when I saw other people looking at my sister the way they did. When in reality, the truth was that I was embarrassed by being seen with her. So I could never take her to a coffee shop or a movie. I used to be jealous of my cousins who would be able to do that.
That Marathe can speak out is a major step forward. But the 49ers executive isn’t all the way home yet. He has not found a way to discuss Shilpa’s deterioration in any detail with their parents, or invited them to hear him speak about it. He told the Times he never heard his parents talk openly about what was happening to their family. And he hasn’t figured out how to break the silence.
“Immigrant families are particularly susceptible, because of the whole Tiger Mother, Tiger Father concept,” Marathe said. “You don’t talk about your feelings. There’s no such thing as mental illness. You don’t want to bring shame on the family by being put in an inpatient facility.”
It’s been a tough year for Marathe professionally. He had been the team president, but was moved out of the top job by what the club called a restructuring and what everyone else called a demotion. And the 49ers are 1-12 with three games to play.
But in getting his mind around the life of his sister, he finds professional disappointment needs to be put in perspective.
