Kathleen Charters Celebration of Life

I met Kathleen in June 1970, at a party with a handful of my fellow graduating seniors from high school. There were no drugs or alcohol, but we did have extra-long spaghetti; I don’t know why. There was also someone I’d never met: Kathleen.

Kathleen had just finished her junior year at Highline High School and was best friends with the party hostess. I quickly realized she was brilliant, and painfully shy; she trembled every time I spoke to her.

I left for Washington State University, and she finished her senior year of high school. We exchanged a blizzard of letters back and forth across the Cascades. She had an offer from the San Francisco Ballet to audition for their company, but decided she was too tall to ever do more than solos or be part of the chorus. She entered WSU in September 1971. Our postage bills plummeted.

On November 29, 1971, I proposed to her, and she accepted. It wasn’t a well-planned proposal. There was no fancy dinner, and I didn’t have an engagement ring. She said she didn’t need a ring, but did need a programmable scientific calculator for chemistry. I co-signed for my first loan, $550, to buy a calculator, equivalent to $4,500 today. A decade later, I asked if she wanted a ring, and she asked for a $4,000 laptop. Thirty years later, I asked if she wanted a ring, and we went to Scotland.

We did buy wedding rings. We saved every penny we got in change, and when J.C. Penny had a sale on jewelry, we hauled a large wooden box to the store in downtown Spokane, found a pair of rings we liked, and told the clerk we were paying for them in cash. She asked what was in the box; we told her pennies. She said she was going on a lunch break. We said the pennies were wrapped, not loose. She reluctantly sold us the rings. Kathleen referred to the rings as “diamond dust,” because each had two tiny diamonds.

We married in 1974. She graduated with a BS in Psychology, cum laude, in 1975, followed by a BS in Nursing, cum laude, in 1977, both from Washington State University. Then she received a Master of Science in Systems Management, magna cum laude, an engineering degree, from the University of Southern California in 1982. Then she received a Doctor of Philosophy in Health Care Informatics, summa cum laude, from the University of Maryland, Baltimore, in 1998, and finally a Master of Arts in Church Ministries from St. Mary’s University and Seminary in 2009. During all the time she was in school, she was also working, sometimes part time, but mostly full time.

And such amazing work: in 1976, she joined the US Public Health Service as an Ensign and in 1977 was promoted to Lieutenant Junior Grade and ordered to the Public Health Service Hospital in San Francisco. In 1979, she was one of two PHS officers who volunteered to do health screenings for a flood of Vietnamese refugees – “boat people.” She screened 7,000 men, women, and children over ten 12-hour days. I only saw her to bring her fresh uniforms. The International Red Cross honored her work by making her an official Red Cross nurse.

Kathleen wrote several computer programs while in the PHS to do staff scheduling, body composition assessments, and other tasks. Some officers in the Navy read her scientific papers and were impressed by her computer expertise. The Navy was opening a new fully computerized hospital in Bremerton, WA, and wanted her there. She agreed and on July 1, 1980, she was commissioned a Lieutenant in the Navy and ordered to Bremerton. When we arrived, we found out the Navy had run out of money and the hospital didn’t have any computers.

Kathleen called Captain Grace Hopper (later Rear Admiral Hopper) and received instant approval for a microcomputer. Kathleen used it to write programs for staff scheduling, officer fitness reports, certification record keeping, and dozens of other tasks. Kathleen faced resistance to her starting Navy life as a Lieutenant instead of an Ensign, and because she was married; she was one of the first married women Navy officers. The resentment faded away as Kathleen insisted on changing the Navy rather than the Navy changing her.

She was ordered to the US Naval Hospital Yokosuka, Japan, in 1983. She was allowed to bring her “dress sword and spouse.” I was an afterthought to a sword she never had.

Promoted to Lieutenant Commander, Kathleen was put in charge of the ICU in Yokosuka. Among her patients were Ambassador Mike Mansfield and his wife. Mansfield insisted on only speaking to Kathleen when he or his wife came to the hospital. He said she didn’t suck up, didn’t ask for favors, and always answered questions directly.

Kathleen was then assigned as the DOD Director of Medical Education and Training for the entire Western Pacific, which stretched from west of Hawaii to Asia, including the Indian Ocean but not, for some reason, Okinawa. She introduced basic and advanced cardiac life support to Japan, training Japanese firefighters and ambulance drivers using American Red Cross manuals translated into Japanese. The Red Cross chapter in Stockton, CA, issued the certifications, and the chapter won many awards for the hundreds of certifications – signed by Kathleen in Japan.

The president of the Japan Medical Association heard about her cardiac life support classes and came to Yokosuka to take them. He failed, but was so impressed that he came back, passed both courses, and invited her to the Japan Medical Association annual conference in Tokyo. There were two problems: she was a woman, and she was seven months pregnant. He wanted her to impress the Association, so he asked her to wear her dress blue uniform, with the gold braid and colorful service ribbons, and sent his limousine from Tokyo to pick her up and bring her back. Today, ambulance drivers and first responders in Japan perform assessments and treatment before transporting patients, in large part because of Kathleen.

