Author: Dawn Kasal-Finley

In Memoriam

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / 4 Comments

Thank you all for coming. The support and love in this room will sustain myself, our children, and hopefully his family through this difficult, dark, and unfathomably painful time.

 

On September 24, 1996, my world was forever changed. It was a Tuesday night and I was working the front of the house at Cold Spring Tavern (where I had worked since I moved to Santa Barbara in 1992). This tall, trying to be cool, guy walks up–he’d been having dinner and drinks with a group of guys. He says hi and asks me if I wanted to get a drink after work. He was already a drink or two ahead of me. I said “No. I can’t. I have a paper to write.” He smiles back–oh that grin of his–”you can write your paper at my house.” Like what a cheesy line. I said “No” because there really wasn’t any other answer. We continued back and forth a bit as I was not completely convinced that he was the kind of guy who would have had a computer at home in 1996. Oh how he changed so many of my assumptions.

I told him, why don’t you come back tomorrow night. Wednesdays were a favorite night w/live music by the Cache Valley Drifters, a local blue grass band, and dinner. The night wore on and I waited on tables and served drinks and then I saw him. I was so surprised that he came. So shocked. I rushed to find his roommate and best friend because I couldn’t remember his name–that is how sure I was he wasn’t coming. We use to laugh at that story, because he often shared that he came every Wednesday with Jeff and other friends, just to try to get my attention. And I had no idea and never really noticed him.

He walks up to the bar and we chat, the evening was almost over. The band starts to play The Lighthouse, one of my favorite Cache Valley Drifter songs–even before this day. As the songs play, he reaches over the bar and just grabs my hand.

That single gesture changed the course of my life. I knew at that moment, I would marry him.

Not to say the early development of our relationship was easy, but we both knew (and sometimes fought) the undeniable connection we had. After that night, I rarely went more than a day or two without seeing and spending time with him.

Our love grew naturally and slowly. We really were friends first. He used to ask me all the time “We’re still friends right?” That we were friends mattered more to him than anything else. And he was my best friend. He was everything. He will always be my everything. It is rare that you can spend nearly 25 years with someone and have only good memories. I can’t recall an actual fight we had. Not that we didn’t disagree–you can’t spend significant time with Bill and not have a disagreement or two. He loved conversation. He loved being the Devil’s Advocate. He loved to spark a response. But he never had or exhibited any anger in our relationship. Our marriage was as perfect as it could have been. We were so perfectly suited for each other. We were a perfect ying and yang.

Those of us who have spent a significant amount of time with Bill, have Bill stories. I can’t even find the right words to describe him and I can’t tell many of the stories here. He was larger than life in so many ways. He just lived. He lived to the fullest. Doing something was more important than planning and waiting to do it the “right” way. He was generous and kind and loving.

He loved a good challenge and a good bet. And he was a horrible gambler. The guys would always joke (but seriously) about betting against Finner (his college nick-name that is still who he is to so many). He was good at so many things (almost everything)–but picking the winning football team was not one of those things. But he loved the challenge. He loved the camaraderie. Football Sundays up on the mountain in Santa Barbara were such special moments to him.

He was apt to on more than on occasion when out with friends to challenge the other husbands/guys to flip for the Bill. He would have picked up every dinner tab if I hadn’t have stopped him. That was just who he was. He wasn’t about things. He was about people and that can be a rare find.

Some of our greatest memories and his own were created on the water. He loved the water. One of our first “dates” was going kayaking. We get in and paddle quite a bit off shore and it’s a bit choppy and he looks at me and says “You can swim right?” I just remember thinking, shouldn’t he have asked me that sooner? I joked “No, do I need to know how?” He stared at me and I responded “Of course I know how to swim. Who comes out in the ocean and doesn’t know how?” He always said it was a test and that he knew we couldn’t be together if I was dumb enough to go out in the water w/out knowing how to swim. But, really I’m pretty sure he just forgot to ask.

