Finding a Rainbow After a Storm

“My biggest wish in life would be to hold my daughter just one more time and tell her how much I love her,” wrote Marco Island resident Roger Moll in his 2007 book Sleepless Nights. “She is very much inside of me. She is, and always will be my daughter.”

Sleepless Nights chronicles the ten years of Moll’s life after the sudden passing of his and his wife Nan’s nine-year-old daughter Kendall. It’s a touching, sometimes searing glimpse into the heart of a man wrestling with one of the worst things any human can suffer: the loss of a child. 

In the book, he talks about Kendall’s love of rainbows, how they were her favorite things to draw, and how important they remain in his life. “On a sorrowful day, even if there is no chance of rain, I will take the garden hose, spray it into the air, and make my own rainbows,” he writes. “I need rainbows. I guess that my life will continue with tears in it, but with grace they will be happy tears. You see, you need to experience life in many ways, often tearful ways, to have the rainbows in your soul energized.”

Just over a year ago, the rainbows in Roger’s soul were energized by an unexpected and selfless act. It wasn’t someone else’s act, but his own.

Kendall Jeanne Moll was born on February 27, 1987. What appeared to be an otherwise normal pregnancy ended with an unplanned cesarean section, which the Molls learned several days later was due to hydrocephalus, or water on Kendall’s brain, making her enlarged head too big to pass through the birth canal. The Molls, who were living in New Port Richey at the time, traveled to Gainesville’s Shands Hospital, where a neurosurgeon implanted a shunt in Kendall’s brain to drain the fluid to her stomach.

The operation was a success, and the hydrocephalus, which can often result in death or intellectual disabilities in infants, became more or less a manageable condition in Kendall’s life. She did have to undergo several surgeries to correct vision issues caused by the condition, “but she came through all of them like a champ,” Roger says. 

As Kendall grew, the Molls realized that they had not only a medical miracle on their hands but an amazing young person with an energy and joyful spirit that drew people in.

“She was an old soul,” Nan says. “She was very deep, intense, like her father.”

The Molls moved from New Port Richey to Marco Island in 1989, and Kendall embarked on a mostly normal life. 

She excelled in school. An avid reader – often reading two to three books simultaneously – Kendall was reading at a fifth-grade level by the second grade. She loved outdoor adventures and trying new things, from horseback riding and cheerleading to playing basketball, baseball and street hockey.

For their part, the Molls encouraged the rich, full life that Kendall embraced at every turn, including multiple trips to spend time with her cousins over the years, whom she adored like siblings.

“We believed in that old saying ‘never let schooling stand in the way of your child’s education,’” Roger says. “The only thing we ever said no to was when she asked to play football.”

Kendall’s overall health was good for most of her life. “She got the usual little colds, this, that and the other thing,” Nan says, but nothing significant. 

In the second grade, however, Kendall started experiencing headaches, vomiting and sleeplessness, and after consulting with the neurosurgeon who operated on her as an infant, she was airlifted back to Shands Hospital in Gainesville, where her shunt, which had started leaking, was repaired and her health restored.

“They had to shave half her head,” Nan says. Kendall, being who she was, didn’t take kindly to Tommie Barfield Elementary’s “no hats” rule. “She came back from surgery, went to the principal’s office and said, ‘I propose we change the rules. I would like to wear a hat so nobody makes fun of my haircut.’” The principal acquiesced and let Kendall wear a baseball cap to school till her hair grew back.

A year later, shortly after completing the third grade, Kendall came down with a fever, which temporarily subsided, then returned with nausea and a headache. Nan and Roger took Kendall to their pediatrician, who diagnosed her with the flu. Roger, who was a commercial airline pilot at the time, decided with Nan that it was okay for him to go on his planned flight. “She's fine, she’s got the flu,” Nan said at the time.

Kendall slept in Nan’s bed with her that night. The next morning, June 21, 1996, she passed away, the result of a catastrophic failure of her shunt.

“She died instantly,” says Nan, who was in bed with her when she passed. “It wasn’t a slow leak like the last time. It was very, very quick, so something must have hit her brain stem.”

Roger, wracked by the loss of his daughter and the lingering guilt of not being present for her passing, began a decade-long downward spiral of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and thoughts of dying. 

“He wasn’t suicidal,” Nan says about Roger at the time. “More like, ‘If I’m in a car accident, just let me go. I want to go. I can’t wait to go. I don’t want to be here.”

After nearly two decades of therapy since Kendall’s passing, Roger says he’s better able to handle the loss and grief but will never get over the pain of losing his daughter. “I’ll be driving down the road and see a father and daughter, and bam! I’m back there again,” he says.

