Jeremy "Jeby" Shannon Kaowsan was a wonderful son, brother, father and friend to many loved ones!  He passed on December 6, 2001 with his step father Larry "Goose" Henninger.  Goose was a great dad who was always there for us and we loved him dearly .

Jeremy has a son and a daughter.  Jeremy was married once.  He served in the U S Navy on the USS Eisenhower, Virginia Beach.

This is a portion of the eulogy read at his funeral written by Kathy Lee

 To all my friends I have left behind

I say to you don’t be so blind

Don’t let the lifestyles of this world

Consume you so you can’t see hope

For  greater is the love of God

Then any deed you may have done

The only moment is the one at hand

For the next breath you take

Is at the Father’s command

A better life He has planned for you

Not only in Heaven, but here on earth too

The only time it will be too late

Is when in death you meet your fate

I’ve left behind a legacy

That will live on in your memory

Don’t be caught in the tempters snare

But let God the Father take the dare

Let Him rescue you from hopeless situations

 That you will know the true joy of salvation

Don’t be so blind my friend I pray-

Accept the love of God today.

Written by Kathy Lee read Dec. 9, 2001

Ecclesiastes 3: 1-8

There is a time for everything...

A time to reject and a time to accept....

 This poem was written by his mother Sherry Alverson.....

My little boy decided to go

I do not know why and I will never know

He told me he loved me, this is why I can’t see

Why he took my heart, and tore it apart

Left me in pain, nearly drove me insane.

God give him wings and let him sing

In your heavenly clouds

Let him sing, Lord, let him sing loud

Love always, Mom

June 2002

There are many things to say but as your sister, you know I speak to you daily.  You know I love you Jeby and we all miss you very much.  We forgive you and know you did what you felt you needed to do.  Not a day goes by that we don’t speak your name and laugh about something silly you use to do.  We see Sarah often and one day we will be reunited with Brandon.  And I know we will see you again in Heaven. Love always, Jessica 

These are some stories his best friend Chris Barber wrote about there adventure together!! (WARNING: Those with heart conditions should consult a physician before reading due to the high level of laughter caused from these readings........Chris Barber is not liable for any incidents caused due to his writings) ENJOY!!!

