Determination, kindness, curiosity, and presence. That was Kat, so it was no wonder that, despite carrying a benign tumor in her brain lining and not feeling all that well that day, she showed up at for lunch on my December birthday, thanks to her will and her husband Danny’s considerable help. It turned out the impact of the tumor was anything but benign. That was the last time I saw her conscious, but we go way back.
In a sense, Kat – along with other close, early life-long friends I met in the early 80s – found me in the wild, took me into their warmth and wisdom, and helped raise me, especially when it came to learning how to be a good friend. Before my early 20s, I had issues (to say the least) connecting with other people without freaking them or myself out. Although what I wanted most in life were dear friends, I didn’t know how to make that happen. (I was what would now be called neurodiverse and socially anxious before we knew such terms.) By the time I came to Lawrence, I was a hot mess with a propensity for bouncing checks, commitments, and off the walls, exhausting those around me in the process.
Kat, according to our friend Joey, had “heroic patience,” I experienced that early on along with her talent for setting limits. Over 40 years ago, I got to see what was on the other side of her calm and calming tolerance for people’s foibles the morning she arrived at the foot of my bed at 6 a.m. with a handful of parking tickets. Tickets on her record and in her mailbox from me borrowing her car, parking it where it shouldn’t be parked or ignoring parking meters all over town. That was the moment I discovered how much fierce power Kat had too, but even then, she didn’t give up on me.
This turned out to be one of the great gifts of my life: Kat’s trust, faith, and friendship x 43 years over hills and valleys, through floods and droughts, down rabbit holes of formal and mostly informal life education, and across expanses of vocations and avocations. There were weeks we were together every night at meetings and potlucks, readings and writing groups (Kat was a visionary poet). We would catch up with great speed and verve in the bathrooms of small East Lawrence bungalows or on porches where we shared our poetry or she helped talk me out of a particularly high anxiety tree in a wind storm of my own making..
There were also years we didn’t see each other regularly, especially when our paths diverged, mine into popping out (if only it were that easy) three kids in six years, and hers into going back to school to become a librarian and working at the law library for decades. Like any great love, time apart didn’t matter. We could pick up where we left off, remembering glimmers we shared years before in midnight wishing circles or around campfires on the prairie that felt ancient and eternal. We could joke about urban adventures too, like the time we started on one end of Massachusetts Street (the main street in Lawrence), going store to store, spending over $50/each an hour x four hours – this was in the mid-1980s, and our shopping spree cost us a giddy and exhilarating fortune, but we did come home with lovely shoes, dresses, and kitchen gadgets.
Kat’s qualities shone through during life and death rites of passage. Danny and Kat joked (but it was no joke) that they attended so many births and deaths that they should hang a sign on their door that says, “We do deaths and entrances.”
She and Danny were perfectly comfortable following me from one end of our old home in North Lawrence to the other end while I marched, bent over and howling each time another contraction hit, naked too. They stayed with us throughout a long and difficult childbirth that resulted in Daniel (yes, named after Danny). Likewise, she was totally present with her mother, Miss Jean, in her last years and months, whether bedside or bank side to insure that her mother received the best possible care with all records in order.
Kat’s attention to detail – as well as her pies and propensity for cooking up a storm for big groups – was legendary. She made my wedding gown, not easy because I chose snag-able dusty rose satin, which she ended up lining with cotton. She even sewed by hand delicate and precise buttons down the back, and if that wasn’t enough, she made bridesmaid dresses for our friend Victoria and my sister Lauren. She balanced the Kansas Area Watershed (KAW) Council books for years, filing our taxes with aplomb, a bigger job that we realized (as we are now finding out), did the books for some close family members as well as for her own household, and she was a whiz at financial investing to boot. Her generosity seemed boundless, extending to investing time, care, and sometimes finances into helping many people.
Speaking of which, she was a star aunty to our kids and many others of their generation. Our son Daniel would talk with her on the phone for hours about strategic approaches to life and work while living with Attention-Deficit challenges. Our daughter Natalie adored meeting up with Danny and Kat for Mexican or Japanese food as Kat unveiled yet another wild tale (and oh, there were many!) from her past, some beginning with lines like, “Then the judge said we could only get out of jail if we got married.” Our son Forest loved her deeply and got very quiet when I told him she was dying.
Which brings us to January 15 when she underwent surgery – successful at first – to remove the tumor that was vastly impacting every aspect of her life, but as Danny said, she was always still Kat at the same time. After being conscious and in pain after surgery, she went into a coma and soon onto a respirator at Menorah Medical Center where we sat and paced vigil with Danny and other friends. When the nurse confirmed what some of us already knew – that the post-surgery swelling had resulted in little to no brain activity with no path back – Danny made the impossible and necessary decision to remove her from the ventilator.
Up until and past the moment she died on January 18, friends called to say goodbye, sing to her, cry on the phone, repeating how much they loved her, while I held my phone to her ear. Some wrote beautiful tributes on how she had given them a way forward, believed in them, walked alongside them through hard storms and losses.
In the hour between the time she came off the vent and her death, we sat – Danny, his cousin Sharity, friends Ardys, Walt, Ken and me – all of our hands on top of the blue fleece blanket Danny brought from home to keep her warm. We told a few tiny stories about her but mostly sat in silence, slowing our breathing, meditating or praying or just watching her with the love and attention she had given all of us so often. It was one of the most beautiful hours in my life but the finality of it made it one of the most horrible too. How could our good Kat be dying and now dead?
Grief is like a giant sack filled with large, angular rocks and also ripped up piles of feather pillows. It’s impossible to get hold of and carry somewhere that makes sense. It’s a mess for the nervous system too as well as a panorama of emotional distress thrown into a blender. Over the last 12 days of time and time out of time, I’ve gone through – as have many of us who love Kat – bouts of exhaustion, irritation, sadness, confusion, and also gratitude for who and how she was and the honor of being with her.
“This is what we’re alive for,” I told Ardys as we hugged and cried before or after or during her death. This, and also true friendship. Kat taught me that. She gave me that.
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