Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Father's Day

Terrific piece in the Globe by Casey's former professor Maddy Blais on Casey's dad on father's day.

SOME STUDENTS arrive in your classroom ready-made, and Casey Kane was one of them. She had graduated second in her class at Holyoke High School, played three sports, was president of the National Honor Society, member of the band, captain of As Schools Match Wits, and eventually ran for colleen in that city’s annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade.




If you teach in the autumn at a college in Massachusetts and there is a reasonable way to fold baseball into the curriculum, you would be a fool not to try. Casey proved the ideal ally, discussing John Updike’s essay “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu’’ while reciting lines from “Good Will Hunting,’’ “Bull Durham,’’ and George Carlin’s monologue on the differences between football and baseball.

Her major flaw as far as I was concerned was that she took just one class with me, as she disappeared into more and more kudos and accomplishments, including serving as editor-in-chief of the Daily Collegian, supervising, among other aspiring journalists, Jill Carroll, who was later kidnapped while reporting for the Christian Science Monitor in Iraq.

Casey graduated in 1999 and was hired as a sports reporter at the Anderson Independent Mail in South Carolina. Her work there was memorable. One example: “There was never a moment’s doubt in her mind. Pendleton High School softball pitcher Brooke Norris may have worried about how she would throw, or whether she’d be able to make it through the game, but she knew she had to be on the mound. With more than 300 spectators to support her and an empty chair behind the backstop where her father Tommy always sat, Brooke offered the best tribute she could to the man, who died of a heart attack Saturday morning.

“She pitched.’’

The first signs of Hodgkin’s lymphoma were more irksome than frightening: Casey thought she had a flu that wouldn’t go away. When she got the diagnosis and called home from the hospital, her father asked if she had been in an accident. “No, but I have a feeling that when this is over I’ll wish I had been.’’

Bill Kane, a fit 60-year-old retired teacher and downhill skiing, cross country, and indoor track coach at Holyoke High, husband of Eileen and father of two sons, did not always have a perfect relationship with his daughter: A feud broke out when she was in her late teens after he thought she had made some bad personal choices. He kicked her out of the house. The details he prefers to keep to himself, except to say: “She was just as Irish as I am,’’ and, “It is the most regretful decision I ever made. It is close to two years that I lost.’’

When she died in May 2004, the grief specialists identified him as the family member most at risk. He commenced therapy with a doctor named Lisa Uyehara in South Hadley who he says saved his life, encouraging him to honor the vow he had made to Casey to ride cross-country on his bicycle - a trip he postponed twice during her five-year cancer struggle.

Yesterday was officially Father’s Day, but Bill Kane intends to honor the occasion tomorrow when he drives from Holyoke to Dana Farber Cancer Institute in memory of his daughter, which he does every two weeks or so.

“It is not whole blood I donate, but platelets, the blood cells responsible for clotting, one of the first friendly victims to be killed by chemotherapy. I am still a biology teacher at heart and can’t let a detail like that go by. I would often donate while Casey underwent her therapy, and on those days when I just didn’t feel up to it she had a remarkable way of getting me to walk past the children’s cancer ward. She knew how to push my buttons.’’

And so he will leave the house he purchased for $25,000 in 1972, with the American flag out front and a shamrock and Red Sox logo stenciled in the driveway, and shoot down the Pike. Afterward, he and Eileen are likely to go out for a bite to eat or, when the Sox are in town, to walk the half-mile to Fenway.

His life is simple now: He works out, he gardens, and he reads. He has only one goal left and he tries to live it every day.

“I want to be,’’ he says, “the man my daughter thought I was.’’