A Hilo woman who lobbied successfully to change a state law so she could live in the same residential care home as her husband of more than 60 years has died.
Terry Teruko Kaide died Friday at a care home in Kailua, Oahu. She was 89.
In April 2009, Gov. Linda Lingle signed into law a bill allowing two private-pay clients to live in the same care home under a two-year demonstration project. Kaide was selected that year as one of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin’s "10 Who Made a Difference."
Kaide, a retired chief clerk of the state Circuit Court in Hawaii County, had been forced to live apart from her husband, Sidney Kazumi Kaide, for two years after her requests for an exemption to stay in the same care home were denied three times by the state. Sidney Kaide was battling bladder cancer and was bedridden.
The state at the time allowed only one private-pay client and two Medicaid clients to live in the same residential care home. Kaide and her husband both were private-pay clients.
Wheelchair-bound after three back surgeries, Terry Kaide regularly traveled to Honolulu from Hilo with her family to lobby before lawmakers at the state Capitol to change the law.
"She had the determination, the perseverance, the sense of mission," said her daughter Charlotte Kaide.
After the law took effect, the couple lived in the same care home in Kaumana for seven months before Sidney Kaide died in November 2009, a month after their 64th wedding anniversary.
Terry Kaide was born and raised in Hilo, the oldest of nine brothers and sisters. She attended Hilo High School, but left after her freshman year when her mother asked her to help her full-time at her laundry shop to help support their family.
While her siblings headed to the beach on the weekends, Kaide spent her time with a private tutor to learn how to type and take shorthand. Kaide later enrolled at Galusha Business School on Oahu to become a legal secretary. An attorney who hired her after she graduated from Galusha encouraged her to take the civil service exam.
Kaide began working as a stenographer at the 3rd Circuit Court and retired as chief clerk after 30 years of service.
"She was really a self-taught person who was always willing to go the extra mile to learn and to help others," Charlotte Kaide said.
Her daughter added that Kaide lived by the Japanese motto "Kodomo no tame ni," which means "For the sake of our children." From caring for her siblings to her own children, she always put others before herself and had a lot of compassion, Charlotte Kaide said.
"Mom was all about sacrifice," she said.
Kaide is also survived by daughters Annette Clay and Gale Sakaguchi; brother James Fujikawa; sisters Charlotte Tetsuka, Carol Boesing, Eunice Yasukawa and Jo Takayama; three grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. Funeral arrangements are pending.
