We’re Going Home – Katie Tritt

Katie Tritt went to sleep on Sunday and didn’t wake up. Yesterday the family announced her remains were donated to the University of Iowa College of Medicine. There will be a gathering in late February. On Saturday she attended a sports event and was living her best life. Now, she’s gone.

I didn’t know Katie well after she graduated high school in 1968, yet she and her family were a significant part of my growing up in Northwest Davenport. Her obituary is here.

When I think of life with my family before college, Katie was a person who made good where she was born and lived her life. There is something positive about that. She was a good person.

She worked her first job at the Dairy Queen at Five Points in Davenport, where all of us kids went when we could. She attended the same high school I did, two years ahead of me. She graduated from the University of Iowa, after which she taught school in the public elementary school where I attended Kindergarten and in the parochial grade school where I attended seventh and eighth grade. She was a substitute teacher until she passed. She was active in the community as an adult, in a way I was not destined to be.

When my spouse and I married, Mother held a reception for us in her home. Katie attended and we have some snapshots of her there. Even in 1982 there was a sense of neighborhood where we shared obligations to each other. The neighborhood as I knew it no longer exists.

Death strikes closer as we age. I hope the rest of my life can be as good as Katie’s was. May she rest in peace.