Bureau volunteer leaves legacy of caring

Pat Ryan was so young when his mother abandoned him that the photos of him taken just after the abandonment break the hearts of his grown children. He was raised by relatives, and eventually his father and stepmother took him in. But Ryan spent the rest of his life trying to fill the emotional hole that opened inside him the day his mother left.

He filled it by working hard in school and then at his sales and delivery jobs. He filled it through his strong, 48-year marriage to his wife, Judy. Together, they welcomed six children in 10 years. And he filled it by serving others through volunteer work.

Ryan was set to assume one of his most challenging volunteer duties this December. He was to be co-chair of the Christmas Bureau with longtime friend Don Kelly.

Ryan, however, died June 7.

“He was looking forward to being at the Christmas Bureau. He felt it was a great honor,” said Ryan’s daughter, Mary Kay Hall, of Spokane. “He felt he was really giving back, being a servant of the Lord. And being a servant was being acknowledged as a good person, despite being abandoned.”

Ryan was 71 but looked a decade younger. He and Kelly attended Gonzaga Prep together, and the high school boys within them came out last year at the Christmas Bureau, joking together as they apprenticed to run the bureau this year. The best buddies attended daily Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Lourdes and drank coffee together afterward.

Health issues dogged Ryan for two years. He and Judy were diagnosed with different kinds of cancer about the same time. He took care of Judy through her treatments and to her dying day, May 27, 2006. His cancer treatments appeared to work, but then he came down with Guillain-Barré syndrome, in which the body’s immune system attacks the nervous system. A lung disease took him in the end.

In his last days, Ryan rallied long enough to say goodbye to his children, gathered around his bed, and to buddy Kelly and good friend Jan Colby, who delivered Meals on Wheels with him and stood by him through his sicknesses.

The best volunteers at the Christmas Bureau often are those who have suffered along life’s journey and who connect with the suffering of many of the bureau’s recipients. The bureau has lost many of its best volunteers over the years, including Ken Trent, who ran Volunteers of America, and Donna Hanson, who was at the helm of Catholic Charities. Ryan’s example of generosity now joins theirs.

“They worked so hard. There’s no way we can let them down,” said Marilee Roloff, president and CEO of Volunteers of America.

Ryan appreciated how the Christmas Bureau’s distribution of food, toys, books and candy allowed poor families to create meals and memories together. He loved Christmas and created with Judy the family-rich holidays he missed as a child. This will be his children’s first without him.

Hall said, “One of the last things he told me was, ‘Your mom and I did good.’ ”

Yes, she told him, you did, more than you will ever know.