This is about living a good life, the best one you can possibly muster. It is the only way to explain this.
Keyia Johnson died April 24 at age 38. The miracle her mother, Joan, had prayed for never arrived. Other things, though, began happening.
Keyia left behind nine children. Six of them, ages 6 to 16, were still in her Aurora home. Their father, Leroy, died a year ago. What would become of them?
Things had grown progressively worse in the months that the woman withered in hospice. Utilities had been shut off. The rent was late. The older kids did what they could. It was not enough.
Then one day, food began arriving. The hot water returned. Someone had caught up the rent.
Paul O’Brien is fearful of what I might write here. The last thing he wants is so much as a whiff that what he and his brother, Rob, did and are doing is at all promotional.
You ask around, make some calls and find out it is all genuine and heartfelt, that the two have been caretaking the woman and her kids since her diagnosis 14 months ago.
Paul O’Brien is co-founder and chief executive of the Floyd’s 99 Barbershop chain. Keyia Johnson had worked in his Lakewood and Champa Street stores.
Workers there for months had collected money and done fundraisers for the woman and her family. They adored her, they adored her children, they said.
The O’Brien brothers paid Keyia Johnson on salary to the very end.
“It was the first time we ever had any employee in those circumstances,” Paul O’Brien said. “For us, it wasn’t even close — either she and the kids go out on the streets, or we help her.”
She was beloved by customers and co-workers, he said, an incredible woman with a happy, contagious personality that, even on her worst days, never left her.
The idea for the “Cuts 4 Keyia’s Kids” cut-a-thon arrived in the weeks before she died. Workers at all 17 stores embraced the idea, and many of them had never met the woman.
On Sunday, every nickel paid for every haircut at all Floyd’s 99 Barbershops will go into a “Keyia’s Kids” fund established at Wells Fargo banks.
There will be entertainment, food, homemade jewelry sales and silent auctions at the stores.
Staff not scheduled to work that day have volunteered to work for free, Paul O’Brien said.
“We are doing everything we can to help these young people stay together as a family,” he said, “to grow up to be good people in our community, just like Keyia already was raising them to be.”
Little children scamper around and tug at I’Tisha Hooper, their demands and playfulness making it difficult for her to finish a sentence. Two of them are hers; the others are her youngest siblings.
“She was misdiagnosed 37 times,” the 23-year-old woman says softly as she recalls her mother. “Most of the doctors told her she just had an ulcer.” Johnson eventually was diagnosed with stomach cancer.
Johnson was in hospice when she called the oldest kids together and told them to come up with a plan about what they were going to do about the younger kids.
Safiyya, 19, and her fiance, Pedro, have agreed to take the six siblings into their Denver home. It just makes sense, she said, because they have the most rooms.
This week Safiyya filed papers seeking to become the legal guardian of her brother and sisters.
“There is no question it will happen. It could be hard,” she said. “But we are determined to keep all of us together.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
