When she moved into her next house (the one before the current house), I stayed many nights with Zoe. We walked around the neighborhood, to the river to chase the ball in the water, into town to window shop. When she went to Nicaragua, she left her car for me to use and I managed to put a nice size dent in the side backing out of a tight garage. I panicked, taking the car to an auto shop to get it fixed before Daun arrived home (I had six days). Apparently I had issues about owning up and instead went straight for the cover-up. The poor auto guy gave me a $900 quote for a whole new side panel and I freaked out. He then said he could probably pound it out for $150. I went for it. I didn’t tell Daun about this until several years later.
As I think about this, I lost several hundred dollars staying at Daun’s house. However, I always loved to do it. I loved Zoe and feel fortunate to have seen her the night before she died. I had moved out of St. Cloud but was passing through on my way to visit my parents. Daun had kept me informed of her condition. She was so good to her, taking her to the holistic vet in Minneapolis many many times, making her special meals of rice and chicken broth and feeding her gently while he lay on the floor. She was a special dog. I’m sure many of you remember her too.
I was
also involved in PLA’yers. I saw Sara Ampe’s note on this website; we
were at SCSU during the same period. I was heavily involved with the
group for the three years I spent at St. Cloud. There were memorable
festivals (Sara – remember the Chicago trip? I live there now) and
on-campus productions. Daun was so generous with those performances and
not concerned about talent, just honest interest and inquiry. I will
never forget the time she gave me. She was the first adult woman in my
life who honestly gave me time and treated me like a thoughtful human
being, not a child. She helped me grow exponentially.
Sandra
Anderson, college friend
For the past 30 years
Daun has been one of the very special friends in my life. (I cannot
bear to use the past tense in that sentence.) Even after spans of time
without contact, getting together again invariably renewed the easy,
comfortable friendship ... as if we had just paused for a minute in our
conversation and started it up again, without missing a beat.
When I think of Daun, I think of her wit and voice and stubbornness ... all thoroughly charming to me. Her expressions tickled me ("fancy schmansy" and "ritzy titsy" as just a couple of examples). Her descriptions of people and life and adventures were so articulate, so clever and so "right on." I felt that I understood her completely, because she was so open and expressive and wanted to be completely understood. Her voice and particularly her laugh were distinctively beautiful and melodic. I simply enjoyed the sound of her voice and her sparkling laughter. Like listening to music.
I always, always admired her to-the-bone stubbornness ... which never faltered, not once, to the very end. As if she wasn't already, she became my hero during her final 22 months.
It is impossible to believe
that she is gone. But, like all of her friends and family, I feel
incredibly blessed to have shared time, space and love with this
incredible woman.
Paul Beauvais, Daun's brother-in-law
"[Her voice] sounded . . . like a chain of long-sought hopes amply rewarded, partly earned but never entirely--decades of pardon and boundless bigheartedness, the promise of rest. He understood that he was hearing too simply. No human voice could give that much in that time to any lively soul." --Reynolds Price, The Promise of Rest
And so we want more. More conversation, more pleasures shared, more
time together, more time. On the Saturday night before Easter I told
Daun that I wasn't ready to let her go, that I had come to say hello,
not goodbye. She didn't answer.
I'm still not ready to say goodbye.
And though I want more, I'm mindful of the gifts I've received. I thank Daun for introducing me to Reynolds Price, and Erving Goffman, and Richard Schechner. I thank her for the gift of Molly Bloom's soliloquy on my wedding day. And I treasure the memories of our conversations, over meals in Berkeley, on the beach in Nicaragua, and in the rare quiet moments at her family's house in Canton. I remember many of the words, but, more than the words, I remember her voice.
And perhaps, in time, I
will accept that what she gave me was enough.
Jeff
Bineham, colleague at St. Cloud State University
Church Memorial Service, April
6, 2006
Yesterday I was telling some friends that one of the hardest things for me to think about in this situation is that for most of us life goes on in remarkably normal ways: We go to work. We eat our meals. We laugh, we drink, we cry, we tell jokes. We read our books and watch our television shows. And yet in the midst of all of that the world has changed in some fundamental way because Daun is gone.
For several years before she got sick Daun worked with the marrow donor program because she saw it as a tangible way to do good in the world. She never imagined, I’m sure, that she would one day be the recipient of a transplant. Her last public presentation was when she went to the marrow donor program’s annual convention in Minneapolis and gave a speech about her experiences as a recipient. And her experience motivated a group of students at SCSU to start an annual donor registration drive at the university that’s been very successful.