He loved sailing with his buddies. He never stopped talking about those moments. His propensity to keep the crew of buddies paying attention with is “man overboard” trainings. Where he would just jump off the boat mid channel and assume his friends would turn the boat around and come get him. I was lucky to get to see him in that environment on 2 sailing trips to the channel islands. He was so at home and felt so free to be himself in those moments. Those moments and memories and every good memory–will sustain me.

When we think of Bill we also have to think about golf. He loved the challenge of it. He loved pushing himself to get better. He loved beating his own previous scores and other people. And again he loved a good bet. Bill had his moments of cockiness and sometimes the arrogance of someone that comes to most things easily, so he challenged my brother Jeff to a round of golf. Bill bet he could beat him w/just his 7 iron. And he did. He was better at golf than picking the right football team. When he was winning–he was fun. He was not always a gracious loser. I believe during one round w/my brother he was accused of being a “fun-sponge.” But that was Bill he was all-in. Whether he was happy and winning or irritated and losing.

To see him as a father is my greatest joy. He was a rock when we went to Ethiopia to bring Noah home and Noah was sick and I was a mess. He was strong and he was so caring. He was everything. And when Zoe came home his heart grew even more and his softer side became way more soft. Dads and their little girls. To see him with his kids was pure joy and happiness. I could not have asked for a better father for them. He loved to be silly–he was still such a kid himself. We always joke that he was really just 12. The laughter he created in our house and lives will live on in our memories forever. I am not nearly as funny as he is, but our kids are every bit as funny as he was–what a gift.

I will spend the rest of my life talking about and remembering this awesome man I was lucky enough to have 24 years knowing and loving. He supported me through a bachelor’s degree, a teaching certificate, a master’s degree (w/1 small child) and a doctorate (w/2 small children). He supported everything I wanted to do. He was 100% with me always. He deferred some of his own dreams for my dreams and for that I am sorry. But for that I am also thankful and lucky. I have an infinite number of good memories. They are all good memories. After 24 years together and 19 years of marriage–all of my memories of him and us are good. Every one. I just can’t say that enough.

He was the love of my life and I was the love of his. We had plans for growing old together and being grandparents (sometime long into the future). We had plans for our kids and so many experiences he wanted to give them and so many places he wanted to take them. So much he wanted to teach them. His kids were his reason for everything. Every choice he made since Aug 2006 has been guided by his most important role as father.

I could go on and on. He had a whole amazing life before we met after he had just turned 30. And I mean a whole life. He left home and went to college, he dropped out of college, he lived in a tent, he biked across Europe, finished college. Attended 8 jazz fests (maybe more) in a row with buddies. Taught himself computers and built an impressive career. He really lived life. He really enjoyed life. He was happy.

He made incredible connections with so many people. He was so many things. And the words and messages I have received from the people whose lives he has touched as far back as grade school lift me and our kids up and I know they lift him up.

I imagine him looking down and seeing all of this love he has helped create and screaming “You really like me…” That was often his biggest fear and worry. That people wouldn’t like him. That he’d say the wrong thing. That he’d do something stupid. He knew he could be difficult. He knew he could be obnoxious. He worried that his “true” self was too much. I always told him it wasn’t. But it was a fear/worry he carried everywhere. I hope he is looking down and has found some peace and knows that we all loved him for all of who he was.

Our wedding song is “Happy together.” One of the lines is “I can’t see me loving nobody but you for all my life.”
And I can say right now. I will love him and nobody else for the rest of my life. The last thing I said to him on Saturday was that if he asked me, I would say yes to marrying him all over. Today, knowing how it ends, knowing the pain. I would say yes again. I would live our life over and over.

The Lighthouse song that was a fav of mine and became a fav of his is about a lighthouse off the coast of main and it goes

“To every drifting sailor on the ocean,
may you be delivered from the gale,
may only peaceful waters lie before you
gentle homeward breezes fill your sail.
Sometime long ago I heard a story
About a lighthouse off the coast of Maine
Holding out her lantern in the rain

60 miles she shines in all directions
While the wind comes lashing down the sound
And the deck heaves and groans to the pounding
of the demon sea driving us aground.