Kathleen hadn’t wanted to have children. But Japan is a very child-friendly country, and after ten years of marriage, she asked me, on my birthday, if I still wanted a child. I was startled, but said yes.

Kathleen spent months teasing me, saying she was chatting with “your daughter.” She didn’t take a pregnancy test until I insisted, and did nothing to change her routine. She scheduled an inspection to Iwakuni, flying there in an ancient Navy C-1 cargo plane built in 1956. She walked to work every day, climbing the stairs to her office on the fifth floor of the hospital. She insisted I was going to have a daughter, not because she’d taken a test to determine gender, but just because she was a woman and “knew.” She told me “Your daughter likes classical music,” “Your daughter wants a hug” and “Your daughter says her name is Lykara.”

When Lykara was born, the pediatrician congratulated me on my daughter, handed her to me, and told me to wash, weigh, and measure her. I was terrified and said I didn’t know how to do any of that. Kathleen, the pediatrician, the obstetrician, and the delivery nurse thought this was hilarious. I washed Lykara and told them she weighed 3.85 kilograms and was 53 centimeters long. They cheered.

A month before Lykara turned two, Kathleen was ordered to the Naval Medical Center San Diego, the largest military medical facility in the world. She helped move from the old hospital to the new one, ran the PACU for a while, and became the project officer for the Navy’s first hospital information system. She customized the system for the Navy, wrote scientific papers on the effectiveness of hospital information systems, and trained the Navy’s first cadre of nurse informaticians.

Kathleen was accepted for a PhD program at the University of Maryland. I didn’t know she’d even applied. She knew I wasn’t a fan of the East Coast, and told me it would only be for three or four years. We arrived in Maryland in 1991, and were there for 26 years.

She was promoted to Commander, and two years into her PhD, the Navy assigned her full-time to the Pentagon, working for the Secretary of Defense, while still working on her doctorate. She handled health policy problems, created technical standards for healthcare information systems, and standardized data collection and healthcare terminology.

She was then transferred to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. She was tasked with creating a single, all-service hospital information system connecting all DOD health facilities in the northeast, from Maine to Virginia. This was mandated by Congress, and everyone knew it wouldn’t work, but she finished the project, successfully, two months early and $400,000 under budget.

After retiring from the Navy after 21 years, Kathleen became a professor in the School of Nursing at the University of Maryland. She loved teaching and doing research, but she hated the constant pressure to do fund raising for the university. Very reluctantly, she left her grad students to become a consultant for the VA on MyHealtheVet.

MyHealtheVet was the federal government’s first online patient portal, enabling VA patients to access their health records, refill prescriptions, and schedule appointments. But it was a mess. She counted 241 links on the opening page, making it almost impossible to navigate. She rewrote the site in plain language, eliminated links irrelevant to health care, and vastly improved response times. She also convinced Health and Human Services to rule that patient health data belonged to the patient, and was not, as many physicians insisted, their personal intellectual property. When she left the project, the opening page had only 38 links, and a huge number of patients used the portal.

She returned to the Department of Defense, as a civilian, in the Military Health Agency. She worked on health quality issues and was part of a team that developed specifications for purchasing a commercial hospital information system for the entire DOD. For her outstanding contributions, she was recognized as the senior federal civilian nurse leader for 2015.

She retired from DOD, again, and moved to the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for Military Medicine, researching spirituality in healthcare. Kathleen collaborated closely with Special Operations Command to conduct scientific research exploring the connections between spirituality and health. She also trained chaplains to support spiritual health within the military. Even after relocating to Sequim in 2018, she continued research on spirituality and moral injury.

In Sequim, she hosted spiritual health groups in person and online for individuals on the East and West Coast and even in other countries. She provided congregational care at Emmanuel United Methodist Church in Maryland and Trinity United Methodist Church in Sequim. She served as a member of the Community Emergency Response Team, and as a board member for Lois’ Legacy. She joined Praising Hands, a “choir” that performs hymns using American Sign Language. In 2022, she was ordained as a Deacon.

In January 2023, Kathleen started having unexplained fevers. We went to the ER several times, and each time they thought she might have an infection. In August 2023, she started bleeding, and drove herself to the ER. An OBGYN doctor said he thought Kathleen might have cancer. In November the UW Medical Center in Seattle, after ten days of tests, diagnosed her with lymphoma. She went through two rounds of chemotherapy and radiation before deciding on home hospice in June 2024.

All of 2023 and 2024 were hard for Kathleen and for those who cared for her. But I don’t want to remember her pain and struggle. I want to remember the shy girl who always had ideas and concepts that exploded my world, the leader who started personal health records and made hospitals more automated, who changed emergency response services in Japan, and the thoughtful person who explored the connection between spirituality and physical and mental health. Kathleen was the playful, funny, loving person who had no hobbies except her spouse and child.

