In Memoriam 1955 - 2025
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Kevin Matthew Roddy passed away in great peace, with his husband at his side and his favorite harp music filling the room, on April 9, 2025 in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi at the age of 69.
Kevin lived a life of astonishing richness, having touched souls across the globe with his kindness, empathy, selflessness, and wonderfully diverse passions. On one hand, he was remarkably generous in helping people through organizations, ranging from designing online educational systems, to performing therapeutic music in hospital and hospice settings, to serving as a hospital chaplain. But more personally, as cousin Kathy noted upon Kevin’s passing, “he magically made time for whomever called, wrote, or was in need of a listening ear or hug”, and “desired to make a difference in every life he encountered (whether it be person, animal, or even insect)”. His impact was truly remarkable.
Kevin was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1955, the youngest of four children of Walter and Dorothy Roddy. His family moved to the small town of Fremont, Nebraska when he was four. His years on the Great Plains catalyzed his love of fierce weather: the brighter the lightning and fiercer the wind, the better.
In 1969 Kevin moved to live with his sister in Atlanta, where he embraced the new opportunities that an urban community provided. In 1973, at age 17, he graduated from high school early and flew by himself to Israel to work on a kibbutz. Over the next seven years he became proficient in Hebrew, cementing his life-long love of languages; afterwards he spent a year studying Arabic at Georgetown University, and later became proficient in American Sign Language and fluent in Hawaiian.
In 1976 he moved to San Francisco, joining his sister and embracing yet another thriving, but very different, social, academic, and spiritual environment. He attended San Francisco State University and then University of California-Berkeley. At Berkeley he worked closely with two renowned scholars of Native American languages and graduated in 1984 with a B.A. in Linguistics. He later received a Master’s in Library and Information Studies there in 1986, working afterwards for four years at Oakland Public Library.
Meanwhile the AIDS/HIV epidemic was taking its toll on Kevin and his partner then, Butch Husted. They buried nearly all of their friends and were there for the bereaved families. The Bay Area earthquake of 1989 focused their attention on the need to leave, and a few weeks later Kevin visited Hawaiʻi for the first time, traveling to the Big Island. Within two days Kevin began to plan their move. Hawaiʻi just felt right.
He and Butch had worked for Pacific Telephone, Kevin as a long-distance operator and then as a cable splicer — the person who climbed telephone poles to make repairs. They joined a class-action lawsuit against the company for discrimination against LGBTQ workers, and the settlement provided the funds to purchase a home site on the Big Island. Moreover, Kevin secured a position as an Instructor at the University of Hawaii (UH) - Hilo Library in 1991, later becoming a tenured Assistant Professor.
Kevin and Butch lived together for 21 years, and then agreed to separate, with Butch remaining in the house. Kevin took a one-year sabbatical and moved to Honolulu, Oʻahu in the fall of 2001 to begin a second Master’s program (in Linguistics) at UH-Mānoa. His thesis research included two 2-month field trips to the island of Yap (western Pacific) to study and document the language of the island of Satawal, the last place where non-instrument navigation by Pacific Islanders was practiced before it was shared with Hawaiʻi researchers in the late 20th Century. Kevin was awarded a Master’s of Linguistics in 2007.
During his sabbatical, Kevin met his future husband Frank on the North Shore of Oʻahu while surfing in November 2001. (Frank was a longboarder, while Kevin was a boogie-boarder, a mixed-marriage if ever there was one!) Kevin was able to secure the library’s Electronic Resources Coordinator position at Kapiʻolani Community College in Honolulu, which allowed him to remain in Honolulu. He learned to code and then developed websites to teach research methods and information literacy, which eventually expanded to all 10 libraries in the UH System. And on Valentine’s Day, 2003 Frank proposed they get married, but it took until 2010 before that was possible.
In May 2018, the house that Kevin and Butch built 26 years previously was returned to the earth by Madame Pele, with an eruption of Kīlauea burying the house under 30 feet of lava. Butch was in the house when the eruption started only a few hundred yards away, and died six weeks later in the apartment Kevin secured for him in Hilo. There was good closure before he passed, and he wished Kevin and Frank well.
After retiring in late 2013, Kevin became a Certified Harp Therapy Practitioner in 2014 and a Certified Clinical Musician in 2023. He created customized musical experiences for patients in healthcare by blending musical improvisation and repertoire using harps and handpans to promote emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual wellness. He applied his therapeutic music skills as a volunteer at the Queen’s Medical Center, Hospice Hawaii, and St. Francis Hospice, all on Oʻahu, and Omega House in Houghton, Mich. until he began his chaplaincy work in 2024.
