I started this writing on August 17, 2024. I’m posting it now that it is at least somewhat completed.
I remember the day clearly, August 17, 1975. He would now be 49 years old. But for the fact, which you know, that he died from cancer at age 29, some 20 years ago.
We were waiting for Jeanie’s water to break to go to Madison General Hospital (Wisconsin) for Peter’s birth. We later joked that it was laughing so hard at Woody Allen’s Annie Hall which made the water break.
Then still something of a woodworker, I’d been building a cradle out of beautiful cherry wood. (It has since served to cradle many babies born to friends, perhaps as many as 20, and will soon welcome another baby about to be born to a close relative.)
No great rush to the hospital and, thankfully, a normal birth. Holding him in my arms I felt a high which lasted for several days. And, yes, I got and distributed cigars all around, though in my present dotage I can’t remember why we gave cigars at a birth (for boys only, or for all babies?).
So many memories, mostly good, some hard. Where to start?
So, in no particular order:
Peter always had a wonderful drive or ambition to do many good things.
He was really pissed when Regis High School demanded that he take a special pre-admission summer school to work on spelling and grammar. He’d been passed through his junior high school with straight A’s because he was a polite white kid who caused no problems. But he’s learned virtually nothing. And this was well before we learned that he was severely dyslexic.
But then Tolkien’s books, The Hobbit and then The Trilogy of the Ring, really turned him on to reading, and he soared academically, especially in courses which were filled with much good reading. Then to Fairfield U. where he had a free ride. Then to Georgetown (with straight A’s from Fairfield; no scholarship but paid for by Jeanie’s research business income) where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa.
He’d had an internship at ABC’s “Nightline” during the spring semester of his Junior year. Working directly with Ted Koppel and other producers and paid for by Ted’s Catholic wife who was on Georgetown’s Board. He’d just happen to see a notice on a bulletin board at Georgetown announcing the internship. Wrote an application (by then he’d become a fine writer) which led to interviews with Koppel and ABC’s news director from NY, and then to the internship (which not only gave him full credits for the semester but also paid a salary).
Nightline offered him a job in DC following graduation, and I urged him to take it since I thought it would look great on his resume. But his heart hankered to join the Peace Corp and he correctly saw that if he didn’t take the opportunity immediately, he’d probably never do it. Initially, since he spoke and read Russian after a very difficult year as a high exchange student in Moscow (many stories about that), the PC wanted to send him to Russia. So he went to their headquarters in DC and negotiated instead his assignment to South Africa – to a small town in Northwestern South Africa in the province of Mpumalanga, near the gate to Kruger Game Park and on the border with Mozambique. The British name for the town was “Lillydale”, but its African name was “Ximungwe” and the language spoken (which he eventually learned) was Tsonga, a Bantu language.
He was assigned to work with grade school principals, helping them move from a British lecture style of teaching/learning to the more open discussion style typical of the US. He soon discovered that one of the principals wanted nothing to do with him, but also discovered that a new school was being opened by a group of women whose certification was not accepted by the male hierarchy. Tuition was on a barter system of goods and services. And that school, initially in an unused garage, became the place where Peter served most and best. After Peter’s death, with contributions made in his memory, we were able to build a library/classroom building for that school.
Initially folks in the village simply referred to Peter (in their language) as “the white guy”. Yet the women decided to change that and started calling him “Nyiko” which means “gift”, since he was a gift to them and they to him.
He was given a bedroom in the only house in the village with running water, situated on the main road where the only water pipe flowed. His housemother was a woman whose husband was mostly away with his other family working in the mines near Johannesberg. Most houses in the village were built down from the main road where that pipe ran – just enough distance from the pipe so that the women and young girls might carry huge jugs of water on their heads.
And he was blessed, on a food shopping trip to Hazyview (the nearest crossroads town), to meet a white South African man and then, through Paul Bruce Brand, to meet many others in the white South African elite. So he had the blessing of knowing both worlds – affluent whites and poor blacks.
He’d met and dated Lisa Arnolds – now Colorado State Judge “the Honorable Lisa Arnolds” – when they were in high school, he at the Jesuit’s Regis High School and she at Denver’s East High School.
He then went off to Georgetown and she to Seattle University. Yet they reconnected in New Orleans where she went to Loyola University to study law and he to the University of New Orleans for a degree in urban planning paid for as part of his post-Peace Corp benefits. He’d become interested in urban planning after meeting folks in South Africa who were attempting to develop Soweto, the south western townships of Jo’berg.
Their dream was to marry and return to the Third World – to Africa and to Central America. Lisa had worked as a paralegal for the eventual Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu. Her fluency in Spanish enabled her to take depositions from native women raped and abused by the Guatemalan military. So Peter went to Guanajuato, Mexico, to study Spanish and there he did a study of urban sprawl north of Mexico City for which he was awarded (posthumously) his degree in urban planning from the UNO. While there the cancer, which seems to have developed from a tropical virus picked up in South Africa, presented itself and he returned to Denver for chemotherapy. He died nine months later after the cancer had spread throughout his body. He and Lisa married at St. Joseph’s Hospital the morning he died. His last words to Jeanie, said with a beautiful smile, were “Mom, I have a wife.” (Lisa had visited him while he was in South Africa, and later he flew to Switzerland where she had travelled to celebrate Peter’s sister Anna’s birthday.)