Tossed and turned about in troubled waters
Battered at the mercy of the waves
Out across the water shines a lighthouse
Mindless of the many lives she’s saved

60 miles she shines in all directions
While the wind comes lashing down the sound
And the deck heaves and groans to the pounding
of the demon sea driving us aground.

To every drifting sailor on the ocean,
Across the 7 seas you are bound to roam
When there is no star to guide your journey
May the lighthouse guide you safely home.

His love and our memories are my lighthouse.

A Series of “First Dates”

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / Leave a comment

I am on the job market.

And it sucks.

I am excited about the prospects I have and I am excited about potentially making the shift from high school English to middle school English. There is also an Experiential Learning job I am interviewing for today that has me really excited.

But that excitement is so short lived.

It has been a while since I have had to look for a job and know that I MUST get one. My family has become accustomed to food, clothes, electricity, etc. It isn’t that dire really. My husband is the bread winner–but we need 2 incomes like most families in America.

The job search is slowing breaking my spirit. I know it shouldn’t. I know I am an amazing teacher and that I just need to find the right fit. But rejection sucks. The going back over “why” am I not moving on. It feels an awful lot like “why doesn’t he like me?”

I wasn’t surprised that I didn’t move on in the process of my very first interview. I was nervous and made the mistake of being succinct in place of selling myself. I didn’t use all of my time wisely.  So, I learned. I got better with each interview—I think.

I have had 9 first interviews. Of those 9, I secured 3 second interviews and was notified by a 4th that I was not moving on.

Of these second interviews:

  1. I was notified that for 1–big city public district that I was moved into the recommended for hire pool.  This means that a building principal can select me for a building level interview. Still more waiting and possible rejection.
  2. I was notified by another that I am not moving on in the process. I was one of 4 candidates brought in for the 2nd round.
  3. Second interview is set up for first week of April

I am still waiting to hear back from 4. I know that I will not hear back from at least 3 of them until the first week of April.

But this is hard. It is hard because you don’t know what it is that made them decide to pass you over. Was it that I didn’t use the right words? Did I not explain something as clearly as I could? Do I sound too ambitious, too pleasing, too pushy? Was it given to an internal candidate and you were just part of the process? Was it really just not a good fit? Was it that your outfit wasn’t exactly right? Were they looking for someone with less experience? Were they looking for someone less socially activist?

And we never know.  We never get the answers to these questions. We just have to go on to the next interview and hope that something different happens. We just have to stop second guessing and be ourselves and be authentic.

That for me is the hardest part–not the being authentic (full disclosure–that is partly why I am looking for a new job. I had to be me and know that where I was wasn’t a fit). It’s the accepting that maybe my authentic self isn’t appreciated or understood.  That no matter my experience, my education, my dedication to student, I am not what they are looking for.

How do I accept that?

 

 

Teaching Something That Matters

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I have to shake the dust off of this place. I’ve been absent and the cobwebs have fully taken over–both this space and my mind.  I have been consumed with teaching, learning, and parenting. My energy has been used to think and I am sad that my thinking (so much thinking) has not been written down–beyond tweets of 240 characters or less.

I started this post in April 2018 and here I am still working hard to teach something that matters. To make a difference in not just the lives of my students, but in the lives of the people they interact with.  That is a tall order.  I teach in an all-boys Catholic high school. Our demographics are 94% white and about 70% of our students are middle to upper-class. Our school tends to lean a bit to the conservative side.  I have been working over the last few years to disrupt the narratives my students have about others. They live in a pretty protected bubble of thought and it is important that they examine that thought before they move onto college, etc.

This semester I have decided to have my students listen to Scene on Radio’s Seeing White podcast. When I first listened to the podcast this past summer, I knew it was something that I wanted to include in my curriculum.  I just wasn’t sure how. I did a lot of thinking and contemplating and finally settled on listening to an episode a week (will fill our semester) and video responses via Flipgrid.  Scene on Radio has a curriculum guide that accompanies the podcast and I provide some of their questions as prompts to the video responses, to help guide students.