1 The Bush Hog, The Shot Gun and The Surprisingly Fast and Agile Snapping Turtle

    Jebby called me up early one Saturday to see if I had any plans. My plan was to sleep late and since that got shot to heck I told him I was free for the day.
    "Good. Grab some brew and meet me at the farm around noon. I have to do a little bush hoggin’ in the back pasture and I should be finished about then."
    "O.K., you wanna fish the front pond?"
    "Yeah, I just found some worm beds and I got a surprise. I found a great deal on a Mossberg Home Defender."
    "I’m there dude."
    For those from up north (above Odenville, Alabama) a Mossberg Home Defender is a cute little name  given to a type of twelve-gauge shotgun with pistol grips instead of the sissy full length stock. This is sold as a hunting rifle although the name suggest the true intent of the manufacturer, to keep out uninvited guest, half siblings, and that uncle who always smells like he works closely with pigs. This "hunting" rifle is meant to be shot from the hip. It also shoots pretty good from a lawn chair, from behind the back, or from the back of a moving pick-up truck on rural roads.
    Around noon I drove up the winding dirt road toward the front pond where a picnic pavilion and a bar-b-que pit sit facing the pond. The bar-b-que pit is almost big enough to fit an apartment full of illegal mexican lawn care technicians in with room left over for a truckload of  tortillias.
    It’s a great day for doing manual labor, the sun was out with a nice cooling breeze of around eighty degrees. I can see Jebby working the tractor as I park next to the fence separating the back pasture and front pond. I get out and unhitch the cooler from the back of my truck and wrestle it over to the table under the pavilion. Good thing I put those fifteen inch tires on the cooler instead of the thirteen inchers like that guy from U-Haul suggested. As I look up I notice my friend driving the tractor in a strange weaving pattern at top speed. I ponder this and shrug, thinking maybe there’s a deep rut or a bunch of illegal mexican lawn technicians were hiding in the brush and he was trying to chase them  back to the bar-b-que pit. Jebby finally sees me and stops the tractor next to the fence as I walk toward him.
    "Mexicans get out again?" I ask as I hand him a brew.
    "Naw, I saw a snapping turtle walking across the field toward the pond and decided to see what would happen if I hit ’im with the bush hog."
    "And..?
    "And that little sunny beach can run!"
    "Your a great motivator."
    "Thanks. Say let me park this thing and I’ll show you that new huntin’ rifle I got."
    Jebby shut off the tractor and walked to his truck. He reached behind the seat and pulled out a the shot gun and a box of shells.
    "Found it at a pawn shop for fifty bucks!" he told me as I followed him over to the pond.
    "That’s a freaking great deal, wanna sell it?"
    "Nope, I just got it this morning when I was pawning some old fishing tackle I found in a tree that blew over last week."
    I decided not to bring up to whom the tackle might have belonged to.
    "Watch this Chris." Jebby said as he loaded the rifle and set up a few bottles near the pond.
    He aimed (kinda) from the hip and fired. POOF! A fine cloud of glass particles appeared where the bottle were standing just a moment before.
    Simultaneously we turned to each other and said, "COOL!"
    At this point PETA supporters should stop reading.
    After a couple of hours we realized we had shot up all our empty bottles. Good thing he had that extra twenty boxes of shells or we might have done something constructive. We soon ran out of inanimate objects to destroy, then the turtle appeared. This pond has a profusion of the meanest snapping turtles you could imagine. This is why we no longer skinny dip in the pond. (Poor Bubba, it was reattached but, well never mind.)