During the last decades of his life, Kevin became very active in developing complex interactive websites for a wide range of non-profit organizations, most notably the International Harp Therapy Program, Fire Tribe Hawaii on Oʻahu, and Hawaiʻi Health Ideas, an organization on Oʻahu facilitating the complex linking of private care homes with patients in need of healthcare services.
One of Kevin’s most beloved places (after Norway and the Netherlands!) was Otter Lake. Located on the Keweenaw Peninsula in northernmost Michigan, and surrounded on three sides by the immense Lake Superior, Otter Lake was where Frank’s Finnish great-grandparents homesteaded 200 acres in 1892. Like almost all of the land on the lake, this property has stayed entirely family-owned, and Frank inherited 12 acres of deeply forested, lake-front land from his mother in 2010. When Kevin first visited in 2006, he instantly fell in love with the solitude and beauty, the deep family connection to the old farm and the lake, and the gathering of the clan there every summer; it quickly became Kevin and Frank’s goal to build a summer/fall house there. The house was finished in 2019, and the original 16x20’ day-use building became Kevin’s wood-heated, oak-floored studio. It was the perfect place to weather the Covid pandemic during the following years. And as Kevin frequently extolled, “If everyone had an Otter Lake, there would be world peace!"
Kevin’s last great passion was clinical chaplaincy. In late 2023 he began Clinical Pastoral Education at the Pacific Health Ministry in Honolulu at the age of 68. Kevin was quite unlike other HPM’s students in that he had no previous academic religious training. However, he found the work to be immensely rewarding, and progressed to the point of having 24-hour shifts at Queens Medical Center as the on-call Chaplain, typically with numerous early hour calls to the Emergency Department. Unfortunately, this new path for helping others was abruptly cut short when his cancer treatment began in May 2024.
Throughout all this time, Kevin continued to nurture and develop his spiritual path. After his Catholic childhood and his deep immersion into Judaism in Israel, his path took a sudden turn in 1985 with his introduction to Starhawk and the Reclaiming Collective, both based in San Francisco. The concept of Gaia as sacred Mother Earth was to him intuitive, and he became an active Reclaiming member for the five years before he left for Hawaiʻi; afterwards he remained part of the community in the diaspora for 13 years as a solitary Wiccan practitioner.
In 2004 Kevin was introduced to Fire Tribe Hawaii gatherings on Oʻahu. These were, in his words, “held on the Equinoxes and Solstices every year, each consisting of three all-night events where music (acoustic only), poetry, dancing, theater and story-telling spontaneously happened around a roaring bonfire. These events were drug and alcohol-free spaces where all were welcome…I learned to play Middle Eastern percussion, I met the harp there, and I came out as a musician…[T]his gathering, a mixture of Christians, Buddhists, Wiccans, and Humanists, helped me tremendously on my Spiritual path by showing me what was possible when diversity meets for a common vision.”
In 2018, Kevin came across the work of Pema Chödrön, a Tibetan Buddhist nun. “I quickly read through her many books and watched her talks at retreats. The anger I felt for ‘why wasn’t the world the way I wanted it, Just and Equal?’ finally fell when I discovered that I was causing my own hurt and pain. Events and people who would make me angry, no longer had power. I learned this from Starhawk many years before, but it sank in only then. I learned something else. You cannot change everything, but you can change how you perceive events and people. I changed how I reacted…and I saw my life become tremendously better.
“Through this change, I believe I experienced Buddhist ‘enlightenment’…realizing, and accepting — truly accepting, to the core of one’s being — that there is joy and pain in the world, equanimity and suffering. This is Life, and we must simply learn how to live with change. We must be comfortable with change, good, bad, or neutral. We can control some things, whilst others we cannot.”
Lastly, Kevin is remembered as a fearless chef, combining unexpected tastes in delightful, surprising ways; recipes for him were just starting points for culinary improvisation. He delighted in entertaining friends and family by serving them a hearty meal, one that was always spiced with lively discussions amongst the diners. And his favorite entertaining was hosting a Winter Solstice party to celebrate Yule every December. He made sure it extended over two weekend evenings so everyone could easily attend, and it was quintessential Kevin in its Wiccan roots, hearty meal, diversity of guests, and spontaneous music. It’s a tradition that will continue on, with Kevin’s spirit drifting through the gathering, in the moonlight of the year’s longest night.
Besides his husband Frank, Kevin is survived by sister Denny, her daughter Jennifer and husband Will, and their children Maleah and Maya; brother Terry; brother Pat and wife Linda; and hānai son Steve and wife Ela. Kevin also leaves Frank’s brother Phil and wife Linda, their children Liz and Allison, and four grandsons; his sister Cecelia; and his numerous cousins and their many children and grandchildren spread across the United States and several countries. They all miss Kevin dearly.