I didn't have time to locate a photo of Kathy McCaig tonight before beginning this blog. I will add one later this weekend after I find a good one.
Kathy passed away yesterday. Her husband called me tonight to tell me the news and I have spent time calling others that I know cared about her and worked with her. She was too young to be saying goodbye to. She had health issues since I have known her...about 25 years. But in recent years she suffered with fibromyalgia and eventually had to retire from teaching Special Education because of it's debilitating effect on her life. I hated to see her go. For one thing was that I knew Kathy was always in my corner. And we all need people like that. We all need friends like that. Kathy and I didn't get to talk much after she and I both retired. But we knew that whenever we did, it would be like picking up right where we had ended before.
Kathy was a tiny person, with her eating disorder bringing her weight to, well, not much of anything over the years. She was in denial most of her adult life about it, but even after she knew what it was she felt helpless to change. We always laughed because she always had big hair and big boobs. Her boobs never got any smaller, even though her clothing size diminished. She ate like a bird but always talked like she ate constantly.
Kathy was from Oklahoma and had a drawl that would almost put mine to shame. I often teased her because she called eggs "aigs" and legs "laigs". It would always crack me up. She called all of us, along with her students, "hon"....in old southern tradition.
I got my first visit with Kathy when she was teaching at Tilles Elementary with the moderate mentally retarded students there. We were opening the program and Euper Lane Elementary in 1985 and our mutual friend and supervisor, Tammy, asked me to go over and job shadow her for a day or two. She and Mrs. Betty, her aide, welcomed me and answered all of my questions. She was a stickler for her paperwork and always hand wrote most of her IEP's long after most of us had been relieved to go with the computerized versions. Her loopy letters and attention to details always made them easy to read and always easy to know the author.
Her students loved her, even as she fussed and mothered them. Most of them needed both. In 1992, we were both brought together to teach two special classes at Southside. This was after we had spent most summers teaching summer school together. I always learned something new from her. She had an ease with what she did and was organized beyond belief.
Kathy knew how to make you feel like she cared about you by always asking about my children and Steve. She remembered details about the storied I'd relate to her about them all and recall them later. I could never remember things like that.
Kathy never forgot my birthday. Never. I always got a card with a personal note written inside. She really missed everyone after her retirement. I tried to remember to make time to go see her, but didn't do that nearly enough. There's a lesson to be learned here for sure.
I feel a bit of emptiness tonight as I think about many of the laughs we shared and the tears we cried together for each other, our families and our jobs as special education teachers. Like a secret society, we didn't have to explain how it was because we knew what the other one was going through.
I will never forget her laughter and her brownies. I know that tonight she is in heaven, having a cigarette and making a pan of her special brownies for her dad that had gone on before her so many years ago.
Good-bye Kathy. You will be missed.
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