Rest in peace, Paul Alan Kern (1972-2024).
There’s a lot in this story. It will be difficult to capture the whole portrait of who he was, but I will do my best:
Audacious, proud, fiercely passionate, deeply emotional, reserved but charismatic. A rebel without a cause.
He drops out of school around junior high and gets involved in the gangs of LA in the 1980’s.
He falls in love, gets married in his teens, and fathers two sons. Things do not go well. Devastated by a divorce, he retreats back to his parents’ house with his two young boys.
Life as a single dad is unconventional. He gets the crazy idea to unschool the boys—he doesn’t like the system but doesn’t have an alternative. He can’t do beyond elementary math, so he does his best to print worksheets, collect books, and share his love of reading.
While on a walk, he discovers a kendo dojo and a Japanese community in the late 90’s and signs his boys up. It becomes an incubator, deeply forming the three. He paints helicopters, works on cars, and does manual labor on the side to scrape by.
Having had a good experience in the Japanese community, he signs his sons up to a Japanese baseball team, and somehow winds up as the head coach. He leads a ragtag team named the Samurais through a few leagues and across several years and is celebrated as a beloved coach.
He decides one day the boys need to at least attend middle school. So he finds a small private Lutheran school to enroll them in despite being strapped for cash. It’s hard to keep them out of trouble, especially the oldest.
The family has all sorts of adventures together. Life is good living in LA with the grandparents and the boys tucked into one small and cozy house.
Things slow down a bit as the boys get into public high school. Their grades are terrible, and sometimes it seems they might slide into his old ways.
But he was unaware of one thing. He left an old worn Bible on the shelf of the room they shared, the one his father recommended, the one he used to try to turn his life around. He didn’t know that one of his sons was wrestling with existential questions and finding his way into it, looking for answers. This son has a life-altering spiritual experience while reading the letters of St. Paul and commits himself to Christ. The two boys, transformed significantly, set out to forge their own path.
They scrap their way into community college, then into a small Christian college further out of the city, and then into jobs. It was time for them to leave home on their own adventures away from dad, bringing the glory days with his sons to an end. What was left for him to do?
He meanders for a bit, but finally musters up the will at 50 years old to get his GED and enroll in community college courses.
He’s brilliant and loved by students and professors. He excels at his studies and gets accepted into UCLA. He attends and has the time of his life studying his favorite subject, history, in the kind of environment he always longed for. He TA’s for a tenured professor and begins envisioning plans to teach abroad.
He studies in the day and spends his afternoons helping his mother caretake for his father, who passes away at a ripe old age. He dreams of new lands, a fresh start, and another chapter.
Sadly, he will never go on to finish his degree. Suddenly and quickly, he is overtaken by heart failure. He fights and rebels even in his last moments. He breathes his last in the company of his family and friends, the blazing path of a maverick at last snuffed out.
And so ends the earthly tale of Paul Kern.
There’s no way I can get to everything: the brotherhood he found in the gangs, the days spent speeding down California highways in our 70’s pickup truck, his acting career in Hollywood, his Jiu Jitsu training with the Gracie’s, his first drafts at an adventure novel, his struggle with being something of a Jon Snow (let the reader understand).
He nursed many wounds and traumas privately by himself. Yes, he was full of flaws, but it’s easy to say that. It’s much harder to understand the whole man, what he overcame, and ultimately what he accomplished, not only by himself but through the sons he staked everything on.
His life is a lesson that it’s never too late to write the second half of your tale, that God can slowly mend the pieces that shattered in you long ago, and that the love you pour into your children and those you influence will sprout like olive shoots, leafing and branching out across the flow of time, bearing good fruit for the earth and blessing descendants for thousands of years to come.
But I’ve waxed eloquent long enough. I really have a simple message to deliver: I loved my dad, and I’m forever grateful I got to be his son.
I look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.
Kern Keep 