TOLEDO, Ohio — This year's Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure Northwest Ohio is in memory of a woman who embodied what it means to be selfless.
Kaylene Kramer was a mother, wife and teacher, a symbol of dedication up until her very last breath.
"She looked me in the face and said, 'We got this'," Kaylene's husband Eric said.
Kaylene didn't miss a beat, even while battling cancer, making sure her two kids, Montgomery and Mallory had everything they needed.
"She was dealing with everything adult-related and also dealing with cancer," Kaylene's son, Montgomery said. "You don't realize as a kid until now how it was."
Kaylene was a second-grade teacher at Eastwood Elementary where each of her students felt her motherly love.
"She treated us like we were her own kids, and she really did love each and every one of us," Lauren Oestriech, a former student of Kaylene, said.
First diagnosed in 2012, Kaylene's breast cancer returned in 2020, this time to her brain. But not once did it cross her mind to slow down. She didn't want to miss a minute with her husband, two children or her students.
"We tried to get her to take a leave for a short time, spend time with your family. Get yourself better, have some time to yourself and it was a no go," her friend and coworker Leslie Oestriech said. "She did not want to discuss that. She was a teacher and whatever needed to be done for that to happen, she was going to do."
Being a teacher meant even in her darkest times, Kaylene taught as fiercely as she fought.
Terminally ill, working full time, and reading to her students while getting chemotherapy treatments, which she also scheduled around teaching.
Could she ever know how much she taught them all about life while trying to save her own?
"She would stay up late every day and stay here up every night past those kids going to bed, doing work," Eric said. "I'm like, 'What are you doing?' 'I got to be ready for the kids, got to be ready for the kids.' Literally, those children were her children."
Kaylene had so much love for her coworkers and her students, but eventually, the cancer became too much.
"We decided to slow down, and she was going to retire from teaching," Eric said. "Little did we know, the entire world was going to retire for a few months anyways with COVID coming into play."
Still, Kaylene found ways to connect with her students.
"She would send letters to them later on when the disease progressed, when her cancer progressed, she would continue to write letters to the kids," Kaylene's coworker and friend Courtney Eckel said.
Even when she could no longer write, Kaylene was there.
"She'd given me the letter the student wrote to her and I was like, 'How am I going to answer this the way she would?' because she just physically couldn't, and, I honestly thought, 'What is the most positive way that you can answer a letter?' and that's what I did, because she was so positive about everything, even till the end," Eckel said.
Kaylene went to the hospital with severe headaches in May 2020, but the pandemic was about to deliver a heartbreaking blow.
"She says, 'Just drop me off at the door, I can walk in, you park the car and come up,' Sounds great," said Eric. "By the time I got up, parked and came back, they wouldn't let me in the hospital. I had phone conversations with her for two weeks. I wasn't able to see her until I believe right until the 18th of May. The hospital told me I needed to come and make arrangements for her because it wouldn't be long. At that point, my biggest concern was getting [the kids] to see their mom."
The hospital allowed Kaylene to stay and her family to visit until her final day.
Even in death, Kaylene taught us another lesson.
"Cancer is not an end. It's a beginning to a new journey in your life. How you take that and go with it and embrace it is up to you," Eric said. "Her strength and her passion for work and strength just to get up every day and fight I think was instilled in my children and in myself."
"It's not the end, it's like the beginning," Montgomery said. "Yes, I lost someone important in my life, but the connections my mom made, with other people, I have a whole new family. I know there's people that were close to my mom that now care about me."