Kathleen Turner-Hubbard
July 13, 1952-June 2, 2016
Stanford, California
Kathleen Adelle Turner-Hubbard died peacefully at her home in Stanford, California, on June 2, 2016 at the age of 63, following a courageous four-year battle with brain cancer.
Born in Washington, Pennsylvania, to Louis and Alma Turner, she spent her early years in West Virginia, and at the age of 16 she and her family moved to California.
After earning a degree in nursing from San Diego State University, she worked at the Children's Hospital in San Diego and then became the first health and safety nurse at the Salk Institute. Wishing to advance her clinical abilities, she enrolled in a nurse practitioner program at University of California, San Diego, and on completion began serving as a family practice clinician at Kaiser Permanente. Throughout her career as an NP, she worked for a number of other organizations, including Planned Parenthood and Athens County Visiting Nurses Association in Ohio, University of California, San Francisco, Palo Alto Veterans Affairs, Palo Alto Medical Foundation, and most recently Stanford Health Care. Throughout this time she not only improved the lives of thousands of patients but also served as a mentor and preceptor to many nursing students.
Kathleen had a lifelong dedication to learning. Besides certifications as both an adult and pediatric nurse practitioner at UCSD, she did graduate work in oncology and earned a master's degree in geriatrics from UC San Francisco. Late in her career, she decided she wanted to switch primarily to teaching and was just a few months short of completing her doctorate from Samuel Merritt University when illness forced her to retire.
Kathy met her husband Phil through mutual friends when he was a graduate student in linguistics at UC San Diego. After a brief courtship and engagement, they married. They lived as a couple for the first four years of their marriage before expanding the family with their first son Jeff and then moving to Athens, Ohio, where Phil had taken a university position. She gave birth to her second son Brad there and returned to the California Bay Area in 1986 to stay permanently. She would tell anyone who asked her that she found the greatest satisfaction in her life was raising them to be hardworking, honest and caring young men.
Kathy loved the outdoors and hiking. She was an avid amateur photographer, visiting many national parks and historical sites in the U.S. and abroad, capturing them with her Nikon. She traveled frequently with her husband and sons to Hawaii, after falling in love with the Big Island on a family trip there in the early '90s. Once her sons were grown, Kathy traveled extensively across much of Europe and Asia, embracing a wide variety of cultures and making friends along the way. She delighted in the many differences in the peoples of the world, experiencing and accepting their rich diversity.
Kathy was also a skilled chef, frequently preparing her favorite recipes as well as experimenting with cuisines from places she had visited, places she loved and places she was looking forward to going to. She shared her passion for cooking with her sons, insisting they know how to prepare healthy and delicious food both for themselves and for those they cared about.
She leaves behind family, friends and colleagues who believe the world is diminished with her passing. She would want them to think instead of what they can do with the time that remains to them to make it better.
She is survived by her father, Louis Turner of San Bernardino, California; her husband, Philip Hubbard of Stanford, California; her sons, Jeffrey Hubbard of Lausanne, Switzerland, and Bradley Hubbard of Oakland, California; her brother, Michael Turner of Camano Island, Washington; her sister, Lynn Kelly of Rancho Cucamonga, California; and her brother, James Turner of Diamond Bar, California.