Peter did his Honors History thesis at Georgetown on the role of ethics for those who reported on the Civil Rights Movement – focusing on the tension between journalistic neutrality and the fact that virtually all of those reporting were deeply committed to the success of MLK’s campaign. Among those he interviewed were Congressman John Lewis, one of the leaders of the movement. I remember details of that thesis since, while Peter’s writing was fairly decent, it still needed much editing which I happily undertook. It was published by Regis University in a then extant undergraduate dissertation series and I still have a copy someplace.
It’s possible that the cancer which killed him originated during his student years in Moscow, downwind from the Chernobyl nuclear reactor implosion. More likely it derived from a tropical virus which he’d picked up in South Africa, a virus which even the South African doctors who are the world’s experts on tropical diseases could not diagnose. The virus went into remission after a short period, but it’s likely that it returned as a cancer some years later.
He loved golf and became pretty good at it. He’d play with his grandfather, John Demmler, at the latter’s home club in Kewanee, Illinois (where Jeanie was born and also played golf as a teenager). I played with him there and also at what is now my home course in Grand Lake, Colorado. Never got close to matching his game. Tennis, however, was another matter. We played often at the public courts in Congress Park, just a few blocks up the road from where we lived on Detroit Street in Denver. He had a great wingspan, making it difficult for me to get the ball past him. But he never mastered a good serve. So golf for him, tennis for me.
His cancer was diagnosed a day or so before Christmas 2003 when we initially thought he was having digestive problems. Turns out that he had what the doctors described as a football sized tumor which had grown in his chest cavity and eventually pressed against his esophagus. He underwent a chemo regimen (time in hospital and then time at home) for close to eight months. It reduced the tumor to the size of a pea and he was prepped for surgery until, just before the planned surgery, the tumor metastasized to liver and kidney and other vital organs. It was then clear that he would die from the cancer. I’ve often thought that the only good thing about cancer is that it gives “you” (Peter and all of us) time to prepare for death. We (he and the rest of us) had nine months.
He was a very handsome young man, even when bald from the chemo. I remember him sitting on our front porch, totally bald, talking with the neighborhood kids. And I remember the nurses in the hospital (during his chemo sessions) paying special attention to him, partly because he was still strikingly handsome, but mainly because he was a young man while most of their other patients were older folks.
His funeral was held at Capitol Heights Presbyterian Church, Jeanie’s home church. The church was packed with folks of all faiths, fellow students from Georgetown, neighbors from up and down our block, even that friend Paul who flew from South Africa. Family and friends had gathered for a great boozy Irish wake at our home the night before. The service was very lengthy because of the many eulogies – one by Lisa, one by myself, one by a close Georgetown friend, one by Paul from SA, and the official eulogy by Regis’ Fr. Kevin Burke, SJ. And after the service we gathered in the church basement for another several hours of drink and talk. Then the young folks proceeded to the famous “Cherry Cricket” then still located in the Cherry Creek area of Denver. Much joy, many tears, laughter and song.
Peter’s ashes were buried in the Grand Lake town cemetery where Jeanie and I will eventually be buried. It’s a place we visit on occasion, sometimes even when the snow is 3-to-4 feet deep. We bought a large bronze cross from Germany (where such crosses often designate gravesites) which marks his grave – and enables us to find it even in the deep snow.
Here, to end this writing, is the obituary published in The Denver Post:
Peter, 29, died October 29, 2004. Peter’s life and travels engaged family, friends and colleagues around the world, as exemplified by his Peace Corps service in South Africa. Recently, Peter was studying to be an urban planner, with an emphasis on social justice in developing nations.
Peter is survived by his wife, Lisa Kane-Arnolds, his parents John Kane and Jean Demmler, his sister Anna Marie, his god-mother, Martha Demmler, and a richly woven fabric of aunts, uncles, cousins and friends around the world.
Because Peter was most at home in his beloved Colorado mountains, Peter will be buried in Grand Lake, CO on November 5. A memorial service will be held on November 6 at 3:30pm at Capitol Heights Presbyterian Church/Ten-Thirty Catholic Community, 1100 Fillmore St. (303-333-9366).
Peter’s family will honor his memory by contributing to efforts in Africa, Central America and Colorado that reflect Peter’s love of all people and his dedication to peace and justice. Memorial gifts may be made to the “”10:30 Catholic Community”” (for the Peter Demmler Kane Memorial Fund), 1100 Fillmore St. Denver, CO 80206.
(I repeat that funds were used to build a classroom/library building at that school he loved in Lillydale. And I add that Jeanie and I were able to be there for the dedication of that building.)
Ah John. Such memories. One summer when Peter was a young teen I hired him to mow my lawn. I lived in Wash Park and he’d ride his bike to my house. After he was done he’d come in the house and throw his gangly teenage body on the couch. I’d give him a glass of water and we’d chat. Such a sweet, kind hearted boy who grew into a wonderful young man. Blessings to you and Jeannie and your family as you remember Peter.
LikeLike