In April 2022, Roger approached Nan with some news. “He said, ‘I’ve got to talk to you about something,” she says. “I’m like, ‘You’re not getting a new boat,’ because he had been bugging me to get a new boat.”

It turns out that while checking his Facebook news feed, he saw a post by his distant cousin, Wendy Hoppock, from Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, whom he had not seen or communicated with in more than 40 years. Hoppock, now 64, had a kidney and pancreas transplant at age 17 due to juvenile diabetes, as well as treatment for lung cancer in 2011, and was soliciting help in finding a kidney donor once again to replace her failing original transplant.

“I posted on Facebook that I was actually looking for people to put decals on the back window of their cars saying that I was looking for a kidney,” Hoppock said. “That’s how I reconnected with Roger.”

“Being the processing person I am, I started to really think about this picture,” Roger says. “Things kept coming to mind over and over again.”

He thought about Hoppock’s grandmother, who was his godmother. He thought about the childhood rides with his grandfather to Hoppock’s dad’s small engine repair shop. He thought about the fact that – for some reason he can’t remember – they were told by doctors they couldn’t donate Kendall’s organs when she passed. He thought about a valued friend named Steve who had just passed away after his own complications from diabetes.

“I showed Nan the picture and told her I was thinking about helping Wendy with this,” he says. “All she said at first was, ’You’re what? You’re crazy!’ But she knew how serious I was.”

The next day, after further contemplation on his morning walk with the Molls’ boxer Big Red, he messaged Hoppock and told her he’d like to begin the process to apply as a living donor through Wendy’s hospital, the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in Charleston.

“I was a little taken aback,” she says. “I’m really good at giving help. I’m not that great at receiving help. I didn’t know how to respond. I didn’t want to be so excited that he’d think I’m too aggressive and just want his kidney, or not being excited at all and having him think I’m totally disinterested in reconnecting and going through the process.”

Hoppock also says she was concerned that Roger “may be doing this for the wrong reason” and didn’t want him getting into a situation in which the physical, emotional and mental toll would lead him to regret it.

In the end, the two struck up a deep relationship and began talking daily. Hoppock and Roger agreed to move forward, and he began the arduous application process, “undergoing countless blood and urine tests, two days at the hospital getting poked and prodded, Zoom calls with social workers and psychologists to make sure I was in the right mindset and just crazy enough to do this but not too crazy,” he says.

On July 14, 2022, he received the call from MUSC’s review board that he was a match for Hoppock and had been approved as the donor. They asked if he’d like to set a date for surgery and his response was, he says, “Hell yes!”

On the morning of August 31, Roger and Hoppock walked into the hospital together and Roger’s kidney was transplanted to Hoppock, “for me to give Wendy a gift of life, and Wendy to give me a life back,” he says.

After the transplant, Hoppock and Roger sat down and talked. “I want to name our kidney,” Hoppock told him. “I want to name it Kendall. He just looked at me and I said, ‘It’s because if you could have saved anybody’s life, it would have been Kendall’s. I’m honored that it was me that you saved.’”

Roger and Hoppock remained close after the surgery, talking frequently. “We both just did a lot of talking about very deep, sometimes dark things and thoughts we both had,” she said. “My husband was terminally ill, and I knew he was going to be passing very soon. Roger was helping me through that. I was helping Roger with Kendall. It’s a very unique relationship we have. I’m probably closer to him than I am to my siblings.”

Hoppock’s husband passed away last October.

On August 25 of this year, Hoppock and Roger had their one-year check-up at MUSC and both are in great health, except for one unfortunate setback for Roger and a happy surprise for Hoppock. “The only issue I have is I lost my taste for beer,” Roger says. “But Wendy hated beer, and now she loves it!”

“I think everyone goes through life wondering what their purpose is,” Hoppock says. “I think Roger and Nan discovered their purpose and it has always been to help others, and what Roger did was the extreme sacrifice. I was also able to find my own purpose, which was to save Roger.

In the last chapter of Sleepless Nights, Roger describes doing the one thing he most resisted since Kendall’s death ten years earlier: saying goodbye to her.

“I’m sure I would have had to do this at one time in our lives and I wouldn’t want to do it then either,” he writes. “I am told I need to do this, so I may continue on in life with less pain in my heart.”

His final words to Kendall, who loved chocolate, are: “Kendall, I need you to do one thing for when we are finally together. I’m not sure when that will be, but you know me, and I need to plan things out. If you could, please find out if the Milky Way is dark or sweet chocolate. Kendall, I love and miss you! Goodbye for now.”

He signed off the way he did each chapter of the book: “Kendall’s Daddy.”