Last spring Daun wrote this note to those students: “I've always been proud of where I work because of its commitment to teach students how to make the world and their lives better because of what they've learned here. While this commitment has touched and shaped my life as well over the years, it has never been as dramatically and movingly important as with your donor drive. As I faced the uncertainty of my prognosis and treatment, you went out and created meaning, and hope, and life. That meant everything to me. I am bursting with pride and love for you!”
When Beth asked me to say a few words about the importance of this program to Daun, my first thought was: at a time like this who cares about the marrow donor program? But then Beth said, “you know because of this program we had a year with Daun that we wouldn’t have had otherwise.”
So even though we’re here to say goodbye to Daun, we’re also here to figure out ways to keep her spirit and her hopes and her values alive. And I know Daun would like it if because of her some other people got that extra year, or the five or ten or twenty years that, unfortunately, she did not get.
The last time I saw Daun was a week before she died. Bess was spending the night at our house and I took her to the hospital to say goodnight to her mom. Bess showed me a gift she had received: a wooden heart and a booklet which explained that this type of wood has a special quality that enables it, more than other woods, to absorb oil from human skin. So if people held the heart in their hand, part of them would remain in the heart and be transferred to Daun when she held it. I held the heart the entire time we were there, stroking it and holding it between my palms.
As we
left I leaned over
Daun’s bed and hugged her, then I pressed the wooden heart into her
hand and
she grasped it firmly.
“I’m with you Daun,” I said.
“I know.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
Bess had put on her coat and Diane zipped it up. Bess held my hand. We walked to the door.
“Goodbye Daun."
“Goodbye.”
[And then I kissed my hand and held it up toward the sky.
Goodbye
Daun. We love you. We
will remember you always.
And you know, I don’t wear a tie for just anybody.
Jeff
Bineham, colleague at St. Cloud State University
Fine Arts & Humanities Leadership Award Acceptance Speech , August
29 2002
The irony of this award is that I’ve never thought of myself as a leader. I said that comment to John Bahde this morning. He smiled and said, “yeah, neither have I.”
What makes this award most gratifying is that I was nominated by members of my department, so I want to thank especially those people who organized and supported that nomination and to all my colleagues who enhance my professional life. I am privileged to work in a department with colleagues who I genuinely like.
And I feel privileged to work in this college. I’m a rhetorician. And while the term “rhetoric” has lots of different meanings, I like this one articulated by Wayne Booth: “the whole art of improving our capacity to interpret what other people say, to think about it, and then to say something worthwhile in return.”
This is not only at the heart of what we do in Communication Studies, it’s at the heart of what we do in this college. It’s at the heart of a liberal education that prepares people not only for work but for life as productive citizens and as individuals who live meaningful lives. Because rhetoric is at base the human use of symbols to make our lives meaningful.
Rhetoric involves adapting to situations. Sometimes the proper adaptation isn’t clear. This is a professional award, but I wonder if you’ll allow me some personal reflections. I hope that people in this college are willing to grant me some leeway here because in the fine arts and humanities it’s often difficult and unproductive to separate the personal from the professional.
As most of you know, last year my department lost a colleague when Daun Kendig died. Some of us also lost one of our best friends.
When I came here in 1986 Daun was the first person to have a meal with my family and me. We went to movies, picnics, and parades together. We ate together regularly. She spent the night with my son when my daughter was born. Every year she took each of my children out on a “date” when their birthdays came around. And while over the course of years we developed other friendships and didn’t spend quite as much time together as we did in those early years, we remained close friends.
Over the course of Daun’s illness, and especially when she died, I realized anew the importance of what we do in this college.
Suddenly the deep questions we ask in philosophy were not just mental exercises, they were profound efforts to make life meaningful in a real, material way: Who are we? What does it mean to be human? What happens to us when we die?
And I found that the things in my life that helped me through this tragedy, that enabled me to experience this situation in a richer and more meaningful way, were the things we strive to teach and to create in this college.
It was the realization of new metaphors for life, for death, for God. It was the development of closer relationships with friends (the mutual experience of Daun’s death). It was the piece of art, the painting or the photograph. It was the creation of a song, and the new appreciation of musical pieces that spoke to me in ways I had not experienced. It was the ability to appreciate a film or a play in ways that enriched my understandings of life and death. It was the piece of literature or the poem that expressed this universal experience in ways that comforted me and challenged me and broadened the range of meanings by which I could try to make sense out of this senseless loss.
We hear constantly that we’re preparing students for the workforce. Well, we are doing that. I want my students to get jobs. But that’s not really what turns me on about working in this college. What we’re really about is making students more humane, about providing them with the symbolic equipment for living life more fully in all of its most tragic, most comic, most romantic, most mundane ways.
