CHEYENNE — Kristy Van Der Hoeven had a way of creating smiles through simple acts of unexpected kindness.
She’d take a pocketful of quarters and fill up all the gumball machine slots so the next kid who turned the dial would get a surprise.
She’d tuck a dollar bill on a shelf in the toy aisle, or she’d leave a bright and encouraging note on a windshield for someone who was looking a little down.
The gestures were never too grand or too expensive.
The point was just to create another smile in the world — and to set a quiet example for her two sons, Cyler and Carter, about how to stand up in a world that can be cold and cruel.
Then in 2021, something unexpectedly cold and cruel happened to Kristy.
The wife and mother of two collapsed from a heart attack, just as her daily workout at Planet Fitness in Cheyenne was ending.
Emergency workers spent an hour trying to revive the young woman. To no avail.
The woman who had created smiles for so many was an earthly spirit one moment, and gone from the world the next, leaving her family with questions that had no easy answers and a void that would be impossible to fill.
“She was amazing,” her husband, Adam Van Der Hoeven told Cowboy State Daily. “She was a great mother, an amazing wife, and what she did for the kids for the couple of schools she worked with … it was just a very fitting role.
“Her smile and her laugh would light up a room. If you just knew her, you’d never forget her.”
The Ding Dong Ditch
Adam doesn’t remember what exactly prompted Kristy to start her random acts of kindness campaign back in 2014. It may have been something she saw on the Internet, or something she came up with for the school children she worked with.
But never forgetting Kristy is part of what lies behind a nonprofit in Cheyenne that has taken up Kristy’s random acts of kindness for the last four years now.
Called Kristy’s Kindness, the charity is funded by an annual 5K run, and all the modest proceeds are used to perpetuate Kristy’s idea that the world can be made better if people simply take the time to do a few things that make other people smile.
The tools of Kristy’s kindness arsenal were always simple, so the charity doesn’t need to raise huge sums of money to continue the effort.
A simple ding-dong ditch at someone’s home with a corny note that says, “You’re the greatest!” doesn’t cost much, after all. Post-its for encouraging notes are still colorful and cheap. Helium balloons are fun and not too lavish yet.
Kristy’s friend, Melissa Stafford, came up with the idea for Kristy’s Kindness not long after her friend died.
It was a way not just to remember her friend, but to do something positive with all of the grief pouring out of her heart.
“I was so angry with God for taking her,” Stafford recalled. “And I was lashing out about it in a conversation with her husband. And he said, ‘Melissa, here’s the deal. Where she’s at now is so far beyond us, and so unimaginable for us, that we will never understand why she was taken from us. All we can do is have faith that she is serving this higher purpose, and she is affecting the world or the cosmos in a way that we don’t understand.'”
A New Idea Is Born
The words were hard to hear, and harder to accept, partly because Stafford felt enormous guilt over her friend’s death.
A month before her death, Kristy told Stafford of a nonspecific pain under her arm while they were on a road trip.
“I remember telling her she should go to a doctor,” Stafford said. “‘It could be your heart,’ I told her.”
Women often have nonspecific symptoms like Kristy’s in the weeks and months leading up to a heart attack. They’re mild enough to be mistaken for other, less serious issues and ignored.
“She was a typical woman,” Stafford said. “Like, ‘I’m not going to waste money going to the doctor for myself. I’ve got to feed my children. I’ve got to make sure that they’ve got everything they need.”
Stafford has wished over and over that she’d told Kristy’s husband Adam about the pain under Kristy’s arm.
“He’s like, ‘It doesn’t matter what we would have done,’” Stafford said. “This was her time and God needed her to fulfill a purpose, which is something I’ve really had to cling to, to make an understanding of this.”
That understanding was slow to evolve, however. And came to her in an unexpected way.
“I was doing one of those 5Ks that she and I promised we were going to do together,” Stafford said. “And I was just outside running around my neighborhood, and the sky was all pink which was her favorite color. And I thought, ‘OK, she’s here. She’s still running this with me. She’s here.’”