Eulogy by Lykara Ryder

When I was a young teenager, my Mom turned to me completely out of the blue one day and said that when she died, she wanted her gravestone to say ‘Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’ She said this with a very peaceful smile on her face. Meanwhile, I was horrified. First, because I was totally unwilling to think about a time when Mom was dead. And second, because I knew my Mom was many things – and a servant was absolutely not one of them. She was a leader: a Naval officer, an eldest child, a nurse, an internationally recognised expert in informatics, a teacher, a church leader… and, obviously, the best Mom in the world.

Fast forward 25-ish years, and I came out to be with her last October. She was directing me around the house to pull together paperwork for my Dad, and one of the documents was her living will. In the section that said ‘If anyone asks how I want to be remembered, please say the following about me’, she had written: ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’

So that’s probably an important thing to know about her. She had a consistency of purpose that I think most of us can only envy. Sometimes this manifested in her being, rather famously, stubborn! But mostly it showed in her everyday determination to do good in the world. And while Mom didn’t change between that first conversation and her final wishes, I most certainly did – because my reaction the second time around was that of course this is how she will be remembered. Of course she lived a life of service. Of course her servant’s heart guided her career, and her ministry, and our family.

Mom loved people. For someone who got the opportunity to travel the world, I don’t recall her ever being particularly nostalgic for places… but she latched onto people and loved them fiercely. She was giving, and caring, and people-centred. She was so often the cleverest person in the room, but she never made anyone else feel inferior. It felt like she was good at everything, except resting and saying no to new projects! Mom accumulated so many accomplishments that it was a favourite game for Dad and I to try to fit all of them into one long title, referring to her as some mishmash of Reverend Dr Commander Mommy Dearest. She was absolutely wonderful – and more than loving her, I really, really liked her.

She was cool! You met her; you get it! She had a passion for the arts and almost became a professional ballerina. But she also had a passion for nursing and worked in San Francisco during the AIDS epidemic. But she also had a passion for computing and informatics, and applied it to veteran support as a cause particularly close to her heart. But she also had a passion for teaching spearheaded massive health education progreammes long before she became a professor. But she also had a passion for nurturing faith communities and led adult Bible study for years at church before taking steps towards ordination.

And while she would happily talk to you about any of those things and was extremely generous with her time and knowledge, one of the first things that my husband commented on after getting to know her is that it truly didn’t occur to her to talk about herself. If you struck up a conversation with my Mom about what was going on in her life, she was much more likely to talk about my Dad – or, embarrassingly, me – or, more recently, her granddaughter. She poured love out on her family.

I never had even the barest hint of a chance at wondering if I was in a loving family. So much for a career as an angsty rockstar with a troubled youth! Every single play, concert, award ceremony, competition, science fair, and parade had Mom in the audience. Every apple my Dad tried to get his hands on was intercepted by Mom to be peeled and sectioned. Every Easter bunny I received had its ears stolen! When I wanted to learn the hand bells, Mom joined the hand bell ringers as well; when I wanted to join the church choir, Mom joined right alongside me. When Dad became a fan of University of Maryland Women’s Basketball, Mom bought two season tickets and went to games with him. When I got my scholarship for a year abroad in Sheffield, England, Mom booked the tickets for her and Dad to come visit me in October before she would even consider booking the tickets for me to fly out in September. She always put us first; she made us feel important and wanted and loved.

And I’m sure she didn’t appreciate her granddaughter living in another country, but she didn’t let the distance stop her from being a doting grandmother to Idony. She made time for the thousands of photos and videos I uploaded. She sent care packages covered in stickers and filled with age-appropriate activities. Maybe it was because she was a nurse or maybe it was her slapstick sense of humour, but Mom loved the almost-disaster stories of raising an active kid (as long as the stories had a happy ending)! She delighted in and encouraged Idony’s adventures.

So we know that my Mom was kind and compassionate; wise and selfless; loving and hardworking. But the picture of her character isn’t complete unless we acknowledge something really important: she was extremely funny. Mischievous, even!

She was adventurous in trying new foods, sure, but what she really got a kick out of was how disgusted Dad could get and she’d ham it up more and more as he became more and more grossed out. There was a running joke in our family that anything that ended up on the shopping list, Mom would find and bring home – so back when the Nintendo Wii was first launched and it was impossible to get them in stores, Dad and I impishly put it on the shopping list… and Mom brought one home and casually left it on the dining room table. When my then-boyfriend / now-husband came to visit for the first time, his parents coached him to be really grateful that my parents were hosting him instead of making him pay for a hotel. So Mom nodded along as he said how much he appreciated it while she set him up on the pull-out bed in the basement… then she warned him that the basement had spiders so big that you could hear them walking ‘but don’t worry, they’re harmless – goodnight!’ and she turned out the light and shut the door.

To avoid any rumours starting, I should say that Mom teased the people she cared about! You will all have your own memories, your own stories of her – but if she ever teased you, I hope you’ll treasure that memory in particular. Mom said she wanted to be remembered with joy and I hope we can all do that. How amazing to live the kind of life that means people are heartbroken when God calls you home.

Life ends, but love does not.