Kapoun family works to honor late son

By Barrett Newkirk

ALEXANDRIA — The Kapoun family is moving past struggles no one is ever prepared to take on.

In March, Bill Kapoun, a teacher in South Korea, died from injuries in an apartment fire. His parents, Dan and Judy Kapoun, quickly flew to Seoul, where they struggled through an intense language barrier to fully comprehend their son’s condition.

Since then, the Kapouns have undergone health concerns and changes inside their household.

Judy’s mother, who lived with the family, died in July after battling cancer.

Their son, Kevin, left home for school, but Rickie, a foreign exchange student from Germany, returned home this summer. That’s all on top of the joy that comes in planning a college graduation and wedding for their daughter, Laura.

“It’s just such an unbelievable amount of transition,” Judy said.

The stress has had a toll. Since her son died, Judy has lost 35 pounds because, as she said, she still often doesn’t feel like eating.

Members of the Kapouns’ church, St. Mary’s of Alexandria, have offered support throughout the family’s troubles, Judy said. When she recently underwent surgery, friends from the church prepared meals for the family, just as they did after Bill died.

And women from the church rallied together and prepared a full table of desserts without even being asked.

The recent struggles of this family began in February.

Bill, one of Dan and Judy’s five children, had been teaching English in Seoul, South Korea, for 14 months when his apartment caught fire. Bill was hospitalized with third-degree burns over most of his body. His Korean fiancée died in the blaze.

Within weeks of his death, the family noted that the medical bill had topped $55,000, which did not include anticipated skin grafts or, later, transportation costs for Bill’s body.

Bill’s teaching job did not provide insurance, so the family was immediately faced with mounting medical costs.

Friends sprang to action. People who knew Bill and his family wrote e-mails and blog posts getting the word out that sister Laura, then a college student in Bloomington, had set up a fund to raise money for the hospital bills.

More than $100,000 was collected in honor of Bill.

Donations and words of support streamed in from Germany. The Kapouns have hosted 15 foreign exchange students, 14 of them German, and the exchange program has continued to collect donations for the family to use in whatever way it needs.

Laura, 23, was working through her final semester at Indiana University and preparing for a May wedding while her parents sat by her brother’s hospital bed.

After two weeks of what Judy described as small steps forward followed by major steps back, Bill died in the hospital. Donations, many coming from strangers, surpassed the amount needed to pay the medical bills.

“People have been amazingly generous,” Laura said. She and her husband, Jake Lundorf, are temporarily living in Alexandria and preparing to teach English in Poland.

Korean authorities believe the fire that killed Bill was accidental, but the investigation was called before an exact cause could be determined when Bill’s body returned to the United States.

“It would be nice to have some closure, but it was important to get his remains home and move on,” Laura said. The investigation “could have stretched on for years.”

Now family members are focused on remembering Bill and his passion for world travel. They are working with the Madison County Community Foundation on applying the remaining donations to establish a scholarship fund for high school students wanting to study abroad.

“It was his goal in life to see the world, experience new cultures and meet new people,” Laura said. “Traveling was just kind of his way of living.”

The Kapouns lived in Germany when Bill was young, but after returning to the United States, Bill didn’t seem content to stay there.

He spent a semester of college studying in Ireland. He graduated from Indiana University in 2004 with a degree in history and economics.

Handsome enough to land some modeling jobs, Bill returned to Germany after college and the spent time in Romania and Portugal before taking the teaching job in South Korea.

Jane Reed, Bill’s world history and government teacher at Alexandria-Monroe High School, spoke with Bill during his visit home the summer before he died. He told her his goal was to continue teaching, maybe try and get a job in another country.

“It all involved the world,” she said.

In Reed’s classroom, Bill was an inquisitive student, always trying to apply lessons to the broader world and always eager to bounce ideas around with his teacher.

During their last conversation, Bill talked with Reed about supporting presidential candidate Ron Paul, and a growing interest he had in Abraham Lincoln, especially the president’s views on human rights.

“He knew how to think,” Reed said. “It must come from the family, the idea that the world is wider than the town in which we live. I’m not putting that kind of thinking down, but there are people who must see the world in the big picture in order to understand it to their satisfaction.”

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— Bill Kapoun, who died from injuries in an apartment in South Korea, wrote his own thoughts on his worldwide travels. Some of his words were published by his sister, Laura, at savebillkapoun.blogspot.com.

In one piece, he wrote the following:

“People say that once you lose hope, everything is gone. I’m not sure you can lose hope, as a human. Maybe my relatively stable and happy white working class upbringing makes me naive but I believe hope is a fundamental aspect of humanity; perhaps to lose hope is to lose one’s humanity. But when I walk down the street, and see a gypsy with her child, or a kid jingling a McDonald’s cup with a few coins in it, I have to think, the thought running through their heads is the same thought as in mine. It’s the same as in the beautiful blonde across the street, and the fat rich business man rushing to a thirty dollar business lunch, where decisions will be made that make the lives of many of those poor people I’ve just passed even more precarious than they already are. ...

“The things we do, the attainment of goals we spend so much time striving for, all mean little beyond the here and now. That is why, when I die, all I hope people to say of me is he lived life. The good, the bad, he took it all in, and relished it.”

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