“It was just second nature to Kathy to want to help people. She had a heart as big as the universe and loved everybody. She was kind to everybody,” a longtime friend said of Kathy Dowling, who died Thursday at age 67.
Tom Russo | Daily Reporter
This story has been updated to include comments from Ted Jacobs, who donated a kidney to Kathy Dowling in 2011.
GREENFIELD — Kathy Dowling was known as a selfless community servant and a warrior when it came to facing her personal health challenges — having undergone nearly 200 surgeries in the past 17 years.
But to Kathy Barr, she was simply her best friend.
The two Kathys met while third graders growing up in Greenfield in 1963. Barr had just moved to town from Kokomo, and their teacher assigned Dowling to show her around.
“And that’s all she wrote. We became best friends at 9 years old, and 57 years later we still are,” Barr said on Thursday, the day Dowling passed away after a health battle that spanned nearly two decades.
Barr was among the circle of friends who thought of Dowling as family — who would take her to surgeries, dialysis treatments and doctor’s appointments, and spend hours by her side during countless hospital stays.
“It took a village, and Kathy had that. Everybody loved her,” Barr said.
On Thursday, Barr’s phone was lighting up with dozens of texts from concerned friends throughout the community as word of her passing began to spread.
After enduring four kidney transplants and a host of other challenges dating back to 2004, Dowling was ready to discontinue treatment last week and say her goodbyes. But she wouldn’t stop until she had a chance to see Barr’s oldest son, Chris, who flew in from California Monday to say his goodbyes to “Aunt Kate.”
Around 5 a.m. Thursday, she peacefully passed away at the age of 67, with Barr’s other son, Michael, by her side.
Dowling never married or had kids, but she adopted Barr’s family as her own.
The boys had grown up hearing how much fun their mother and “Aunt Kate” had while sharing an idyllic childhood growing up in Greenfield, then later as roommates at Indiana University in Bloomington their senior year.
“We had a magical friendship and magical childhood. It was all about fun and adventure,” Barr recalled.
As kids, the two young girls shared one bike all summer, riding each other around town until it grew dark and it was time to go home.
They spent most of their time at the former Riley Park pool, which sat near the current park entrance just off Main Street.
“Kathy loved swimming and she loved the water. We were little fish out at that pool,” Barr recalled.
It was her love of swimming that would lead Dowling to become a swimming and diving coach at Greenfield-Central High School, where she also served as a track coach, teacher, journalism advisor, school counselor, director of counseling and dean of students.
In June this year, friends and colleagues gathered at the newly renovated Riley Park pool, just off Apple Street, as it was renamed the Kathy Dowling Aquatics Center in her honor.
For the past 10 years, Dowling served as a board member for both the Greenfield Parks Department and Greenfield-Central schools.
Two weeks before the parks board dedicated the aquatics center in her name, the school board voted to rename the conference room at the Greenfield-Central Educational Services Center in her honor.
Superintendent Harold Olin said Dowling’s name rose to the top of a long list of other suitable candidates.
“Kathy was an amazing ambassador for the Greenfield-Central schools. She would do anything for the schools and students we served,” he said Friday.
“With 30 years as an educator and three terms on the board, she always made her decisions based on what was in the best interest of the kids. She was an outstanding educator, a fantastic board member, and honestly just a good friend. We miss her already,” he said.
Dowling was known for not only her commitment to community service, but for her random acts of kindness.
As a high school guidance counselor, “she always knew how to help someone look at things differently, to help turn their lives around,” said Barr.
“It was just second nature to Kathy to want to help people. She had a heart as big as the universe and loved everybody. She was kind to everybody,” she said.
Dowling was also tenacious when it came to fighting for her health.
She first went into kidney failure when she was 49, and would face a number of life-threatening health issues over the next 17 years.
“She was such a fighter,” said Barr. “She just had tremendous hope. That’s what brought her through all these surgeries and transplants. She was alway focused on the desired end results. She just kept moving forward.”
Kristin Fewell, another of Dowling’s lifelong friends, always marveled at her positive spirit.
“Despite all she had going on, she still found the good in everything and everyone. She was the bomb.com,” Fewell said.
That sentiment was echoed by Ted Jacobs, a former colleague who donated a kidney to Dowling in 2011.
“She was that one-in-a-million person who was loving, kind and friendly, who always thought of service before self. If there was a book written about someone who gave of themselves above and beyond everybody else, Kathy Dowling would be the subject matter,” he said.
He said Dowling was so beloved, when her colleagues were told she was in dire need of a second kidney donor at a Greenfield-Central faculty meeting 10 years ago — after the first kidney she received failed due to underlying health conditions — 20 to 30 people immediately volunteered.
The matching process took a few months, but Jacobs got the call in late October that he was a perfect match.
“I was at Walmart buying a battery for my car when I got the call to be at the hospital the next morning,” said Jacobs, who was teaching English and drama at Greenfield-Central at the time.
Now the director of the Warren Performing Arts Center in Indianapolis, Jacobs said he would “stand on a mountaintop anywhere and say anybody that can give a kidney ought to, because Kathy was living proof that there is plenty of life that good people like her can still live.”
“I have had zero side effects or problems since that happened 10 years ago,” he said.
Most importantly, he got the chance to extend the life of a woman who was one of the kindest, most selfless and most loved people he had ever known.
“She was the light under the bushel for people. Whenever people needed a shoulder to cry on, or someone to talk to, Kathy was always there — no matter what she was going through,” he said.
Even when she was feeling her worst, Dowling was known to attend parks and school board meetings virtually from her hospital bed or while resting at home.
Among her proudest achievements were helping to create Greenfield’s Splash Pad in 2018, renovating the city pool in 2019, and helping drive the installation of an all-inclusive park for children with special needs behind Greenfield-Central Junior High School.
Barr said it was wonderful to see her friend be able to make such a tremendous impact on the community over the years, but heartbreaking to watch her struggle with the mounting health challenges that nearly killed her on multiple occasions.
“It was just so painful to watch her suffer,” said Barr, “but I was grateful to be there as part of her support system of good friends. I’d do anything for her, because she would have done anything for me,” she said.
Dowling underwent four kidney transplants throughout her journey, always expressing love and appreciation for those who made it possible, along with her “tribe” of friends who sustained her through it all.
“I am so blessed with a community that just steps up and friends who are like family to me,” she said earlier this year. “I don’t know how I could be any more blessed.”
For those who knew her, Fewell said the blessing was all theirs.
“There will never be another Kathy. She was just an icon,” she said. “My family has been blessed to have her in our realm.”
