Kathleen turns 30

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

If you look at the “Today in History” section on Page 11 today, you’ll see some pretty notable events, like the beginning of Martin Luther’s Protestant Movement, Paul Revere’s famous “The British are coming!” ride, and the Great San Francisco Earthquake.

One thing you won’t see in there but one that had a tremendous impact on my life was that on April 18, 1994, I became a father for the first time. I was just 20 years old at the time. My wife was a couple of weeks away from turning 19. We were practically babies ourselves when our baby girl, Kathleen Justice Hardin was born.

If you’ve never heard me mention Katie (as we called her), it’s not because I’ve decided to leave her out of all the stories I tell about my life and my family in this column. It’s because she is

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no longer with us. Sadly, on Sept. 1, 1995, at just 16 months old, she passed away from an aggressive form of meningitis. She had actually already dealt with one bout of meningitis at nine months of age but recovered. Unfortunately, the second case was just too much.

But in the not-quite year-anda- half we had her, she was the best thing in the world. She was an early walker and an early talker. She liked to stay up late and sleep in, which was just my kind of schedule.

She liked music and liked to dance… and she could absolutely murder a doubledecker taco from Taco Bell with her eight teeth.

While we did lose her, we were later blessed with three healthy children who are all grown up now, but I do wish they had gotten the chance to meet their big sister, who would be 30 years old today. I can’t even imagine what kind of woman she would be now.

Who would she have married? What would she be doing for a living? Would she have kids of her own?

Of course we missher. We still have photos of her all over the house. Every Christmas, we hang her stocking right there with everyone else’s, even though we only had one Christmas with her. And we share our Katie stories with our other kids so that her memory lives on with them, And, of course, now I’ll tell her nephew all about her too.