Cat Flynn Memorial Scholarship [Box 7016]

The Wake-up Call That Changed Our Lives.

     The situation my wife, Catherine, and I were in was difficult enough when the phone rang in March of 2015. We were taking care of my father, a World War II veteran who was 94 years old. He was as sweet a man as I ever met, but with his advanced age both his body and his mind were in decline.
     We all did the best we could, and then the phone call came early on a March morning in 2015. Our daughter, Caitlin, a.k.a. Cat, was on the phone crying hysterically. She had good reason. At age 24, she’d just been told she had stage-4 breast cancer. The very idea was so incredible that I thought she must have misunderstood what she’d heard. I told her that.
     I was wrong. She was right. As incomprehensible as the diagnosis was, it was horribly accurate. The reason I resisted reality was understandable. Cat was too young to be in such a horrible situation. Wasn’t that disease something that struck older women?
     More than that, damnit, she should have her whole life — decades of it — ahead of her. She’d only recently graduated from Cornell University, magna cum laude, and now she was starting the process of earning a master’s degree and a Ph.D. She was going to be a professor. She’d bring her intellect, enthusiasm, and winning attitude to generations of future college students.
     To a degree, Cat managed to reach many of her goals. She earned her master’s degree at North Carolina State University, and began working there as a graduate instructor. Her classroom work was reviewed in the same way everybody gets evaluated these days: by online comments. Cat did very well indeed in that regard.
     With the help of the drug Ibrance, she managed to live a fairly normal life for two-and-a-half years. As normal as possible when you know the drug will remain effective for only so long. After it stopped working, came several lines of chemotherapy. Their effects were also temporarily beneficial, but unlike the Ibrance they had negative effects on Cat’s liver.
     Even so, Cat kept on teaching and working toward her doctorate. She passed her doctoral qualifying exam and reached the point in her scholastic journey labeled ABD, all but dissertation. In order to do the research for her dissertation, she’d need to travel to France. That was when the Covid virus spread across the world. Countries closed their borders. Travel became impossible. Research would have to wait.
     Only Cat didn’t have the time to wait. She’d run through all of the lines of chemotherapy that were available to treat her disease. Worse still, the chemo drugs had all but destroyed her liver. That disqualified her from participating in clinical trials that explored other avenues of treatment.
     A particular moment of heartache came when Cat realized she could no longer teach her final classes of that semester. She said she wouldn’t be able to do justice to her students. So with deep regret she handed off the teaching work she loved, and at which she excelled, to another faculty member.
     Cat died on the morning of May 5, 2021, regretting that she hadn’t earned her doctorate and fearing she’d never left her mark on the world. Anyone who ever met her would tell her she was wrong about not leaving her mark. She was widely loved and respected by family, friends, colleagues, and students.
     To honor Cat’s memory, we’re trying to raise $20,000 to establish a scholarship fund in her name at North Carolina State University in the subjects of Cat’s focus, linguistics and sociology. Any and all help we receive will be deeply appreciated.
     If you’d like to see who Cat was, please visit: Cat Flynn Memorial Video