Kathleen Dawn Bingham

Kathleen Dawn Bingham Kathleen, or Katie, Bingham was born on August 17, 1938 in Bozeman, Montana to Golden H. and Alice Lenore Bingham and she passed away August 6, 2018 in Tacoma, Washington. She is survived by three younger brothers; John M. Bingham of Rigby, Idaho; Michael R. Bingham of Gilbert, Arizona; and Mark H. Bingham of Seattle, Washington. Her family and friends will celebrate her life in a memorial service at 3pm Saturday, September 8, 2018 at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints at 1102 So. Pearl St., Tacoma, WA 98465. Kathleen was the sixth of ten children, and was sandwiched in between two rascally brothers, acting as a peacemaker, or like a moderating cooling rod in a nuclear reactor. Whenever another player was needed for a team, be it softball, basketball, touch football, or hockey, Katie was often drafted to fill out the roster. And she gave as "good" as she took. Katie was talented in academics as well as music and she played the clarinet or "licorice stick" for marching and pep bands in High School. The squeaks and squawks of the clarinet permeated our home as Katie practiced to master the correct lung, lip, and tongue coordination. In 1949 her family moved from Bozeman, Montana to Logan, Utah where her father took a position with the Utah State Agriculture College. By 1953, the family had moved to Emmett, Idaho, where Katie graduated from high school as president of the local chapter of the National Honor Society in 1956. After high school, she worked in Las Vegas, Nevada in a "five and dime" store while living with her Aunt Ethel Davenport which allowed Katie to save up enough money to enroll in college at Utah State in Logan, Utah in January 1957. In spite of the untimely death of her father in December 1956, by diligent work and with the help of academic scholarships, she was able to graduate from college in 1961 with a B.S. Degree. College education for every one of the siblings was a hard and fast family goal and Katie was "ALL IN" as the current expression goes, to help each one of her siblings achieve this objective. After her graduation, she began working as a Medical Technologist at the McKay-Dee Hospital in Ogden, Utah, where she had interned as a college student. She was now in a position to financially assist her younger siblings with their higher education expenses. From October, 1962 to October 1964, Katie answered a call to serve in the Austrian Mission, for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. here she was surprised to find that her mission president had been one of her former college professors, W.W. Smith, who wrote that he was very pleased to learn that the soon-to-arrive Sister Kathleen Bingham was "his" hardworking Kay Bingham from his Utah State days. Austria in the early 1960s was not an easy assignment. The country was starting to dig its way out of the wreckage of World War II, and trying to decide if it was going to be a "Western" or an "Eastern" European country. Winter weather could be cold and biting, and her journal entries related that the "coal vendor" would at times divert the missionary sister's "pre-paid" coal giving it to the building landlord instead. People were suspicious of each other, and converts were few. But Katie and her companions plunged onwards in trying to master the German tongue, holding "home" primary activities with two or three children at a time. Their goal was to give the Austrian people an image of how families could be blessed by living gospel principles in their homes, day by day. Katie eventually served a supervising Sister over several other Sister Missionaries in the mission. After an honorable release from her mission, she returned to Ogden where she soon gained certification as a Nuclear Medical Technologist. This work involved injecting selected patients with various radioactive isotopes, with extremely short half-lives, in very small quantities, so that a Medical Doctor could evaluate the "scans" of the patients and see where the isotopes had been deposited, or not, in helping to come to a diagnosis about internal organs such as the liver, kidney, or the thyroid. In this work, Katie's people skills came to the fore when she could reassure the patients who were nervous and uncertain about what was going on with these new kinds of procedures. But the work gave Katie the means to act out her chosen roll as nurturing older sister, aunt to her nephews and nieces, and supporting daughter to our widowed mother, as well. By the time all of Kathleen's siblings had completed their own education, her mother, now a retired school teacher, accepted the call to serve as a full-time missionary in the Roanoke, Virginia Mission. Upon Mother's release, Kathleen went out to be her mother's traveling companion on the "long way home", with stops to see historical sites such as Appomattox Courthouse and Williamsburg, Virginia. They also drove down to Orlando, Florida to see Katie's brother, Michael Richard Bingham. After Mother's report home to her Stake President, and her formal mission release, Katie and Mom took off for a lengthy bus tour from Omaha, Nebraska visiting L.D.S. Church history and American history sites in the eastern half of the country. The two even got in a trip to Hawaii with Katie's stake youth group. Life is full of good as well as not-so-good experiences, and Katie's was full of both kinds. In 1971, she suffered from uterine cancer. She came through treatment and was declared "cancer free", but she knew that she thereafter could never have her own children. By 1984, she had moved to Seattle because when her hospital changed ownership from a Church-owned entity to being owned by a not-for-profit consortium, she was out of a job when personnel head counts had to be lowered. Her search for a job in the same career field had led her to move to Seattle, Bellingham, and finally to Tacoma. When her medical technology field moved into the direction of being fully computer-dependent, she found that, lacking the skills with the "new" technology, she was frustrated in trying to regain her former jobs all over again. She then drifted around in several lower paying fields, for example, selling bus tickets at Fort Lewis and working as a home health-care aid, etc. Her income was less, but she was fiercely independent and she had long ago learned how to "get by" on less income. In Tacoma, she had found a ward where she could serve others in many nurturing capacities. She had been a blessing to many shut-ins and less active sisters. But by 2011, those same ward friends would be a blessing to her. Diverticulitis of the large intestines drastically changed her life when the large intestines had to be removed in 2011. She bravely carried on in her church duties and in temple work as soon as possible and as long as she could independently drive herself around. In and out of hospitals and convalescence centers, she eventually lost her ability to drive herself. In 2018, after a brief four session experience with hemodialysis, she was exhausted and ready to die. But even down to the end, she was a positive influence on others around her. On the last day of her life, the woman in the bed next to Katie in the convalescent center told Katie's younger brother, "I'm praying for her to get better, even though I know that she probably won't get better". Then she told him that she was baptized a member of Katie's church when she was a child living in Seattle, but that driving truck on Sundays and a God-hating alcoholic husband that kept her away from church. Then she asked him, "Could you possibly ask the Elders to come and give me a blessing to help me get well? I think that would just do the trick for me". All those ward members coming to visit Katie had made a positive impression on her roommate, awakening a ray of hope. The author of Kathleen's life summary is woefully aware of the incomplete nature of this story. No one will ever know the complete story, because she did not server others for public acclaim. She served because she loved people, and she knew what the Savior would have her do. May God bless us all as we adapt to the fact that Kathleen's "enduring to the end" has come to an end; and may we all take her life as an example of how we might be kind to other people, each day in some way, small or large.