chapter nine

Faith

“It is this belief in a power larger than myself and other than myself which allows me to venture into the unknown and even the unknowable.”

Maya Angelou
Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now

Kentucky Strong: Loretta and Kela

I am driving through the Kentucky countryside to the tiny farm community of Tompkinsville, population 2,530. It is the first day of June, and all around me the world is the newest green. The rolling hills on either side are dotted with barns, some old and nearly consumed with vines, others sturdy and red. Holstein cows lounge against the edge of a pond, their black-and-white spots graphic against the plush landscape.

The sides of the two-lane road are thick with Queen Anne’s lace, purple thistle, and honeysuckle, and I roll my windows down and breathe deeply. It is impossibly beautiful. This drive reminds me of the Kentucky I grew up in, when I’d ride around Logan County with my girlfriends, radio blasting, celebrating the first day of summer.

I am on my way to meet with Loretta Lyons, known affectionately by those close to her as Pearl. Loretta is the mother of Kela Lyons Fee, MD, whom I was lucky enough to call a friend when I was a young mother. Kela’s first son and my third were born just a few months apart, and those were colorful and happy years filled with birthday parties and baby showers, Easter egg hunts in the spring and hayrides to the Jackson’s Orchard pumpkin patch in the fall.

Even with her demanding schedule as a physician, Kela had so much energy and life that she found a way to make time for it all. She was a woman of boundless love, laughter, faith, and courage, and in everything she did, she shined. She was a beloved wife, mother, daughter, friend, and doctor. And she left this world too soon at the age of forty-three.

Kela and her husband Kirk, an orthopedic surgeon, moved to Bowling Green in 1997. Within a year, Kela’s OB-GYN practice had boomed. Everyone wanted her capable hands to deliver their baby, but it was more than her skill as a physician that drew women to her practice. It is not an overstatement to say that her patients loved her. Several even named their daughters for her. As Loretta put it, “How many women go to see their doctor and get a big ole hug when they come down the hall?” That’s the way Kela was: warm, with a wide smile, always going in for the hug. Her love and compassion for people, like her Southern accent, was thick, pure, and authentic.

Samantha Rivera

Like everyone who knew Kela, I felt blessed to have such a person in my life. When she was suddenly diagnosed with stage four cancer at age thirty-nine, our community was shocked that someone with such vibrant energy and purpose could be so sick. For weeks, nearly everywhere I went— my children’s school, church, social gatherings—the conversations were the same, hushed and dampened with sadness, fear and incomprehension. Kela’s sons were only six and four at the time.

Our entire community mobilized to show support for Kela and Kirk in the only ways we could. Meal preparation and delivery were quickly organized and, with so many people wanting to help in some small way, the schedule was booked months in advance. There were spontaneous prayer vigils at churches, civic and women’s groups all over town.

Broadway United Methodist, Kirk and Kela’s church home, held a healing service soon after her diagnosis. Word spread throughout Bowling Green and people came from every walk of life, completely filling the church. As my pastor, Rick Bard, describes, “We simply opened the church for people to express their prayers, spontaneous and heartfelt, for Kela and Kirk. The prayers given by new mothers whose babies had been delivered by Kela were especially moving and powerful. I could feel the profound impact Kela had had on these women during the most important experience of their lives. The emotion and love in our church that night was simply beyond words for me.”

“I believe that God is in me as the sun is in the color and fragrance of a flower – the Light in my darkness, the Voice in my silence.”

Helen Keller

Kela and Kirk were on their way back from consulting with cancer specialists in Louisville when they heard about the service. In the midst of all they were dealing with, they drove to the church. Pastor Rick remembers, “I’ll never forget seeing them walk in the back doors. There was a hush in the room. I was moved by her bravery, her grace, and the way she hugged and greeted everyone, letting them in to her life, expressing her gratitude for their concern.”

Kela was already a person who inspired others, but her dauntless spirit during her four-year battle with cancer gave us all a model for how to live. Knowing Kela made my own faith deeper. When I shared Kela’s impact on my spirituality with my Pastor, he responded, “People of courage let us into their lives in a rich way, as Kela did. Perhaps the most powerful face of courage is that which, when faced with the worst, is the simple force of human will that says, ‘I will keep going. I will exude hope.’ ”

And she did. Kela underwent an aggressive treatment of chemotherapy at the James Brown Cancer Center in Louisville. Even though the disease was already widespread, her body responded and scans showed the cancer in complete remission. Kela rejoiced and lived her life even more intensely, taking trips, savoring new experiences, and making memories with her husband and sons. She seemed unstoppable. As other cancer survivors have told me, once you have endured chemo and finally feel good again, the simple absence of pain is something to be cherished and celebrated each day. Not knowing if the cancer would return, Kela left her medical practice to focus on what was most important to her: her family and sharing her faith.

She narrowed her life’s focus, but she did not close ranks. Kela viewed her cancer as more than a personal challenge; but as an opportunity to connect with people. She helped raise funds for the James Brown Cancer Center in Louisville, gave speeches to church and civic groups, inspired others with her words, her optimism, her beautiful spirit. She formed Kela’s Crew with the Western Kentucky University Women’s Volleyball team to raise money for cancer research and treatment.