I will admit as the first responses are pouring in, that I am nervous. We aren’t a perfect school, but one of the main tenets of our school is Education for Service, Justice, and Peace.  I feel strongly as a parent, that we have to teach these values explicitly at times. I have also invited other faculty members in school to participate and several have expressed interest.  I feel it is important that my ideas aren’t the only ones that students hear.

I am pleasantly surprised that many students picked up on the idea of institutionalized racism and we’ll be doing some unpacking this week about racism (prejudice + power) and how that is entrenched in our founding and our institutions. We’ll talk about how “reverse” racism isn’t a thing and we will also be looking at logical fallacies.  After teaching logical fallacies, I am going to ask students to listen back to their first video responses and see if they used any fallacies–we had a lot of Straw man arguments happening as well as weak analogy and false dichotomy, and post hoc.

I am interested to see if they can recognize these fallacies in their own arguments, as well as the arguments that our politicians are making these days.

**edited to say that in January I resigned my position as the school and I were no longer a mission/vision fit. I am sad that I won’t get to see my students expand their thinking and be exposed to narratives that disrupt their biases.  But white supremacy requires the ignoring of history and there was a lot of resistance to my pushing of narratives that remind us of our White Privilege and how we have benefited from centuries of White Supremacy.

The Reality of 45

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I don’t often feel my age.  Yesterday, I did.  It was more a combination of age and a couple years of laziness–but 45 is hard.

I have always had a love/hate relationship with exercise, etc.  I love the way it makes me feel; but to be honest, I have not made it a priority.  There has always been an excuse or something else in the way–dissertation to write (DONE), papers to grade (Never Done), kids to run around (TAXI).

But, I have always been able to get back on the train pretty easily.  This past summer it hit me when I did a bike ride with my bestie–we had done lots of bike rides–and I struggled in ways I hadn’t before.  My hips are older (and I don’t stretch like I should) and my age is catching up with me.

My age and the difficulty of getting back in shape was never more apparent than yesterday when I did my first 5k training cycle.  My daughter is doing Girls on the Run this year for the first time and she needs someone to run with her.  I thought this was just the motivation I needed to get off my expanding ass and start the long (VERY LONG) road back to health.

It sucked.  I use to be able to run (a little)–but my knees and hips are a bit more combative (they like being lazy). It didn’t help that I am battling some lung congestion; but let’s be honest that was the least of my issues.  I was supposed to run for 1 min and walk for 1.5 min, alternating.  Well–I was able to run for 30 seconds.

It was humbling.

It was one of the first times that I have really felt old.

It was one of the first times that I have come face to face with the fact that I have really let myself go.  I will not give up–I might need more Advil.  I will keep pushing and if I have to do that first day 4-5 times before I get up to the 1 minute of running than I will.  I will do it for me.  It will be great to run with my 3rd grader–but it will be more than that.

I didn’t think I’d ever finish my dissertation and I did.

Yesterday, I didn’t think I could do the full 25 minutes of running/walking and while it was sucky and I didn’t do as much as I set out to do–I did it.  I will do it again tomorrow.  I’ll teach my kids that no matter how hard something is you cannot give up.

Here’s to hoping 45 gets better.  But it’s hard.

 

The Light at the End of the Tunnel

/ Dawn Kasal-Finley / 2 Comments

I  defend my dissertation on July 12th.  The culmination of nearly 8 years of work (some of that time was spend processing how research will do what it wants).  Eight years of thinking about my work.  Eight years of writing.  Eight years of missing time with my kids and family.  Eight years of wishing I had more time to focus on my academic work.  Eight  years of wishing I could do it all, so much more quickly.  Eight years.

But now it comes to an end.  As I work my way through some final revisions, I can see the light at the end.

I know the time was worth every moment of guilt, frustration, and discovery.  I have changed and I look forward to what this next phase brings.  But Dawn Finley, Ph.D.  sounds pretty good right now.