Kirk Thomas Maddox

He continued to play football throughout his school years. He also loved to swim and did the best cannon balls. He made everything fun and others were just drawn to him.

He loved the outdoors and liked to play golf and go fishing. He had also become an avid duck hunter. On those days, he would be up before dawn. He loved those early mornings and being on the water for sunrise.

He was the life of every family gathering and friends were always visiting. Kirk could dance with the best. He had a rhythm that just made us all smile. Kirk was always busy, busy living life.

He was just as busy in college. He participated in campus activities, often volunteering to help with whatever was needed. He was a member of the SHAPE Club and spent most his summers taking extra courses and completing his volunteer hours in physical therapy. Becoming a physical therapist was his dream and he was determined to achieve that goal.

He studied constantly and was very focused on his grades. He had just completed his internship and had been hired as a Physical Therapy Tech at Dynamix Physical Therapy.

When Covid came along and Dynamix was forced shut down, he found a little job on a farm in Dresden with his friend, Nathan. Kirk wasn’t one to sit still for long. He liked being active & meeting new people.

Kirk had also embarked on a journey, while in college, to become healthy. He changed his diet, exercised and had an extremely positive attitude. He lost his life just three years into that journey, after a day on the farm, while on an evening run. He was 22.

He collapsed just a little over a mile into his run that night from sudden cardiac arrest. This is when the heart suddenly loses function, often due to an electrical abnormality in the heart. Life saving efforts failed, leaving us with a gaping hole in our family.

Kirk was so proud of himself for his weight loss and was determined to achieve his dream of becoming a physical therapist, and to live his life in service to others. How this dream will never come to fruition is beyond belief for those who love him.

He was just days from graduating with honors from the University of Tennessee at Martin with a degree in Health and Human Performance and he was looking forward to attending graduate school to earn his doctorate in physical therapy.

Kirk was grounded in his faith, kind, and good natured. He had committed his life to Christ just a few months before. We will never understand why this happened, not in this life. What we do know is that when the world lost Kirk, it lost a true gift of God.