Stafford kept running and the thoughts kept coming to her.
“It was like, ‘She’s always going to be here,’” Stafford remembers thinking.
Rather than a single moment of clarity, it was one long thought that kept burrowing down, deeper and deeper. Finally, it all became an idea, bubbling up to the surface of her mind.
“If we could do some sort of fundraiser,” Stafford thought. “If we could get a group of people together to do some random acts of kindness.”
That would keep Kristy’s tradition alive.
Better, Not Bitter
Stafford first called Kristy’s husband to run the idea by him.
They could do a 5K in Kristy’s honor, she explained to him, and use the money they raised to continue her acts of random kindness.
For Adam, this was a painful and emotional request at first, even if he understood where Stafford was coming from and what she was trying to do.
“I had to put my selfish feelings away, as far as how it would make me feel, and realize what it’s designed to do and accomplish,” he said. “How it could help so many other people.”
Seeing all the random acts of kindness streaming out from the group’s Facebook page the last four years has been confirmation enough that he made the right choice. But it was a wrestling match with his heart at first.
“Nobody will ever know why she was called home so early,” he said. “However, knowing where she is at, and just having faith and trusting God, that he works all things for our good and our glory. We may not understand it. But you just have to let that be, because it would be like trying to figure out why the ocean is deep or the sky blue. I mean there’s just certain things we won’t ever understand.”
Wanting to know, wanting to understand are natural human impulses.
“But you’ll tear yourself apart trying to find out that answer,” he said. “So, there’s a certain point where you just have to stop and say, ‘Well, I may not like it. I don’t understand it. However, what would Kristy want me to do? Would she want me to be bitter or better?’”
Choosing Kristy’s Kindness was one way he and all of Kristy’s friends and family could choose to get better.
From A Few Fishes, Many
The first year, Stafford wasn’t sure what to expect for her inaugural event. She decided she’d be happy if 50 people showed up to run the 5K and raise a little money for the charity. That would be good enough.
But, as word about her idea began to circulate, something wonderful started to happen. Before Stafford knew it, far more than 50 people had signed up. Within the first month or so, there were 100 people ready to run for Kristy’s Kindness. One hundred people!
Stafford could hardly believe it, but people just kept signing up from there. Before long there were 200, then 300 people signed up for race day.
Friends told her she should probably expect a last-minute rush of at least 50 more people signing up on the day of the event itself.
“Better order more T-shirts just to be safe,” one friend told her.
But Stafford had a hard time believing all these people who had signed up would really show up. What would she do with a bunch of extra T-shirts?
She needn’t have worried. Her friends turned out to be right.
Come race day, there were indeed another 50 people signing up for the event, bringing the total number of participants to about 350 souls, all there to support the idea of perpetuating Kristy’s random acts of kindness in the Cheyenne world.
Reaching Beyond Wyoming
Since then, Stafford has worked to attract runners from all 50 states to the race.
“We’ve had people from Texas, Nebraska, and Mississippi sign up,” she said. “And we do offer a virtual option, too, where we can send them a shirt and a medal.”
One of the furthest participants came from the East Coast, and that’s one who Stafford particularly remembers.
“His goal was to run a 5K in all 50 states,” Stafford said. “And he picked ours for Wyoming … because it talked about kindness and giving back to communities.”
That fuels an unspoken hope Stafford has that the concept behind Kristy’s Kindness is something that can spread beyond Cheyenne, beyond Wyoming, out into the rest of the world.
“This has turned into a community of people who just want to make the world a little happier,” Stafford said.
Adam, too, hopes to see it continue to grow, though he believes that’s ultimately up to God.
“It’s great to think this could grow into something bigger,” he said. “But whatever transpires, we’re not going to give up as far as if we can just instill that thought process of hey, ‘How can we help out the cashier who’s working on Christmas eve or the single mom who has to work two jobs.'”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