    "Eh, eh, watch this Chris...."
    "Wait don’t...."
    KABOOOMMM!
    "You missed."
    "No way, he’s only about thirty feet away, it must have moved or something."
    "Well it had a movement, but it’s still standing  in the spot you told me to watch."
    "You try, wait where’s it at?"
    We both turned around and saw the turtle slip into the pond with a little plop. Jebby turned to me and smiled.
    "What about it? We need to thin ’em out anyway or they’ll eat all the small fry and then there won’t be many fish left."
    Now that wasn’t exactly true but it sounded like a plausible story if Goose caught us.
    We began taking turns firing into the pond. The fire power trained on that pond was enough to level a small country, like say China. While we replenished ourselves with the refreshments I had hauled in earlier, that !#@#$* turtle popped up for a breath. Now this pond is only a few hundred feet in diameter and fed from a spring deep under ground. So it’s deep, cold with a small creek running out and into the Little Cahaba. There was no where that turtle could have hid. So being the sporting rednecks that we were... we took turns and opened fire, turning the pond into a cauldron of foaming water and stirred up sediment. After a few moments we stopped. I thought I hit the turtle but Jebby swears he did too. Well the thing reared it’s head from the pond again, so we shot again. And again, and again. Finally we were satisfied that we had eradicated the monster from the pond.
    "Well Jebby, now what? We only got one box of shells left."
    "See that oak in the middle of the field over there?"he said pointing to the tree that was only about fifty yards away.
    "Yep."
    "Look up in the top, ain’t those starlings?"
    Sitting in the top of the oak was a flock of birds, about a hundred in all.
    "Something like that. They’re small and black but I don’t know."
    "Let’s go see"
    "Awright, but I go first."
    "O.K."
    The next day Jebby and I went back to the farm for a little fishing, which we forgot to do the day before. Goose, Jebby’s dad who also is the caretaker on the farm, walks up to us as we unload the cooler and tackle.
    "What you boys up to?"
    "Just some fishin’ and a little drinkin’"
    "You shouldn’t drink on Sunday." Goose tells us as he opens his fifth fifth of the morning.
    "Jebby, you know anything about this?" Goose says as he walks, pointing, to where the pond spills over a lip of rock into the creek.
    I walk up behind them as Jebby gets to the spot Goose is talking about. There I see about fifteen snapping turtles with various missing parts laying in a shallow depression filled with water. I felt pretty bad about that, we thought there was only one, a very, very quick moving one. Jebby is a quick thinker when faced with a possible situation.
    "Well Goose, when I was bush hoggin’ yesterday I cut close to this side of the pond and heard a gawd awful racket. I got down thinking I hit A rock and saw these turtles all chopped up. I figured they’d make good catfish food so I dumped them in and forgot about ’em."
    "Oh. that ’splains that but what about those dead birds under the oak out there? Come to think of it, why’s half the top gone out of that oak?"
    I suddenly remembered I had to be somewhere that day and left to be there. I would call Jebby later to check on things."
    Jebby called me that evening and said everything worked out fine. We talked for about an hour and promised to be free for next weekend. I told him I would bring my new shot gun that Goose sold me for fifty bucks and we’d do a little target practice.... or something.

