Danette Duckworth wasn’t going to let death stand in the way of her long-standing love for the St. Louis Blues.

When she found out last fall that her cancer had come back and spread, she started telling her husband, Ken Duckworth, 61, her final wishes. She wanted to be buried in the jersey of her favorite player: Chuck Lefley, a forward for the Blues in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, who had given Danette a hockey stick at a game when she was 18 years old. She cherished it her entire life.

Ken was determined to honor her dying wish. In November, the couple got a special Lefley jersey made with the number 25 on it.

Danette got to wear it once.

Ken and Danette both grew up in the small Missouri town of St. Clair. They became friends in high school when she was 16 and he was 15. She was the only girl Ken knew who subscribed to Hockey Digest, Baseball Digest, Hockey News and Sporting News. He would read the magazines with her in study hall. One day she came over to his house and played table hockey with him.

“Of course, I beat her,” he says.

Their friendship turned into something more following high school, when Ken joined the Navy. They kept in touch through letters and saw each other on his visits home. On their first date, he took her to a Blues game.

“That night I lay in bed, and I knew I was going to marry that girl,” Ken says.

He did marry her on Sept. 6, 1980. They spent all their wedding money on Blues season tickets. The family never missed a game -- every preseason, regular season and postseason game. If they couldn’t go watch it live, they watched on television.

The games brought out a different side of Danette’s sweet demeanor.

“Shoot the dang puck!” she would scream at the top of her lungs at the TV.

“Pipe down,” Ken would tell her.

Their daughters laughed to see their sweet mom lose her cool and holler during the games. Jenni Hills, 28, of De Soto, Missouri, said her earliest memories are of watching hockey with her mom. For years, Danette made one prediction over and over: The Blues would win the Stanley Cup the year she died.

Two years ago, Danette was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of pancreatic cancer. She couldn’t go to many games after that because of the rounds of chemotherapy. But she never missed watching -- and yelling at -- the TV. Ken, her husband of 38 years, said the last few weeks of her life were extremely difficult.

“She was the most resilient, mentally strongest person I have ever known,” he said in a eulogy he delivered at her funeral. He described their last moments together.

“Last Friday, she was in much pain … I sat with Danette all night, holding her hand, and softly talked. We prayed for God to take her home. Sometime around midnight, she took off her wedding rings and handed them to me. I told her she wasn’t going to die without those rings on her finger.

“As the sun began to rise, with the fireplace softly glowing brightly, I played Alan Jackson singing ‘Softly and Tenderly’ on her phone.

“After he finished, I told her I loved her and it was OK to go. I know she heard me and acknowledged me with a faint squeeze of the hand.

“Moments later, she slipped into a coma.”

He slipped her wedding rings back on her finger.

Danette was 62 when she died on Feb. 2.

Her beloved team was in next-to-last place in the Central Division. But when she knew she was dying, she figured it was their year.

“If they make it, you spend the money and go,” she told her husband a month before she died.

Ken breaks down into tears when he talks about how much this Stanley Cup Final would have meant to her.

“She’d be literally overjoyed,” he said.

Once again, Ken is honoring his wife’s final wishes.

“I’m spending the money and taking them,” he said. He and his daughters attended Game 3 in St. Louis.

Hills made a big poster with her mother’s picture, and they wore special T-shirts with her mom’s name. The shirts said: “She waited 49 years for this, and now she has the best seat in the house.”

Years ago, I overheard two parents talking at a fifth-grade graduation.

“We’ve got seven more years,” one father said, after which he and his wife were headed to Florida. He was sharing the countdown to his kid’s Big Graduation on one of the Little Graduation days. It may not have been the most sentimental response to the ceremony, which also featured a slideshow and ice cream, but I smiled in commiseration.

Who among us hasn’t done that same math at some point? This dad was just saying the quiet part loud.

In fairness, by the time high school graduation rolls around, many parents have already sat through kindergarten, fifth-grade and middle school graduations. I’m not mad about any of these. We may not have had the same ceremonial markers at younger grades growing up, but we also didn’t have to worry about dodging bullets during a math test. My point is that each generation has its own reasons to party, or at least let out a collective sigh of relief, before turning the page.

Our generation has grumbled about kids’ participation trophies and over-the-top “promposals,” while shrugging at kindergartners hiding in cabinets during mass-shooting intruder drills. Maybe it’s easier to get caught up by the small stuff that feels controllable rather than the big stuff that makes us feel powerless. Consider the posts on countless parenting groups’ pages: Someone’s upset because of a school district’s swimsuit policy at pool parties. Another parent is irritated about a teacher’s note on an unwelcome bag of chips in a school lunch.

Most of the chatter is about the small grievances and demands of daily parenting. And this makes sense. It’s what we are dealing with day-to-day.

But I do wonder how this depletes our focus from a more fundamental risk facing our children: How do we prevent the kind of gun violence in schools that is a regular feature of the news cycle now? Obviously, people have different ideas on how to do this. But think back to our school days. Can you imagine someone giving your English teacher a gun to use in a possible shootout in the hallway? It seems too ludicrous to even imagine, but this is a real idea that lawmakers, particularly those beholden to the National Rifle Association, have put out there.

