Ken Quilantang must have taken a course from me; how else would I know him? What I do remember clearly is the course he did not take from me, a graduate course in Documentary Poetry. Ken was a fiction writer, a very good one, so I was game to have him in among the poets. Many students in that class wrote about their families in the context of Hawai`i's history. It was a wonderful group of students. A week or two into the class, Ken came to my office. He had wanted to write about his kid brother, Jonathan, who had died suddenly, and who loved cars. He'd suggested making a container for his poems that was a mock-up of a car. He was nearly in tears. He wanted this to be his project, but he couldn't do it, as he was still grieving intensely. Years later, I heard that he and his wife Gail had had a son; they named him Jonathan.
Today, I attended his funeral, a beautiful service offered by his friends, family, and colleagues from KCC and HCC. As I sat in the chapel, a memory came up for me. Every so often in my teaching career, but only rarely, I would look at a student and think that my father would have liked him. Ken was one of those students, kind, humble, responsible, hard-working, talented, full of heart. Rather like my dad. He died of cancer at 52. Two black kittens kept coming down the aisle before the service, were carried out, and returned over and again.
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