Remembering Kathy Mezick

by Johnathan Brendle, Grandson

The first week of each month, I would check the mailbox every afternoon coming home from school for one thing: The Horsemen’s Corral. For nearly 30 years, my grandmother, Kathy Mezick owned and edited the paper. I remember when the Corral went from a newspaper to a magazine format. In the first few pages, the editor’s note was a short journal of her month, mostly pertaining to her animals. At least once a year, my name would make an appearance as I would spend one week of my summer with her on the farm. Pure bliss, compared to the hustle and bustle of Washington, D.C.

Our family used to make trips to Ohio fairly often throughout the year and I looked forward to spending time with Kathy more than anything else I would do all summer. As she and I grew older, it became difficult to put me on the back of a horse. I was bigger and she wasn’t as strong as she once was. Despite having to watch my younger siblings sit on Zack (American Quarter Horse) as I helped with barn chores, Kathy always had something exciting to do. One year, she had set up an authentic teepee—ones that I read about in my American History classes. We camped out in her front yard with a small bonfire. It was a hybrid between camping and ‘glamping’ as we had an air mattress and a portable speaker system. Her adventurous spirit always stuck out to me.

In college, I moved in with her. It was not long after her mother had passed. We spent a lot of time at my great-grandmother’s house cleaning and organizing. I really think that it was a lot for her. Karol, her twin sister, has always been right there with her. With them, I experienced true loss and grief. The most important part of my grandmother’s life was her animals. I can’t call them all pets —she truly loved all animals. Despite her allergies, she would foster barn cats, she always had horses, her birds that would come back every year, and most notably, her dogs. While she was on oxygen and physically becoming more stagnant, she often told me that she wanted to go on a road trip across the country in one of those sleeper vans. I would ask her about her oxygen tanks and her inability to get around like she used to.

“Oh, we can figure it out,” she would respond. When you ask her about how her dogs would fare, you would find that they were the only inhibiting factor for anything she did or wanted to do. The problem with dogs is that they don’t live long enough. Heartbreak after heartbreak over the years that still is more than worth the pain.

Kathy died on a Sunday. I like to think that she went peacefully. One of the last things on her mind was her last dog, Millie. I drove up from Virginia to try and see my grandmother one last time. I was too late. I cried and cried as I rerouted myself from a hospital in Cleveland to her home near New London. I couldn’t believe it. I spent over two and a half hours on the phone with her less than two days prior, talking about what we would do when I was coming up to visit in a few weeks. When I got to her house, there was no hum from the oxygen concentrator. There was a silence there that I had not experienced. I slept on her couch that night with her dog on her bed next to me. I filled her empty bird feeders on her deck and the silence was being filled with the sound of the birds and an evening breeze running through her wind chimes. While she is gone, the life that surrounded her lives on. I know that is the only way Kathy would want it. Hug your animals and give your horses a carrot from my grammy. May her legacy ride on.