English professor took a keen interest in the ‘bigger picture’
About six years ago, Thomas Kissane was in New York visiting his older brother, Joseph. One night at dinner, one of Joseph’s friends turned to him with a question.
“Well, Joe, what do you think — Shakespeare or Marlowe?”
A longtime college English professor who ran in academic circles, Joseph Kissane was used to such conversation. For his brother, a fellow Pittsburgh native, it was a peek into a different world.
“I’m sitting there saying, ‘I’m thinking just about the Steelers,’” Thomas Kissane said with a laugh.
Joseph Kissane was a subject of awe even to those closest to him, an exceptional man who knew seemingly everything yet was always striving to learn more. It was a passion that guided him throughout life until his death April 19 from COVID19. He was 89.
All that he embodied, however, lives on in the hearts and minds of his friends and family.
“He was, for me, the epitome of the most decent qualities in a human being,” said Elena DeBarbadillo Vejen, Mr. Kissane’s niece. “He just set the bar high for me. I always looked up to him as an example of how to be as a person.”
Born in Pittsburgh in December 1930, Mr. Kissane graduated from Central Catholic High School and Duquesne University before serving in the Korean War. After his military service, Mr. Kissane moved to New York to study at Columbia University, where he earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in 17th-century literature. After teaching stops at Rutgers University and Hunter College, Mr. Kissane returned to Columbia, spending three decades as an English professor and later an administrator until his retirement in 1997.
Over those years, he found a home and community both at Columbia and in New York. A sharp, witty man with a subtle sense of humor who was able to have conversations about virtually anything, Mr. Kissane built a large but tight circle of friends in New York. Together, they would frequent the city’s many theaters. When family, from his younger brother to his niece, would visit, Mr. Kissane would take them on excursions through the city, going to plays, art galleries and restaurants.
“His life is so much different from mine in Pittsburgh,” Thomas Kissane, a 73-year-old Fox Chapel resident, said. “I wasn’t envious, but I admired how he lived and how much he enjoyed life.”
When not in New York, Mr. Kissane was an avid traveler. England was a favorite destination, so much so that for a long stretch, he would visit London every year. Before the coronavirus pandemic, he planned to return there in June for a wedding, telling his brother about how eagerly he was anticipating the trip.
Mr. Kissane’s work and travels instilled in him a boundless sense of curiosity. He immersed himself in an array of subjects, with Irish history, inspired in part by his family’s lineage, being one of his most recent.
It extended to things in which he wasn’t particularly well-versed. Although raised Catholic, Mr. Kissane wasn’t particularly religious, but at his mother Kathryn’s funeral about 15 years ago, a priest asked what hymns the family wanted to use for the service. Mr. Kissane reached for a hymn book.
“‘This is one of my favorites. Martin Luther wrote it in 1615.’ He just looks at the title, and he knows all the hymns,” Thomas Kissane said. “I said, ‘How do you know that?’ He said, ‘Didn’t you go to Catholic school?’ ”
Those qualities never made Mr. Kissane a standoffish intellectual. He was generous with his knowledge, sharing facts and stories with those closest to him.
In her talks with him, Ms. Vejen would often be asked what her children were interested in at a given moment, and he would buy them books that corresponded with those curiosities. Whenever Ms. Vejen, a resident of Hackettstown, N.J., would go into the city to see her uncle, they would walk the streets together, with Mr. Kissane telling an interesting story about a building they passed or a neighborhood through which they were strolling.
“Many people walk through life and they don’t have much depth of interest in the stuff around them,” Ms. Vejen, 50, said. “They’re so focused on what their own tiny life is about and what they’re doing. He took it all in. He was interested in the bigger picture.”
That sense of generosity extended well beyond family. Mr. Kissane was a regular volunteer at a soup kitchen in his neighborhood in Manhattan. Following his retirement from Columbia, he worked with a group that would tape him as he read books, audio recordings that would later be given to blind people to enjoy. He was meticulous with that undertaking, taking the time to go back and make sure he pronounced everything correctly.
Until his final days, Mr. Kissane was, to his family’s knowledge, in excellent health. He was, as his younger brother put it, “the healthiest person I ever saw at age 89.” In mid-April, Mr. Kissane told his brother he had a fever that quickly went away.
A couple of days later, though, he had a cough that, even after being prescribed medications, got progressively worse. Mr. Kissane assured his younger brother that he would have a friend take him to a nearby hospital if he felt it was necessary. At about 6 a.m. on April 19, Mr. Kissane called his friend, but shortly after he arrived at Mr. Kissane’s Chelsea residence, the 89year-old was found on the floor and later pronounced dead.
“That’s what this virus is doing to people,” said Marianne DeBarbadillo, Mr. Kissane’s younger sister.
Between the relatively abrupt death and the pandemic preventing any kind of memorial service, Ms. DeBarbadillo lamented the lack of closure her family has been provided.
In the days that followed Mr. Kissane’s death, though, Thomas received emails and notes from friends of his brother. The memories had a common theme, all expressing what a caring person Joseph Kissane was.
“I could always call him or send him a letter, and he would give me advice or tell me what to do,” Thomas Kissane said. “He was like a brother, uncle and a father. He covered a lot of bases for me.”