#2 A Day In The Life?of Jebby and Me.

    Lake Purdy. Late evening. Thunderheads looming in the fading sky. The howl of the wind and flashes of lightning in the distance. These things we ignored. Jebby and I were more concerned about the secret government black ops helicopters that some people referred to as mosquitoes. They seemed attracted to the smell of Miller beer and Camel cigarettes mingled with the odor of desiccated nightcrawlers. Those damned bugs were as greedy as the Red Cross during the tornado season. Jebby discovered that various profanities and burning pine cones offered some relief from the onslaught of the large beasts.
    Jebby had called me after work that Friday, back in the summer of ’97, with the promise that the crappie were in a frenzy at our spot on Lake Purdy. Maybe he meant the mosquitoes because the crappie were as shy this night as they were the previous weekend. None the less, we had beer, cigarettes, a few Black & Mild cigars and plenty of ticked off nightcrawlers (for bait not snacks). We broke out the fishing tackle and began some serious fishing. The conversation ran from some cute girl he just met to the subject of graphite fishing rods and their conductivity for lightning on open water during a lightning storm. The fishing was not going to well. The worms either thought the fish were some type of elemental gods and selfishly sacrificed themselves to them, or my theory on the evolution of oppossible thumbs in the fish of Lake Purdy was correct. The weather worsened from severe lightning and high winds to severe lightning, high winds and tornadoes. This is the point at which we began to ponder the conductivity of our six foot graphite rods which were currently being held at a forty-five degree angle toward the sky.
    "Hey Chris, think this is a safe spot to cast from?" Jebby asked as he lashed himself with rope to a large pine tree with one hand and fished with the other. He was very dextrous in most fishing situations.
    "Should be, as long as lightning doesn’t strike that tree again. Hey you were right, those burning pine cones do seem to help thin out these skeeters."
    "Yeah, Goose taught me that once...@#*^!*! you mutha ... sorry damned skeeter ’bout  drained me dry, hand me another Miller so I can get my strength up."
    As I handed him his refreshment, a huge arc of blue lightning struck the water nearby.s
    "Hey, at least those crappie are fried now,.. oh thanks. Now that’s refreshing. Do you remember that idea we had for home brew?"
    Jebby was referring to the time a few weeks before when we were fishing the dam at Logan Martin. We got a little drunk (yes you can get too drunk to fish) and we noticed that after eight hours in the hot blistering sun we had taken on the aroma of the bait we were using, shad. Up until then we had been kidding about the recent boom of micro brews in the bars and stores. Jebby came up with a new micro brew, Shad-Ale. Take one Corona, One Shad, mix well and Whola! Shad-Ale® (now available  Shad-Ale Light®, less scales). But I digress.
    "Yeah I remember, that wasn’t funny by the way (it was). You could have warned that guy before you gave him one. Hell, we only had sixteen left at the time, seemed a waste of good bait."
    "He got over it."
    "Does he still have that warrant out for you in St. Clair?"
    "Yeah, but we can still sneak up and fish there this weekend."
    "Sounds like a plan. Is that a funnel cloud?"
    At this juncture, we decided this trip was a waste of effort. We vowed next time to just save time and throw in the bucket of nightcrawlers and cut out all this casting business.
    CRACK...BOOM!
    "Chris!!!"
    "What? Whoah!  Cut the rope before you run next time you dumbass."
    "Oh really, well I thought the rope was already burnt through by now, you ready?"
    "I guess, help me get my tackle box out of that tree."
    "Just leave it it’ll be there tomorrow, besides I don’t think we could reach it at that height. Maybe the wind will knock it down a few yards by morning."
    "O.K., lets go maybe we can still make it to the Central before anymore trees block the road."
    "Lets go. Think we should stop by your place and clean up first?"
    "Naw, this way we can get the round table to ourselves. Hell maybe even the whole freaking bar."
    "Then who’s gonna serve us?"
    "Point taken, lets go to my place and clean up first."
    Jebby and I spent the rest of the evening at the Central Club regaling everyone about the size and amount of the crappie at Lake Purdy. I think one or two people actually bought into the story. As I sat back to let Jebby take over the narrative I sipped my shad free beer and thought "This is what it’s all about". I’m not sure what
"it" is but that evening, as the storm raged through the trailer parks, I was pretty sure on the "about" part.

