Senior appreciation: SM South’s Kennedy Ash is a soccer player, caregiver and survivor
.jpg "Shawnee Mission South senior Kennedy Ash has had a rocky road the past two years with some family health issues, but she’s proven up for the challenge and has decided to keep playing soccer in college at Central Oklahoma.")
We’ve all lost something, sure, but here is a spring break trip interrupted with a news report that all schools and spring sports would be canceled.
“It didn’t seem real,” said Kennedy Ash, a senior soccer player at Shawnee Mission South High.
Then it got worse. She Facetimed her mom, who told her to call her older sister.
“I didn’t want to tell you this on your trip,” Kennedy remembered hearing. “But I can’t hold it in anymore. Dad’s in the hospital.”
A stroke. Literally 10 minutes earlier, Ash thought she had a senior soccer season and a healthy father. Ten minutes to rock a world, twice.
Ash should be closing out her last season of high school soccer. Her team won a regional title last spring, first time in 20 years, and many figured they could do even better this year.
“Soccer helps with a lot of things, like mental health,” Kennedy said. “Playing soccer makes me feel OK with everything, and that it’s gone, it takes a toll on me in different ways.”
Her senior year is now spent with online classes, backyard soccer drills with her sister and helping care for her father, Michael, and mother, Deidra, who had a liver transplant last year.
Sorry. Maybe the liver transplant should’ve been mentioned earlier in the story. Deidra was hospitalized shortly before the start of Kennedy’s junior season. She was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver, her skin turning yellow and doctors telling the family Deidra would likely die without a new liver.
In that regional championship game, Kennedy scored a goal. She looked into the stands, out of habit, struck by the reminder of who wasn’t there to see it. Once, Kennedy visited Mom at St. Luke’s and Deidra was so out of sorts she couldn’t recognize her own daughter.
“It was basically like watching my mom die in front of me,” Kennedy said.
The transplant came, and eventually Deidra was released to go home. The Ashes deep-cleaned the house to protect Deidra’s immune system, because doctors said any sickness could be tragic.
Deidra’s feet swelled, and each step hurt. She had a walker, but Kennedy made a habit of walking behind her for extra support. She cooked for her mom and cleaned.
Even before COVID-19 canceled so much, doctors were concerned enough about Deidra’s immune system that she has not been cleared to work again. But she’s doing well now. Well enough to go on walks and well enough to drive her husband to therapy, even if she stays in the car while he’s inside.
Michael is doing better, too. He’s permanently blind in one eye, which creates some problems, but the family is helping him recover. They believe he can get back to work for a telecommunications company soon.
Kennedy’s is, obviously, a senior year turned upside down. And not just by the loss of graduation and prom, the stuff you always hear about. There’s this thing at South, they call it Gotcha, where they go around and squirt someone with a water gun. High school hijinks. Sounds like a small thing, but Kennedy has looked forward to it for years.
“You’d see people hiding outside houses waiting for someone to walk out,” she said.
Another one: signing day. South had planed a ceremony for April 5 for Ash and others to sign their college letters of intent. That was wiped away, obviously, so Ash signed the paper and sent it back to Central Oklahoma from her home. There was no celebration, not even dinner.
“We just went on like it was a normal day,” Kennedy said, and whatever normal means now.
Like all of us, she’s finding ways to cope. She’s been over every blade of grass in the backyard, especially the flat part where she and her sister can do soccer drills.
She sees friends occasionally. Every other day or so she goes to a friend’s house to sit on lawn chairs in the driveway. They stay 10 feet or so apart, and the sessions can last for hours. Sometimes they eat dinner, sometimes a snack, sometimes it’s just words. Those moments are the best. It feels like nothing ever happened.
“That’s my escape from reality,” she said. “It’s so much fun. It brings me back.”
Kennedy has been through more in the last year than a teenager should be forced to endure, but if the point isn’t what we go through but how we cope, then this is a happy story. Or, at least, an inspirational one.
She played her last high school soccer season unsure of how much longer her mom would live, and completely unaware that it would be her last high school soccer season. She’s helped care for both of her parents before graduation, but humans are resilient, and that’s especially true of Kennedy.
She’ll keep practicing, keep helping her parents, keep forgetting it all to laugh for a few hours in her friend’s driveway. We find what we’re made of in moments like this, you know?
“I’m just looking at the world like I can’t take every day for granted,” she said. “You never know what the next day will bring. You never know what’s going to happen.”
This story was originally published April 29, 2020 at 5:00 AM.