Living legacy of KC Chiefs fan Jessica Tangen was her boundless love of daughter Kyla

Jessica Tangen was born with long arms, her mother will tell you, and she always knew just what to do with them.

“Ever since she was a baby, she held and cuddled,” her mother, Lee, said in her apartment on Monday. “As she got bigger, she cuddled. I mean, she cuddled.”

At the mention of that, Jessica’s 9-year-old daughter, Kyla, hurried into the other room. She promptly returned with “Precious” — the Teddy bear her mother was given about as soon as she was born 43 years ago.

“She hugged,” Kyla said with Precious in her own arms. “Hugged me. Hugged.”

As they were leaving Jessica’s Riverside apartment on July 30 to go to a Chiefs training camp practice at Missouri Western State in St. Joseph, Jessica paused to embrace her daughter tighter and longer than usual.

Even with their ride waiting outside, she kept holding her. Maybe as long as five minutes.

Hours later, on the verge of getting the autograph of Chiefs star Travis Kelce, Jessica collapsed and died from a heart-related issue. As they reflect on her last days now, they figure Jessica either had health problems she hadn’t shared or a premonition.

That’s why they think Jessica, a 1998 North Kansas City High graduate, reminded her mother she must take custody of Kyla if anything ever happened to her. And why she gave Kyla that never-ending hug that defined her more than anything, even as she is being broadly mourned as a lifelong Chiefs fan.

As such, her death at training camp compelled a stirring nationwide outreach of consoling gestures that extended even across fan lines.

You should know that each and every one of those prayers or acts, including through the Kingdom Cares private Facebook page that raised some $3,000 and sent toys and school supplies for Kyla, has buoyed the family and said something reassuring about human nature itself.

“From Washington to New York, Florida, California, I mean just people everywhere,” said Jessica’s brother, Dan, who called the outpouring “amazing.”

He added: “To experience it firsthand, the love and caring of people out there in the world, sometimes it’s hard to see that with all that goes on day to day.”

In a certain sense, Dan is even grateful it happened where it did. If it had happened at her apartment, the support wouldn’t have been anything quite like this. There, it was a circumstance that he called “kind of how Jessica would like to be remembered.”

As a Chiefs fan, yes, but also while doing something for and with Kyla.

Jessica loved the Chiefs. All the more because she’d become acquainted with a number of them through furnishing and decorating their camp dorm rooms as part of her managerial job at Rent-A-Center.

But she lived for Kyla, with whom she shared a room in a one-bedroom apartment as she saved toward a house.

For a long while, Lee said, Jessica didn’t think she would ever have a child. And when she learned she was pregnant, Dan said, she was scared and uncertain how she could make it as a single mother.

But when she required emergency-room treatment with bleeding and doctors told her she was in the middle of a miscarriage and probably wouldn’t carry Kyla to term, her devastation also was clarifying:

She desperately wanted Kyla, it turned out.

And when she was able to have her through what Dan called “the grace of God,” she cherished her from that moment on.

That’s why she worked so many 10-or-more-hour days, always coming home with a smile, to pay for dance classes or Worlds of Fun. Or take her on trips to Disney World and Universal and the Smoky Mountains and Branson.

It was even why they were at camp that fateful day: so Kyla could interact with Chiefs players, particularly Kelce.

In the shattering aftermath, Kyla has been uplifted by her friends and family. She’s been soothed by the outpouring from strangers.

But she’s also been profoundly sustained by the everlasting gift from her mother: knowing she was loved.

That always will be Jessica’s legacy. And perhaps it can be appreciated already through the melt-your-heart, brave, precocious and funny girl she gave to the world.

It wasn’t just that Kyla summoned the uncanny strength to speak at her mother’s funeral on Aug. 7 at the White Chapel Funeral Home in Gladstone, where she moved the audience and made people laugh with such stories as the time as an 18-month-old she went for a “swim” in a toilet.

What anyone who was there will always remember, though, is that Kyla tried to greet everyone. In at least one instance, she even went out to the parking lot to hug Mosaic Life Care’s Joey Austin — who has been such a source of comfort to Kyla and the family that she also was invited to Kyla’s 10th birthday party next month.

She could tell, after all, that others were hurting.

“Well, a lot of people would be crying, and a lot of strangers I didn’t even know at all would be there … and I really felt bad if they came and cried,” Kyla said. “So with the people who were crying, I would go in the chapel, and I would hold their hand while they would go see my mom laying in the casket.”

In these agonizing weeks since her mother died, Kyla’s poise and resilience have been nothing short of remarkable. Enough so that it’s easy to worry from the outside looking in that she’s still in shock and it hasn’t all hit her yet.

But the family is encouraged that she’s talking about her mother and even that she’s done so quite directly. And however the stages of grief unfold, she will know she’s not alone.

She can count on the devotion of her grandmother and uncle and more extended family as she acclimates to a new school district here in Horton, where she soon will have her own room for the first time in the new apartment she’ll share with her grandmother.

And while she has such good friends she says she doesn’t need new ones, she’s so outgoing it’s hard to imagine she won’t soon have more.

As she’s contending with a piercing loss no child should have to bear but too many do, she’s enjoying some normalcy through such outlets as the online games she likes to play with friends and her dog, Pollyanna.

And she’ll feel her mother around her in any number of other ways.

Soon, she’ll find and put up in her new room the fairy lights Jessica had bought for their move into a house. She’ll keep taking solace in her mother’s belongings, like the sweater she’s sleeping with now and the pillow on which she can still smell her.

As soothing as it can be to wrap or surround yourself in such intimate connections, their memories of her will be as or more comforting.

Dan, who is five years older, thinks about the cassette tapes of songs, commercials and skits they made when they were kids — and the thrill he got when he learned years later that Jessica had kept them.

He thinks, too, about what he’s come to discover all the more since she died: the way she always tried to help others, as he’s learned through social media.

But what resonates most to Lee and Dan is how that instinct was hyper-focused on Kyla, who has her own fond memories to revel in.

Such as what it was like going to the most recent Super Bowl parade in the frigid weather.

“If you watched the (television) news, I was the one lying on the ground with cardboard covered with blankets,” she said. “Yeah, that was me!”

Or one of the stories she wishes she’d told at the funeral: what led to the punishment of being grounded for a week from Kelce-related material like the “New Heights” podcast.

That seemed the right sort of justice after the way she responded to a girl who had frustrated her at school: Parroting Kelce’s comeback to the mayor of Cincinnati’s trash talk leading up to the AFC Championship Game, Kyla said, “Know your role and shut your mouth, you jabroni!”

Her mom, she said, laughed and laughed as she administered the “penalty” that came from the heart that animated everything about how she treated the daughter she never stopped hugging.

The love that was the essence of his sister, Dan said, looking across the room at her greatest gift.

“Every single thing she did was for that girl,” he said. “And that’s the memory of Jessica. She’s sitting right there.”

A trust has been established in Kyla’s name. Donations can be sent to: Kyla R. Tangen Trust, c/o Union State Bank of Horton, 301 E. 15th St., Horton, KS 66439. Online donations can be made at: givesendgo.com/Krtangentrust.