When she was diagnosed in November of 2004, she was only given about six to eighteen months to live. She lived four years. During that time, she impacted thousands of lives. Dealing with cancer gave Kela a stage to share the strength that was getting her through: her faith in God. As a Christian, she believed in taking whatever came her way in life, no matter how hard, and using it for something good as long as she had breath in her body. This she had learned from her mother, Loretta.

I have often thought about Loretta, and how it would feel to have had such a loving, accomplished, and vibrant daughter, only to lose her so cruelly in the prime of her life. She has been in my prayers many times over the years. When I told Loretta about this book, and how I wanted to write about Kela and the people she inspired, she agreed to meet with me and share her story.

Loretta Pearl Lyons

After a delicious chicken salad at the City Café in downtown Tompkins-ville, where nearly everyone knows Loretta and stops by our table to say hello, I follow behind her in my car to her home. We turn at a sign that reads “Hade’s Triple “K” Dairy,” and pull up to a pretty white farmhouse. A cow barn is down the hill, silos and a large tractor sit to the right, and flowers bloom in the yard and on the porch. It’s peaceful, lovely. She invites me to sit in the cozy front room, surrounded by family photos, and for the next two hours, I am mesmerized by the soft Southern cadences of Loretta Lyons’ voice, telling me her story.

Loretta was in her second year at Campbellsville College, working on a teaching degree, when she married the love of her life, Hade Lyons. At that time he was a teacher at a one-room school in Bradley Springs, Kentucky, with dreams of becoming a dairy farmer. After they married, Hade and Loretta lived in a tiny white frame house while she worked to finish her degree and gave birth to their four children: sons Kerry and Kevin, and another son who was born prematurely and died at just two days old. Kela came along in 1965.

Loretta finished college two years later and began her teaching career at Hacker’s Branch, another one-room schoolhouse in Monroe County. The next year the one-room schools consolidated, and she started teaching third grade at Tompkinsville Elementary. Not surprisingly, several friends in Bowling Green who attended that school have told me that she was their favorite teacher.

When Hade and Loretta could borrow enough money to realize their dream, they purchased the land for their dairy farm, naming it the Triple “K” Dairy after their children. They were happy, fruitful years, devoted to raising their young family, expanding their dairy farm, and teaching. Listening to Loretta talk, I can hear the joy and satisfaction of those years in her voice, can feel how deeply connected she and Hade were to their community, their church, their land. I am drawn to a grainy, framed photograph of Loretta and Hade, caught in a kiss on a porch swing. They look blissful, carefree.

In 1976, Hade suddenly died of a heart attack at thirty-eight years old. Loretta was only thirty-four. “Losing my husband changed my life in an instant,” she tells me. “And in the midst of my grief and sadness – and that of my three children – I also had to decide what to do with the farm. I loved teaching, but I couldn’t run the farm on my own and teach full time, too. My dad and Hade’s older brother went with me to the lawyer’s office soon after Hade died. I remember my dad saying to the lawyer, ‘She’s gonna have to sell those milk cows.’ My heart just hurt at those words. I thought, ‘Sell the milk cows?’ I knew deep down that I didn’t want to do that.”

“I got a lot of advice from people telling me to sell the farm, that I couldn’t run it on my own with three kids to support. But you know, somehow that just made me more determined to farm. And I couldn’t stop thinking about something Hade had told me. I don’t know if he thought something was going to happen, but he had said to me once, ‘If anything ever happens to me, don’t sell the farm until our kids are old enough to decide if they want to farm.’ I was just determined to do what I had to do.”

And so that summer, Loretta started farming. She set the tobacco and milked the cows. “I worked from daylight to dark, mowing and baling hay, driving the tractors, chopping silage and caring for the livestock. For a while, I think I was doing it to prove that I could, and also to make Hade proud. But it helped me to heal, too. Hard work is the best medicine for healing. That, and having a goal, something to keep you going every day. I’d get into bed and just fall asleep at night.”

“The physical work, while exhausting, was actually the easiest part. The tough part was having to make all the decisions alone. I learned as I went along. My husband’s older brother was a farmer and he helped me figure things out at first, but eventually he just encouraged me to use my own judgment. I found out quick that farming was a man’s world. I’d go to the parts store, or the feed store, or to buy a tractor, and I could tell they thought I didn’t know what I was doing. They assumed they could just sell me anything! They were surprised when I told them what kind of bolt I needed and that I knew exactly what type of machinery it was for. They thought there must be a man around somewhere making my decisions for me. Well, there wasn’t!”

Kerry, Kevin, and Kela were just fifteen, eleven, and ten at the time of their father’s death. “They all had to grow up fast,” Loretta acknowledges. “Kerry helped a lot with the farm, and when he graduated high school, he started farming with me full time. Kevin took care of the baby calves, and he was protective. He wouldn’t go to bed until everyone else had—and then I’d hear him checking the stove and locking the doors. Kela, just a little girl, started keeping the house and cooking dinner at night, since I worked the farm until dark.”