    Chris Barber
   
#3 Best Friends and Other Once In A Lifetime Events

    A friend is someone to hang out with on a Saturday night. A best friend is someone you hang out with for life. I have several friends in my life, my wife, Rob & Jenifer Landsdell, Danny Howard, and Bryant Beavers to name a few. But in all my life there has there has been only a couple of best friends. My wife is one of these (I know she’ll read this so excuse the browny points) and Jeremy Kawison. Jeremy ,or Jebby as we called him, was a person that the first thing you noticed was his personality. It was the type of friendly personality that expanded and made itself felt throughout any room he entered.  (unfinished....)


#4 The Road Yacht Incident and Theories on Dimensional Warps as Storage Space In Detroit Steel

    Jebby was a couple of  years younger than me and therefore I was his chauffeur for a while. Then the day came when Jebby came of age to possess a drivers licenses of his own. When he called to tell me he bribed his way past the test and had his license, I felt a chill creep up my spine. Now Jebby could drive just fine, as long as there were no stops, curves or other drivers in the vicinity. After a few months of practice he came over to my house to pick me up for a party that Friday being held at a friends house in Brompton. Since Jebby didn’t own his own vehicle he borrowed his mothers car. Borrowed may be the wrong term by some definitions, lets just say his mom, Sherry, didn’t object. Mainly because she was asleep at the time of the borrowing.
    Up until that evening I had never seen his mother’s car. Turns out the thing that cruised up my drive was something called a New Yorker. It was blue and silver in various patches and shades with tail fins to boot. That car was built back in the days when the designers thought that the more steel in a car the better, in case you ever wanted to mount a ten inch gun on top and drive into some middle eastern country for gas. We measured that car, at a later time, and discovered it to be about nineteen feet long (not counting other cars, deer, stop signs or trees that may have been embedded in the grill at that particular time) and a little less wide than a four lane highway. Jebby wrestled the New Yorker, or "road yacht" as we came to call it, into my drive from the road. This involved turning but, luckily my yard had about an acre of flat, even grass on both sides of the drive entrance. For Jebby to turn the car he  had to get a running start from one side of the mammoth front bench seat (some would call it a sectional sofa) and leap onto the steering wheel and pull down as he fell the ten feet to the floor board, then the car would go in the corresponding direction in which he fell. Sometimes this would actually work enough to steer. Jebby eventually finished his turn and parked the car. I hiked the two acres to the car and tried to open the door. I say try because you don’t just walk up and swing open a half ton door. Jebby would ram the door from the inside while I stood with both feet firmly planted on the side of the car and pulled. After a few minute something popped, and it was not the car.
    "Just hop in the window Chris, we gotta go the store first. The party started half an hour ago."
    "Exactly how do I reach the window, pray tell." I asked as I stood looking up at the car door. I was only six two after all.
    "Use the wheel well to climb up. Then swing over toward the opening and hook your foot on it. I’ll grab your ankle and haul you in."
    After another hour of practice I made it into the car with only a mild concussion.
    "What we need from the store?"as if it wasn’t a ritual which we preformed on every excursion.
    All together now, you know the list.
    "Camels, Beer, and a Mountain Dew."
    "Can we pick up some Black & Milds?"
    After we left the quickie mart, Jebby guided the road yacht onto highway 78. He engaged the cruise control which was an eight foot pole that he jammed through the steering wheel and wedge onto the gas pedal. Then he got up and walked to the back seat to check on our cargo. I decided to adjust the cruise control several times during his journey to the back seat until we reached our destination.
    "Give me a hand, get out and catch the beer as I drop it to ya." Jebby tells me from the passenger window.
    "Sure, OUCH!"
    "Sorry, eheheh...."
    The party was your typical collection of underage drunk guys hitting on underage sober girls. It was loud and smoky in the house but we toughed it out for a few hours. The party wound down and we decided it was time to go.
We climbed into the road yacht (good thing our buddy had a trampoline) and headed out. We decided it would be fun to sail the road yacht around the backroads to sober up before we began the dangerous task of sneaking in our houses. Well apparently another unknown feature of the yacht was a broken fuel gauge. We ran out of gas about half a mile from a gas station on the edge of town. It was about 2:00 A.M., give or take a day. Being the designated passenger I was a touch more sloshed than Jebby.
    "DAMN IT *^$^#@!@!$#%!!!"
    "What’s up Jebby?"
    "No gas. I’m going to walk back to that station we passed and get some."
    "Some what?"
    "Some gas, just get out and come on. Can ya walk?"
    "Sure...."
    Mistake number one.
    We walked (well he walked, I swerved, weaved and fell) to the gas station. For some reason all this seemed funny to me at the time. I got the giggles just as we reached the gas station. Maybe it was the carbon dioxide from the broken exhaust in the yacht that was affecting me.
    Jebby swung around as we reached the door to say "Shut UP! You’re gonna get us in trouble you &%#@!"
    "SSSsssuuuuuuurrre thing bud." I said in my perfectly controlled and sober manner.
   
