Karen Kemper Magee

Karen Magee was our dearly loved mother, sister, grandmother, aunt, and friend. She was also a therapist and Jungian analyst, a Girl Scout, a tennis player, a Robert Redford fan, an artist, and a teacher. She died from complications of metastatic melanoma Saturday, August 18, 2018, in Houston.

No person was insignificant to Karen. She appreciated anyone who worked hard at what they were doing and reached out to anyone who needed help. Her outgoing nature and friendly smile let her connect with people from all walks of life and backgrounds. She valued fairness, equality, and compassion.

Karen was a tough critic with strong opinions, and she could sometimes be too hard on people, including herself. But she also radiated warmth. She celebrated others’ joys and empathized with their sorrows. And she was quick with a card or phone call to let someone know that she was thinking about them.

Her tastes were simple and unpretentious. She liked daisies, Land’s End cotton cardigans, breakfast at McDonald’s, TV police procedurals, and riding the zoo train in the park. Yet she delved deeply into the complexities of being human and helped others to do the same.

Karen Elise Kemper Magee was born March 9, 1945, to Walter Rice Kemper of Marlin, Texas, and Dorothy Elise Chappuis of Rayne, Louisiana, in San Francisco, where Walter was stationed on Angel Island with the U.S. Army. Karen grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, and then Houston, in the Meyerland neighborhood. As a youngster, she dabbled enthusiastically in tap, ballet, acrobatics, violin, water ballet, and various school groups.

Joining the local Brownie troop kicked off a lifelong love of scouting. The Girl Scouts’ core value of service to others stuck with Karen forever, guiding her in her family, community, and professional lives. She remembered her Girl Scout adventures as some of the most fun she’d ever had and was still in regular touch with her scouting friends at the end of her life.

As many of her friends (and acquaintances, and random strangers she met) could tell you, Karen was a proud graduate of Bellaire High School. Go, Cardinals! She played on the high school tennis team for 3 years and was a good student, involved in many school activities. Starting at the University of Texas in Austin in 1963, she pledged Alpha Delta Pi (same sorority as her mom) and was majoring in sociology until a blind date with James Joseph Magee, a graduate student in engineering, changed her plans.

Karen and Joe married in 1965 and moved to Midland, Texas, where they had three children. The family moved to New Orleans in 1971 and lived there for 13 happy years. Karen loved being a mom. She volunteered at school and church, made clothes for her kids (and for their dolls and stuffed animals), and was a Girl Scout troop leader. Without the help of the Internet, she planned and executed multi-week summer road trips (some of the family’s best memories), and she made sure that Christmases and other holidays—including Mardi Gras—were always special. Art classes, painting, and tennis were on her schedule too, but mostly she took care of her family and worked to keep the far-flung extended family connected. She also loved to bring people together “to pass a good time,” complete with a dish of Cajun jambalaya or shrimp Creole.

When Joe’s work with Shell Oil took the family to Houston in 1983, Karen went back to school. She completed a BS in behavioral science and then an MA in marriage and family therapy at the University of Houston Clear Lake. She ran the table with a 4.0 GPA, despite her unshakeable conviction that she wasn’t “smart enough.” Karen opened a private therapy practice in 1991. By 2001, she had completed the rigorous, multi-year training program to become a Jungian Analyst.

Being a therapist was Karen’s dream job. She was also a gifted teacher. At the Carl G. Jung Center in Houston, where she taught for 30 years, she became known for using movie clips in her workshops and lectures. She had a unique talent for connecting moments in film to the deep issues in people’s lives, especially the ethical issues faced by mental health professionals. She gave her final ethics workshop at the Jung Center in June 2018.

When Karen was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma in 2014, the prognosis was that she’d die in less than a year. Leading-edge care provided by MD Anderson and Karen’s own perseverance and spirit kept the cancer from taking over for more than four. During most of that time she was able to keep living her life the way she wanted, even as she soldiered through surgeries, radiation, medication therapies, and multiple clinical trials. She continued with her private practice and teaching at the Jung Center, sustained her many friendships, made new connections with the people she met, and spent lots of quality time with her close-knit but geographically distant family. The family would like to thank her team at MD Anderson, most especially Dr. Adi Diab, Natalie Jackson, and their wonderful nurse Dolores, for helping give her, and us, that time.

We’re also grateful to the kind assisted-living staff at Parkway Place as well as the caring team from Hospice Plus, who helped us through Karen’s final weeks.

And we can never thank enough Karen’s and now our family’s dear friend Lynn Perrin. He set a new standard for going above and beyond.

Family mattered to Karen above all else. She leaves behind a loving and devoted one, including her children Molly Roberts (Jeff), Charlie Magee (Katy), and Katy Magee; siblings John Kemper (Sallie), Don Kemper (Molly Mettler), and Martha Lee Kemper (Jean Brophy); grandchildren Abby, Davis, and Jack; and nine nieces and nephews. She would also want us to mention her grand-dog Harvey, the “guardian angel dog” (Karen’s words) who saved her life when she developed post-surgical septic shock a few months after her cancer diagnosis.

We miss her.

For those so inclined, we think Karen would be pleased by memorial donations to the Melanoma Research Foundation (www.melanoma.org), the Jung Center of Houston (junghouston.org), and the Girl Scouts of America (www.girlscouts.org).