When 18-year-old James Lynch graduated from Lawrence High School in 2017, he was dreaming of a movement for widespread kindness. Just weeks before his sudden death from a drug overdose, he told his mother, Kara Lynch, that he wanted to start a campaign, and he already had a name for it.
“He said, ‘I want to start a movement…I want people to know a person can be really troubled, and they can be really messed up in many ways, and they still have so much to bring, to give,’” Lynch recalled. “And then he said, ‘I want to call it Kindness Just Because.’”
A vibrant teal is the color by which Lynch remembers her late son. Soon after he got the idea, she took him to pick out a shirt for his movement. James is buried in the teal shirt he picked out. In white lettering, the shirt reads “Kindness Just Because”. Now, shirts like it are worn by hundreds of students at LHS.
That’s because after his passing, Lynch took up the movement in her son’s memory. Soon, her work brought James’s message back to the community at LHS he had called home: the Including People Selflessly (IPS) program. Led by Susie Mička, IPS took on the movement in 2021, when Lawrence High was struggling to recover from the damage of Covid-19.
“We’d had a really bad year coming back from covid and things needed to change…the world had forgotten how to be nice to one another,” Mička explained. “That’s one of the reasons we jumped on it.”
More than that though, Mička explained, there was the memory of James.
“The other story here is about healing from grief…[Kindness Just Because] gave something to hold on to,” Mička said. Her voice broke. ‘We’ve got to help them hold onto this, because he has to mean more than that last moment,’ she said.
Now, the movement has taken on it’s 5th year at Lawrence High and throughout the Lawrence community as a week-long campaign led by the IPS program.
When James explained his vision for Kindness Just Because, he was drawing on a life of often-unseen hardships, throughout and beyond high school.
“He was friendly, he was outgoing, he was all of these things, but he also never felt good enough,” Lynch explained. “God, it was devastating to watch.”
When he began struggling with addiction, many of his friends quietly backed away.
“Of course they did,” Lynch said. “Of course they did because they didn’t know what to do. So he felt more and more lonely, and more isolated.”
Despite hardship, James still thrived on connection; a reputation of inclusivity and kindness began to cement itself in his identity. History teacher Valerie Schrag remembered this reputation. James was in her class his senior year of high school.
“James’ mission in life was to make life better for anyone he met,” Schrag recalled. “That was particularly powerful, because he had faced some challenges in high school, and he had figured out how to get beyond them and not let them stop him,” she said.
It’s that reputation that today’s Kindness Just Because campaign strives to carry forward. Tackling many of the same struggles that plagued James’ life, the movement’s impact has touched lives far removed from James himself. And maybe, Lynch wondered, that’s the point.
“I think it doesn’t take long before it’s not a story about James,” she said. “And I think that’s the way it should be.”
Mička agreed. To her and Lynch, the campaign was an unexpected gift in the wake of his passing.
“The timeliness of him handing off that campaign to his mom the way he did,” Mička explained, “I don’t know if I believe in god, but thats like, whoa.”
Now, Lynch said she knows the true power of the kindness to which James clung.
“The one thing that I know now that I didn’t know before he died, is that love is much more powerful than death,” she explained. “It could have ended very different, but instead, we were left with this gift of sharing…because what is kindness really? It’s love. “
For Lynch, there’s a hope that goes beyond even the movement itself.
“I hope there’s a heaven, because that’s where he would have wanted to be all along,” she said. “He wanted a place where the only thing that exists is love.”
