Courageous Kat

They say that strong women raise strong women, and my mom was definitely a strong woman. More appropriately, my mom was a badass. A woman who took whatever life threw at her and told it who was boss. 

Kathy Smith Vaughn was born on New Year's Eve, 1955. She always said, “Everyone celebrates my birthday." She loved cows, especially black and white Holsteins, driving fast, reading, and doing puzzles. She was goofy and easy going– the counterbalance to her Type A husband and daughter. She taught me the value of letting loose, even if I don’t do it often enough. She went by “Kat” and her online persona was cureusKat, an apt description for an amazing woman and mother who was always curious about the world around her.  

My mother moved a lot with her family as a child while her father worked on the interstate build out.  Some of her formative years were spent living in a rural Tennessee community where they didn’t have running water until the late 1960s. Stories of working the tobacco fields, outhouses, flour sack dresses, farm chores, and practical jokes with her aunts and uncles filled my childhood. During Texas history class in fifth grade, we spoke of how things used to be: the same outhouses and flour sack dresses my mother spoke of often. When I shared these stories with my teacher, she told me that I was mistaken because that history was far too long ago for my mother to have lived it. Mom was irate. She wrote a sternly worded letter to my teacher, and she sent me to school with the quilt her granny made from those flour sack dresses to further elucidate her point.  I don’t know if that teacher ever apologized to my mom, but she definitely never said another word doubting anything I said about the subject. I’m sure that Mom’s righteous indignation that her daughter was called a liar and that her history, and that of other Appalachian families, was doubted was made clear. Crystal clear.

After high school, Mom got a job working at Eastman, one of the largest employers in Kingsport, TN, and she was one of the very first women to work alongside the men at the plant. She climbed scaffolding, made repairs, and loaded railroad cars all without assistance. She always told me that she never asked for help because, if she did, the men would’ve used it as proof she, and other women, didn’t belong in the workforce. Self-sufficiency was tantamount. She was strong and determined, even when the work would take her muscles to failure. My earliest memories are of her strutting to the car where my dad and I waited to pick her up at the end of second shift, red hair barely contained and her biceps straining the seams of her shirt sleeves, the 1980s version of Rosie the Riveter.  

After that, we moved a lot, and my dad traveled frequently for work. That meant it was just the two of us most days until I started Kindergarten. Mom was my first teacher because I didn’t go to mother’s day out, preschool, or daycare. She taught me to read and write, even when I perplexed her by switching hands while coloring and writing. She instilled a love of reading in me. We played dress up and dolls and also cars and blocks. She watched Disney's Alice in Wonderland, my favorite Disney movie to this day, at least a thousand times. We made art together, and she developed a strong talent for oil painting.

When something broke at home, we fixed it. Her ability to troubleshoot and fix things seemed magical, even if she ended up hurting herself in the process, which was a common occurrence. I recall one project where she was trying to use a drill with a round sanding disc, and instead of sanding the intended object, she nearly sliced off her left thumb. Her fearlessness with projects and fixing things instilled in me a can-do attitude; there’s rarely a mistake so egregious that you can’t undo the damage. If all this were to take place in our current era, I’m convinced that Mom, armed with YouTube and the Internet, would have been invincible.

When I chose computer science as my major in college, she didn’t discourage me or even comment on the fact that I’d probably be the only woman in a room full of men. When I told her about the frustrations of being the only woman and some of the inappropriate things I’d endured, she’d shake her index finger in anger, a hallmark gesture of hers when she was fired up, like she was going to tell all those men she didn’t know how they needed to behave. Her stories of being one of the pioneers for women in the workplace, working in a plant with a bunch of men, prepared me to succeed in my career in cybersecurity where, until recently, I was frequently the only woman in the room. I credit her for the strength it took to thrive in my career. 

The last 10 years were a different kind of survival for Mom. She battled several severe health issues, but she did what she had to do to keep them under control. On September 1, 2021, our lives changed forever. My dad asked me to take Mom to the ER because she was having difficulty communicating.  We thought that maybe she had a stroke, but instead, the CT scan found a 1 inch mass in the part of her brain that controls speech. Several weeks, tests and doctor visits later, she got a diagnosis:  glioblastoma. Glioblastoma is an aggressive, cancerous brain tumor with a terrible prognosis; median life expectancy is 12 months.  

Like most things in life, I think she took that as a challenge. Over the course of nearly 18 months, we went to radiation treatments, targeted treatments, MRI scans, doctors appointments, and throughout it all, periodic stays in the hospital. The treatment and the cancer changed her. Before, she had red hair that I always envied growing up, wishing I looked more like the beautiful woman that raised me instead of having blonde hair and blue eyes. Somehow, over the years, people started saying we looked a lot alike. The little girl inside me smiles every time I hear that now, though I still don’t see it myself. But after radiation, her hair fell out, and it regrew as a dark brown with gray flecks. She slowly lost the ability to communicate clearly and walk on her own without falling. Through it all though, she still smiled a lot, laughing and trying to cut up, even when the words she said didn’t make sense to the rest of us.

Cancer is always cruel, but there’s something worse about glioblastoma. It not only robs the person of their life, but it also slowly steals the essence of who they are. In her final weeks, Mom got quiet, and even her ability to answer yes/no questions disappeared. She gradually fell into a near comatose state before she passed a few days later on February 25, 2023.  

She lives on. In my heart, in my memory, and in how I live life the way she taught me. Fighting for what is important, breaking barriers, and finding joy even in the worst of times.