FREDERICKTOWN – Kathryn Daniels and her family had seen it coming for over a year, but that didn’t make it any easier.
Doctors had told her husband, Jim Daniels, that he would have “a few weeks to live” when he was diagnosed with anaplastic thyroid cancer back in December 2016. Anaplastic tumors, which pervade the neck and throat, are the least common and most deadly of all thyroid cancers, affecting only one percent of all thyroid cancer patients.
But Jim Daniels was a fighter.
“He had a very positive attitude – he always did. He always was the optimist,” Kathryn Daniels said, sitting in her Fredericktown home last week. “And he was very driven, and he said he was going to beat it. And we thought he was.”
After a year-and-a-half of going in and out of treatments, sometimes going through month-plus spells where he could not swallow, Daniels lost his fight to cancer this spring. He passed away on April 23 at the age of 67, at home with his family by his side.
In the weeks leading up to his death, Daniels helped with his own funeral arrangements and spent time with his three children discussing how they would carry on the family farm. He still joked and laughed and went to as many community meetings as he could.
But he also made a request.
‘He was a John Deere man’
The day before Daniels’ death, his wife asked him one final question.
She knew that he wouldn’t want flowers at his funeral, so she asked if he’d like people to bring John Deere toy tractors instead. Unable to speak because of the tumor in his windpipe, he nodded his head ‘yes.’
“He was a John Deere man,” Kathryn said with a smile as she walked through her husband’s old ‘John Deere room,’ which she had yet to touch in the weeks since his death. The room was filled with green and yellow artifacts, John Deere pictures and puzzles and hats.
Daniels wanted the toy John Deere tractors from his funeral to be donated to the Nationwide Children’s Hospital Center for Childhood Cancer. At his funeral, over 180 tractors were donated.
Another wish that Daniels had before his death was to establish a scholarship fund to help local kids attend 4-H camp.
Daniels had been active in 4-H his entire life, going to camps as a kid and eventually becoming a counselor after that. He advised campers for 39 years and was also on the local 4-H Planning Committee.
“I know one year he said he was there almost the whole summer. He just loved it,” Kathryn said. “And then when he was diagnosed, that’s where he said he wanted his money to go.”
The scholarship fund that Daniels established, with the help of lifelong friend and Knox County 4-H Extension Educator Larry Hall, is a community trust that will earn interest every year and will continue to grow with consistent donations.
Hall said that Daniels’ desire to create the scholarship symbolized what it was all about for Jim, which was much more than just himself.
“His heart was huge and he wanted to help kids on down the road, even the ones that he wouldn’t necessarily know, because he wanted it to go on for years,” Hall said. “He didn’t want it to be just a flash in the pan where maybe one or two years we give out scholarships and that’s it.”
The scholarship helped seven kids attend camp this summer, as nearly $7,000 has been donated over the past few months.
“I was thinking they’d get like, $100-500 maybe,” Kathryn said. “I’ve written 160 thank you notes, and my kids have written to all the people they knew. I think I have about six to go, but then I keep getting texts, ‘Oh, somebody else sent money today.’”
Kathryn talked at length about how much the village has helped her family through the past year-and-a-half. She said community members pitched in to pay for three weeks of Jim’s chemotherapy and radiation treatments last year, and that she has enough donated food in her fridge now that she could “live for a year.”
“The community has just been incredible,” she said. “We are blessed to live where we live, and to have the neighbors and friends that have been so supportive.”
‘Everybody loved him. Why did he have to go?’
Along with his 4-H duties, Daniels was involved in nearly everything he could be in the Fredericktown community.
He was a member of the Green Valley United Methodist Church, Green Valley Tillers Farm Bureau Group, and was on the Knox County Fair Board for 28 years. He was also on the Fredericktown Tomato Show Board, Fredericktown Fire Board, Jr. Fair Sales Committee and the Zoning Appeals Committee for Wayne Township.
“He was just one of those Fredericktown people that you just know,” Fredericktown Community Fire District chief Scott Mast said. “It’s Jim Daniels.”
Hall believes that Daniels’ involvement stemmed from the fact that he simply loved being around others.
“He was very approachable, gregarious. People liked to hang around him because he was funny. He didn’t know a stranger,” Hall said. “So he was able to connect with people young and old. He would have an opinion on something, but if you had a differing opinion it wasn’t a dealbreaker.
“You could have a good dialogue and agree to disagree on some things, and keep on. He had a really great outlook on life.”
Kathryn remembers his laugh and his upbeat attitude, which he shared contagiously until the day he passed.
“Everybody loved him. He was hilarious, he just made everybody laugh,” she said. “I went to the counselor yesterday and I said, ‘Everybody loved him. Why did he have to go?’”
A little over a month after Jim’s death, the scars still remain. Kathryn said that she feels “empty,” missing the one she knew and loved since the age of 15.
“It’s been really hard on them, and me,” she said, referring to her children. “Until you’ve been there, you just don’t know.”
Kathryn said that she has been able to find solace in the way that her husband’s legacy will be carried on, though. Between the toy truck donation and the growing scholarship fund, her family will have tangible reminders of what Jim meant to the community.
Last Friday morning was muggy and warm in Fredericktown, the sun shining brightly on the corn and soybean fields that line the village’s backroads. Many of the area’s farmers had began their daily work, rolling down the road on tractors and combines, breaking a sweat by sunrise.
There was a feeling of strength, of hope, as the sun came up for another day.
A little ways down Sparta Road, a short drive from where the Daniels’ house sits, there were two green and yellow toy trucks sitting in a yard. A little farther down, a man rode a life-sized version down the road, smiling and nodding as he hummed along.
Fredericktown has lost Jim Daniels. But it hasn’t lost his spirit.
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