The probability of a child dying in a school shooting is still very low. But the chances of a child carrying the scars of living through a mass shooting are significantly higher. Last year, the Washington Post did a yearlong analysis on the collateral damage of the “uniquely American crisis” of mass shootings in our schools. They found that, beginning with Columbine in 1999, more than 187,000 students attending at least 193 primary or secondary schools have experienced a shooting on campus during school hours.

The report noted that the number of children who have been shaken by gunfire in the places they go to learn exceeds the population of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

It made me wonder: What would our response have been if nearly 200,000 children had been sickened by school lunches? Food poisoning would have far less of a long-term impact on a child than surviving a shooting. But I bet we would have gotten rid of questionable lunches right away.

In the meantime, we’ve let a nightmare haunt our kids from kindergarten to college graduations. We’ve let them live with the anxiety of a classroom turning into a bloody war zone.

We don’t spend nearly as much time talking about things we haven’t been able to protect our children from, partly because there are countless immediate things for parents to worry about. But this new reality we’ve created for our kids has changed my countdown clock at these minor league graduations. When my youngest finished middle school this year, I was proud of the young man he’s becoming and excited about high school for him.

But in the back of my mind, I was relieved another school year had gone by without incident.

Four more years of high school, then hopefully, four years of college.

Along the way, I’m letting more of the small stuff slide.

Every parent sending a child off to college wants to know that they’re going to be safe as they pursue their education. Unfortunately, sexual assault continues to plague most campuses.

Some victims file complaints with their schools’ Title IX offices -- either instead of or in addition to pursuing criminal charges -- but what happens then? If you haven’t been personally involved in a Title IX investigation and hearing, it’s hard to imagine how it might unfold. We’re familiar with scenes from criminal trials, but this process isn’t like that, even though the university may be making decisions about crimes as serious as rape.

The Title IX process has been the center of political and media attention in Missouri lately, as legislators and lobbyists pushed bills designed to better protect students accused of sexual assault. The Kansas City Star reported last month that Richard McIntosh, a Jefferson City lobbyist, launched a campaign to change Title IX law for every campus in the state after his son was accused and subsequently expelled from Washington University last year through the school’s Title IX process.

The proposed law’s platoon of lobbyists and supportive lawmakers have made this an issue of protecting due process rights for the accused.

So is the process, as it stands now, unfair? I reached out to Lori White, vice chancellor for student affairs at Washington University, where I have taught college writing as an adjunct, to explain the process.

Here’s what White says happens when a student makes a complaint.

-- The student is advised of their options: They can simply get the emotional and psychological support they need from the university’s resources, or they can choose to go through the criminal process, the student conduct process, or both. The support is available regardless of any other action taken.

-- The student decides which path to pursue.

-- If the student files a complaint with the Title IX office, an administrator meets with the student, takes the complaint and determines if it meets the requirement for a Title IX investigation, which looks into sexual assault, misconduct and harassment. If it does, the person accused is notified that a complaint has been filed.

-- An investigator employed by the university interviews both parties separately and any witnesses that either party provides. There is no limit on the number of witnesses.

-- The student who files the complaint can request another investigator from the university’s investigative team if they have any reservations about the hired investigator.

-- The investigator writes a detailed report about the information collected, which is seen by both parties in the case. Either party may provide any additional information after reading the report. The report is delivered to a three-person panel, which typically includes a faculty member, staff person and student. The panel calls each party separately to tell their side of the story and answer questions. The panel may also call and question witnesses from the report.

-- Both the complainant and accused are allowed to have one support person during the hearing, which can be a friend, parent, attorney, or whomever the student chooses. However, only the complainant and accused can speak during the hearing.

-- The panel issues a finding of either “responsible” or “not responsible.” The panel uses the standard of “a preponderance of the evidence,” similar to what is used in civil cases and other cases involving violations of student codes of conduct. It’s a lower standard than “beyond a reasonable doubt,” used in criminal trials.

-- If the accused person is found “responsible,” there is a range of consequences including probation, educational sanctions, suspension or expulsion. A report is given to both parties explaining the decision.

-- Either party can appeal the decision to the university provost, whose decision is final.

White shared data on cases that have gone through the Title IX process at Washington University from 2013 to 2018. In that time, there were 45 cases investigated by a contractor hired by the university. The accused was found responsible in 25 cases; seven of those 25 were expelled, eight suspended, and 10 got probation or an educational sanction or no-contact order with the student who made the complaint.

Washington University’s crime statistics, obtained through the Clery Report, indicate there were 122 reports of rape on campus from 2013 to 2017. The fact that only 45 Title IX investigations were pursued over a nearly concurrent time period could be due to complainant students’ decisions not to pursue the cases, White said.

“The process is designed to be fair and equitable to all parties,” White said.

The university joined other colleges in the state to speak against the proposed legislative changes to the process, which they say would discourage victims from reporting sexual assaults and misconduct.