The following was in Daun’s office. It was written on March 30, 1972, when she was an undergraduate, a sophomore at Ohio University
“Once again I find myself attempting to keep a diary for a purpose which is threefold. The first fold is just to write in an effort to improve my writing. The second is to “record” my life in the hope that it will be discovered after my death and not only become a best seller but a movie, leaving my heirs well off. And finally I hope that if I take time to write I can begin to untangle this mass of contradictions struggling for survival in a land of mutiny known as me.”
Let’s never forget
that our vocations are special,
because
in our classes sit students who – even if their primary goal is to get
a job –
are at some level trying to figure out what life is about.
And I think those of us in this college are
in a unique position to help them in that endeavor.
Marc
Crail, high school friend
from
his column for the
Kent, Ohio Record-Courier,
April 11, 2003
I’ve been fortunate enough to have some great “teachers in my life, although I have often been slow to recognize the lessons I’ve learned from each of them. In fact, it has been the loss of impending loss of these important people in my life that prompted me to reflect on all that they taught me.
…Another great “teacher” in my life was actually a classmate. Daun Kendig was the prettiest, smartes, and nicest girl in my class at Massillon. When I eventually got over my crush on her, we became fast friends. In later years, we wrote and emailed regularly, although we saw each other only once or twice a year since she worked as a college professor in faraway St. Cloud, Minnesota.
During her fight with
cancer over 21 months, she
taught me a
great deal about loving life, fighting for it furiously, valuing family
and
friends, and the importance of prayer. Daun was optimistic yet
realistic. She
endured painful treatments and underwent experimental procedures. We
were all
hopeful that she would get well and be able to watch her hyoung
daughter grow
up, go back to teaching, and continue to enrich our lives. Daun died a
year
ago, but the lessons I learned from her are clearer now than ever. I’m
glad
that she knew how much we cared for her, and I hope she knew how much
we
learned from her.
Linda DeFine, high school friend
In Memory of Daun...The first thing is this
whole event and this whole week
for me is about generosity. My fundamental philosophy is that people
are
inherently selfish. In
the vocabulary
of this institution, I think you would say that we are fundamentally
sinners.
And since Daun was a human being, I know she had her deep self-concern,
but I
am just so struck how she was all about other people. If I had gone
through
what she went through the past two years, I would have been heavily
into the
medical marijuana. Yet for Daun, it was always about other people. When
you
came to see her, she would stagger out of bed to come and make you
welcome. The
picture in the obituary was focused on her daughter, not on Daun, and I
think
that is a good representation of who she was.
The second thing I want to say is that my own personal memory of Daun is about a certain kind of day. It’s already been mentioned that Daun deferred to no one in her passion for Eudora Welty. There was one Welty story that I remember from college, “A Worn Path.” It is about a selfless person, an old Black woman, who is going on a walk one morning to go to town to get medicine for her sick grandson. It takes place on a certain kind of day, a day Welty describes with such clarity that it resonates for me, “a bright, frozen day,” a day that was cold and wintry, and yet sunny, intense sunshine. The description struck me so that whenever a day like that happened, I’d associate it with that story. At one point, I talked to Daun about that, and she got it. So when a day like that happened, I would stop by Daun’s office and say, “Daun, this is a ‘Worn Path’ day, and we shared that.”
So I know that on bright frozen days, I will not only think about Eudora Welty, I will think about Daun.
Rev. Katie Schneider-Bryan, Lead
Pastor, First United Methodist Church, St. Cloud, MN, Church Memorial
Service, April 6, 2002
Words
of Faith Honoring the Life, Death and Resurrection of Daun
Kendig
Scripture:
John 20:1-18 Mary meets the Risen Christ at the Tomb
I could hear Daun reading this beautiful story of Mary’s encounter with Jesus on that first Easter day. I could hear her voice in the reader’s voice last Sunday morning. Now, we have so many wonderful people who read our Sunday scriptures, but I have to confess to you that we often saved Daun to read for Easter. Now don’t tell anybody. You see, Daun knew the power and the beauty of words and did not take lightly her assignment. She was the only church member I know who took the scriptures home and completely retyped them. She then put them into a vinyl sleeve—some of you seem to know about this—and of course she enlarged it so it would be easy to read. Now I know she practiced reading those scriptures, oh no not silently but out loud, to hear the nuances in each word, going back over a phrase to find the right inflection, the right moment for a pause, and in that, God’s word, God’s voice came vibrantly alive through Daun.
