One artist will take the stage Friday to share his story of loss and the journey for answers.

Kurt Lindemann, an assistant professor of communication at San Diego State University, and visiting artist, will perform his one-man show, “Don’t Say Goodbye Without Leaving,” — which focuses on the loss of his brother, Mark, — at 8 p.m. Friday in the Kleinau Theater. In 2001, Mark was hiking in Sedona, Ariz., with a friend. Lindemann said he received a call explaining how his brother fell 30 feet to his death and he began to search for the friend.

“I didn’t have his friend’s number but managed to track down his family, get his number and talk to him,” Lindemann said. “He described to me how my brother slipped off a cliff ledge, how he caught my brother by the belt and tried to pull him up but couldn’t, and had to let him drop to his death.”

This individual, whom Lindemann has only spoken with once, has become elusive and rather enigmatic to him.

“I’ve never met this man and have spent the last few years trying to track him down,” he said.

Lindemann proceeded to use his search as a launching point into an introspective journey, he said.

“This piece is about my journey to get in touch with (the friend), how this journey makes me think differently about my relationship with other men in my family who have passed away, and how technology can bring people together yet create even greater distances between us,” he said.

While he has performed for a great deal of his life, Lindemann said he just began approaching subjects with this caliber of story.

“I’ve been performing for about 30 years, but only in the last 12 years or so did I start doing these kinds of performances that take concepts studied in an academic way, like grief, narrative, masculinity and health, and explore them through performance,” Lindemann said.

Lindemann decided to tell the story as a way to help those around him in similar traumatic experiences, but also to help him.

“Part of this is for me, to explore my own relationship to grief in a cathartic way,” he said. “But more importantly, I hope this prompts audience members and readers to think about the ways we all grieve and how gender plays a role in the grieving process.”

“Don’t Say Goodbye Without Leaving” is free for the general public. More information may be found at http://kurtlindemann. wordpress.com where Lindemann continues to document his journey through the grieving process as well as tracking down the last man to see his brother alive.

Jake Saunders can be reached at [email protected], on Twitter @saundersfj, or 536-3311 ext. 254.