    In we went. I managed a pretty good imitation of a duck walking while smoking crack. Jebby placed me next to him in front of the counter and told me to stand still. I stood there weaving only slightly as I began to zone out. He turned to the swarthy, lunchroom reject looking woman (?) with a hairy mole on her lip  behind the counter.
    "Excuse me ’mam, we ran out of gas a ways down the road. Do you have any type of container I could use to put gas in?"
    "Let me see if I got sumtin’ in the janitor’s closet." she said in her best imitation of a swarthy, lunchroom lady reject. Her mole moved. I swear.
    About this time I noticed something that was hidden by the woman earlier. Porn magazines. Not just Playboy and Penthouse but those fetish types that just ooze raunchiness and pics of obese, sick porn stars. All I could see were the titles. That was enough. I went beyond giggles to hysterical, bellowing, laughter.
    "Hey Jeb, look at that!"
    "Ssshhh..."
    "No man, look. Big Butts, Big Boobs, Things Your Dog Wouldn’t Lick", these were the titles of the magazines I read aloud at the top of my lungs.
    "*%%*$! Chris, ya going to get us busted! Be quiet!" Jeby turns a pretty shade of reddish purple when he gets angry.
    About this time the swarthy lady comes back, followed closely by her mole. She eyeballs us with that "I’m calling the cops" look.
    "You boys need anything else"before she calls the cops. "Is he drunk?"she ask Jebby as she points to me.
    "No ’mam, just stupid and loud."
    Swarthy lady hands us an old milk jug and Jebby fills it up with gas. Just enough gas to pour in the half gallon carb in the yacht. We would have to make anther trip to get more gas.
    When we get back to the yacht, Jeb puts me in the back seat to keep me out of trouble. He forgot about there being an extra sixer in the back. While Jebby went around to the trunk for something, maybe to let out those four band members we put  in earlier that evening, I began to sip on a beer. Now Jebby had left the trunk up while he went to the open hood to infuse a little go juice into the carb. The trunk lid was about the size of a main sail from an old three mast sailing ship. This may be why I never noticed the Leeds cop that pulled up behind us as I laid back in the seat to contemplate the inside of my eyelids.
    Tap. Tap. Tap.
    "Stop it Jeb."
    "What’cha doing? Car problems?" The cop asks Jeb. He hasn’t noticed me in the car.
    "Ran out of gas, you know how it is."
    "Where’s your friend from the store?" damn that woman.
    "Uh, in the back. I was just taking him home for the evening."
    "You two been drinkin’’?"
    "He has." Thanks Jeb. "I was just going to drive him on home."
    "Get him out of the car."
    "Come on Chris."
    Buy this time I had sobered up a considerable amount. Amazing what a sense of getting busted and going to jail can do for a person. I stumble out of the car and stand with Jeb while the cop looks at me then looks in the back seat.
    "How many have you had?"
    "Just two beers."
    "Really... pull out the empties and set them on the roof of the car. Now."
    Being the fine law abiding citizen I am, I did as I was told. After a few minutes the cop looks at the roof of the car. I followed his gaze to the modern glass sculpture that the roof, trunk and hood had become. I didn’t think the car had that much cargo space. It was only two hundred cubic feet inside the back of the yacht after all. I decided  to tell the cop about my theory on dimensional space warps and there nexus points located in large quantities of steel. You see I think if you put enough steel in one area, say the size of a fine Detroit  built road yacht, the magnetic disturbance would cause a warp of the surrounding spatial dimensions of the universe thus creating a vortex into which all types of objects could become trapped. Especially twelve ounce beer bottles due to  some unknown quirk of the universe.
    I looked the cop straight in the eye to tell him this, but instead what came out of my mouth was "three?"
    "I see. Well It’s late and Since you friend was taking you home anyway  I’ll let y’all go. But if I ever see you two again I’ll put you butts in jail so fast you’ll never know what hit you."
    I stood next to jeb and felt a wave of relief flood through me. I put my hands in my pocket and sighed. Apparently this is something you don’t do during a search. It seems to spook cops.
    "GET you’re @#@%@!%%(! hands out were I can see ’em!" the cop yells at me while holding a gun in his shaking hands. I tell ya, he was a fast draw. I remove my hands from my pockets and keep from soiling myself while he put his gun back into his holster.
    "Don’t ever do that during a search boy or you’ll get shot."
    I thought he could have explained that better before he pulled his sidearm on me. The cop made us put all the bottles in the ditch (EPA be damned) and told us to leave. Well being that I didn’t really pay much attention during the search thing until he pulled the gun, I kinda remember him taking our licenses when he first caught us. Jeb was already heading back to the drivers side of the yacht when I ask the cop if I could have my license back.
    "What? Boy I gave you your license back an hour ago. You trying to get smart with me?"
    I was confused and started to argue with him. Before I could express my opinion about his uncivilized demeanor, Jeb came around to me and pulled my wallet out of my pocket and handed it to me. I opened it up and saw my license and decided to shut up and get in the yacht. I figure it was more of that dimensional warp phenomenon but kept that idea to myself. Jeb was allowed to get the rest of the gas for the road yacht and then drove me home. I thanked him for the fun and excitement of the evening and said we should do this again sometime. He mumbled something about my not knowing my something from something in the ground and drove off in a cloud of dust and smoke. Guess he needed to get home before his mom woke up. Well we’ll take my car next weekend so he doesn’t feel so rushed next time. The boy really needs to keep away from so much stress.

memorial created  by Jessica Akins jrakins01@windstream.net