We have been blessed in this way and in countless other ways because of Daun’s love. So it is that we are all drawn here out of the diverse ways in which we have known and loved Daun. Now Daun, as some of you know, had mixed feelings about this kind of gathering, but we’re here anyway, you notice, and she did tell me in one moment perhaps of weakness in her last months here, “Well Katie would you just take care of it?” And so we are. And we’re gathering.
You see, she could hardly talk about it, I think, because she was so fierce about wanting to live. To talk about this kind of gathering was perhaps to broach giving up or letting go. And Daun, you know, never gave up on life or living. Emily Dickinson expresses something of Daun’s fierce love of life:
Because
I could not
stop for
death,
He kindly stopped for me.
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
Daun
could not stop for death, but death stopped
for
her—untimely, too soon, no good reason, unexplainedly. And so now we
have to
gather. We feel compelled to gather, don’t we? To seek God’s comfort
and seek
that miracle of comfort in each other, to celebrate the miracle of
life, and in
this place most of all, to claim that mystery we call resurrection,
which will
not let death have the last word.
Today we are called, and, I think, challenged, to practice resurrection. That’s how Wendell Berry puts it. And he goes on to say, “Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.” The facts of this life have been difficult for Daun, as they have been for many people. It’s not fair. Good people face great obstacles. But Daun worked alongside her doctors, declaring that God was good and not to blame. I can’t tell you how many times she told me that. And she told me over and over that she knew that God was with her through it all. Daun believed in, and witnessed miracles along the way. Many of us shared in those miracles. Out of her 50 years of living, it is very important to remember that only two of her 50 were in this most daunting battle against cancer. Forty-eight other years were also lived with joy and wonderful accomplishments in both her personal and professional life. Others of you will help us to name those.
Yet when life was troubling God found a way through…. Cancer came, the new trouble, and a stem cell transplant was needed and another miracle emerged as a donor matched with Daun. Chaplain Judy Connolly was found at University of Minnesota hospital, lifting Daun’s life along that journey, too. And God was finding a way through. At the time of her transplant, Daun wrote to us, “I am feeling pretty frightened about what lies ahead. I am still optimistic about the process, though that optimism is tempered by the news about my heart and kidneys. What I know more than anything is that I want to live, and I am going to do everything in my power to see that I do. I count on your love and all your prayers to help me through.” God kept finding a way through.
She continued, and this single mother who could have lived so alone through it all discovered this incredible web of support that she shared with us— and with our 7th, 8th, and 9th graders in a video one evening –this incredible web of support, the support of you, her colleagues, her neighbors, her church family, and most of all, in her own family, in Beth and Diane. They made a way to be here again and again in countless flights from Colorado and Massachusetts week after week, and God was finding a way through it all through the gift of their persistent and positive and sacrificial and joyful and tender and strong and enduring love. Through all of you, God found a way through.
And now a loving mother has died…. And we who feel the heavy loss gather here and discover each other, friends given who were once strangers. Daun gives us to each other. And once again, God finds a way through. You see, these are all the signs of resurrection that we have seen and continue to see today. God always finds a way through.
What Daun believed and what Christians declare on Easter is not so much the mystery of the empty tomb. It’s not the empty tomb but the living presence of God with us. It’s God’s living presence that rolls away the barriers that would keep us from God’s love. Like Mary at that garden, too, it was not the empty tomb which gave her hope: it made her afraid. But it was recognizing the voice of Jesus: Jesus speaking her name and promising not only to be with her in that moment but going ahead of her all along her way. There is nothing in this whole creation that can separate us from the love of God, which we have seen in Christ Jesus. God always finds a way through.
In our children’s time in our Easter service this past Sunday morning, I gave each child a polished stone, and I told the children that there was a big stone in the way on that first Easter, but God rolled it away; God won’t let anything stop love. Love always finds a way through. They are, instead of Easter eggs, you see, our Easter stones. Today you may need a tangible reminder of the power of God’s love which defies all barriers, even death. There are more “Easter stones” for you to take, as you leave this service. Take a stone if you need to, if you want to. It may become your hope stone, or your prayer stone, your Daun stone or your sunrise stone, or your “sign- of -God’s –presence- whatever –we- face” stone.
You see, today we do truly practice resurrection with each other. And it will take practice. Most of all, it will take the presence of God.
One
of the last email messages that Daun wrote to us asked
us to pray for another miracle. She had had several and she was hoping
for one
more. We did not get the miracle we had hoped for. But God as always
provides
other miracles. Daun closed that note with these words, “And remember,
my
parents actually named me Daun. This sun plans to rise.” And she has.
She has.
By the grace of Jesus, who is the Christ. Amen.
One of the
performances we took down to