The bravest person I ever met
One of my first students passed away last week. Here is a brief, inadequate tribute to her moral courage.
I have a quick word about some new work, then a short tribute — that I wish I hadn’t had the occasion to write — to one of my all-time best students.
I have a new essay at Plough (a wonderful magazine that deserves broader attention) about the seeds of our current dissatisfaction with work: “Workers Deserve Better.”
There’s still time to register for the Jesuit Book Club discussion of The End of Burnout on April 20. I’m very much looking forward to talking about the book with you as well as with Nick Ripatrazone and Mike Jordan Laskey.
More new writing is on the way. An essay in an exciting venue should appear soon, and I’m at work on something also very exciting. If you’re a new subscriber, I want you to know that I have a book out (The End of Burnout).
I am once again offering an asynchronous, online class in spiritual nonfiction, starting May 23. Details are here. Note that spiritual nonfiction encompasses writing about other people’s spirituality as well as one’s own; you need not be religious or spiritual yourself to take the class. Feel free to reply to this email with questions. And if you sign up for Writing Workshops’ newsletter or follow them on Instagram, they sometimes run discounts on registration.
This message arrives a little off schedule because I needed a few days to decide if I wanted to share this tribute. As you can see, I decided I would after all. I’ll aim to send you something on burnout next week; some disturbing reports have appeared lately about veterinarian burnout, and I’d love to talk about it.
When I met Kate 23 years ago, she was a first-year women’s studies major at the University of Virginia. She belonged to a sorority and to the Air Force ROTC. And she was a student in a religious ethics class for which I was a teaching assistant. She turned in her papers on heavy, formal stock. I recall writing in the margin of one of them that some grammatical error harmed her credibility. It was a harsher comment than I would have made later in my teaching career. In any case, she told me she was confident she would never make the mistake again.
Kate and I became friends. In the following years, she switched from the Air Force to the Marines. When I asked why, she said, “Because it’s harder.” She eventually left the sorority.
After graduation, Kate served in Fallujah. I can’t imagine the horror she saw there, not just from the insurgency, but from other Marines. As she later wrote in an essay for Vox, she endured frequent sexual harassment during her service, including the threat of violence. She loved the Marine Corps, which to her meant she had to call out its endemic sexism:
Marines at every level: Your silence is consent, just as mine was. You have position and cause to protect all of our fellow Marines… Speak out. Shut this down. Get my back.
Be better and stronger than I was, and protect the cohesive team that’ll be needed in the next fight. I should have filed formal reports when I ran into issues instead of trying so hard to be an issue-free team player who can handle all things herself. I set up future women to have to do the same by not fighting to change the culture, no matter what it cost me.
What I find remarkable in this passage is the turn toward the self in responsibility. Kate is chastising herself for not taking the more difficult path of going through the bureaucracy to report what happened. She seems to be saying that she thought only of herself, which meant, paradoxically, brushing off what she endured.
Kate’s next fight came quickly. Soon after she published that essay, she received a diagnosis of stage four breast cancer. The cancer quickly metastasized to her skeleton. I remember a message she wrote to me about this news, using that word: “skeleton.” I had never seen anyone use it in such a literal and self-referential way. It was an acknowledgement of the bare physiological fact of her life — of all human life. It was a clear-eyed acknowledgment of reality.
How did a 38-year-old woman develop this cancer? As Kate learned, she was not the only young female veteran who did. She believed the high cancer rates in Iraq veterans resulted from burning trash in open pits, ignited by jet fuel, a known carcinogen. She spent the next several years bringing attention to this problem and advocating for veterans with health problems like hers. Once again, love compelled her to criticize an institution she loved.
The effort was not in vain. The U.S. Senate recently passed, unanimously, an act named for Kate that would require the Department of Veterans Affairs to conduct mammograms for women who were exposed to burn pits during their service.
Three weeks ago, Kate went into hospice. And last Tuesday, she died. Her husband, son, and parents are surely devastated. They have my deepest sympathy.
I am skipping over long periods in Kate’s life when we weren’t in contact and I don’t know what she was doing. I know she earned a Ph.D., became a university professor, and published books — including one on military suicides with another former student and Marine veteran, Sarah Plummer Taylor. But I’m surely missing huge aspects of who Kate was.
Kate told NPR last month, "I know I don't have that much longer. I accept that reality, but I'm just trying to preserve quality of life so that I can parent and that I can enjoy people as long as possible."
Her life is a greater ethics lesson than I have ever taught.