I ask if Kela had always dreamed of becoming a doctor. “Yes she did,” Loretta says with a smile. “I remember Hade asking her once when she only seven or eight what she wanted to be when she grew up. She said, in her feisty way, ‘I’m gonna be a doctor.’ He said, ‘Oh good! You’d let momma and me come for free, right?’ And she said, ‘I would the first time!’ We just laughed at that.”

I’m not surprised when Loretta tells me that Kela was a whirlwind of activity through her childhood and adolescence. “Kela was always busy doing something. If she was reading a book she was making a potholder at the same time. She studied hard and was the Salutatorian of her class, the class president, and pretty much the president of every other school club or organization! But she never let anything slide. She played the piano for our church on Sundays. She asked her guidance counselor for every scholarship application that came into that high school. Most of them were just getting thrown away and she’d ask if she could take them home. I’d hear her up late every night, filling out applications for scholarship and leadership programs, or making her own clothes. She learned to sew in 4-H and made her own prom dress.”

Kela set off for the University of Kentucky on a host of scholarships, the largest of which came from winning the National Miss TEEN Pageant. The pageant recognized young women for their academics, community service, and talent, and contestants were required to either perform or give a speech. Kela wrote a speech that used farming as a metaphor for qualities like patience and perseverance, and delivered it wearing overalls and a straw hat, carrying a crooked neck hoe.

Wearing the same yellow dotted Swiss dress she had sewn for her prom, Kela won the Kentucky Miss TEEN title and flew off to the National Pageant in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with Loretta, who remembers it as an especially happy time. “We sat in her hotel room the night before and read the Bible. I remember telling her, ‘If God can get the glory, then I hope you win.’ To be honest, we all thought the girl who played the violin was going to win, but she got first runner-up. When Kela’s name was called as the winner, we just lost it!”

And that girl who played the violin? She was Gretchen Carlson, who went on to graduate from Stanford, be crowned Miss America, and is today the host of her own Fox News show. But our Kela won the crown that night—not bad for a country girl from Tompkinsville! Even wearing overalls and a straw hat, she shined.

Along with the scholarships, Kela won a trip to Hawaii as Miss TEEN, and Loretta smiles at the memory, telling me how much fun they had together on that adventure. She reminisces in her soft voice about other joyful times: Kela’s elated phone call after her acceptance to medical school at the University of Louisville, her beautiful wedding day with a reception in the backyard, the births of her precious sons.

When I ask Loretta to recall when Kela seemed happiest as a child, she says, “The night she was saved. She was the happiest little girl. It was the day after her ninth birthday, and in her testimony before the church she said, ‘I didn’t think I got much for my birthday this year, but now I got the best present of all.’ ”

Above all, it was faith that gave Kela her passion for life. It was what grounded her, inspired her, and made her such a radiant presence. She had, after all, watched her mother survive, and then thrive, by leaning hard on God, and never losing faith in His goodness. In the terrible loss of her young husband, Loretta was powerless. But her children needed her. Her farm needed her. She chose to ask for God’s help, to draw from His strength, which helped her to become what she needed to be: a powerful woman.

We walk around back, and Loretta shows me her garden, with its lovely outdoor seating area and arbor of purple flowers. She has created a “bottle tree” out of a wooden post skewered with colorful glass bottles of every hue, and she tells me how beautiful it looks illuminated by the rays of the setting sun each evening. I imagine her sitting in this peaceful spot, with its view of the fields all around, watching her son Kerry and grandson, Hade, driving the tractors and working their land together.

I tell her how much I admire her, how much I learned from the daughter she raised. She smiles and says simply, “I give God all the praise and glory for any good that I might have ever done. I feel like God has blessed me in so many ways. A lot of people don’t understand, because of all that has happened. But I think if you let God lead the way, He can take every bad situation and create something good from it. When I think about Kela, it just seems like a dream that she was my daughter. And I think, how did I get so lucky to have a daughter like her?”

In Memory

“For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor powers nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord.”

Romans 8:38–39

In her memory, Kela’s husband Kirk had a new baptismal font built for the Ministry and Activity Center of our church. I can feel Kela’s sweet spirit whenever I see children baptized there. It is a fitting tribute to a woman of great faith who delivered thousands of new babies.

Last Easter, Pastor Rick Bard spoke about the Baptismal font, and its symbolism for Kela’s life, work and faith. “My wife Debbie expressed it beautifully,” he said, quoting her. “I’ve been thinking about the great number of babies that Kela ushered safely into this world. Before a baby is born, the mother’s water breaks, and out of the labor and breaking of the water, life comes forth. Every time someone is baptized they go under the water, which represents the death of sin and guilt and regret, and then they are raised up out of the water, which is symbolic of new life and hope through Christ. Every time someone is baptized, I’m reminded that Kela’s life is still giving life.”

And so am I.