With Wind and Will, She Took Life for a Dance

Kim O’Brien met Sam Swaim four years ago at a New Year’s Eve party in the San Fernando Valley.

“She asked me to dance,” Sam recalled at her funeral on Thursday. The party ended, but the music played on.

They married and settled in Oxnard. Kim immersed Sam and little Brittany, his daughter from a previous marriage, in her other great love--Irish dancing.

Kim Swaim died last week at 33. She had cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that gradually fills the lungs with mucus, destroying vital air sacs. There is no cure.

Nobody danced at Kim’s funeral, but the spirit was there.

In full regalia, an honor guard of 36 students from Ventura’s Claddagh School of Irish Dancing solemnly lined up in two columns. Each held aloft a pair of dancing shoes as several hundred mourners at Conejo Mountain Memorial Park slowly filed past them.

“Straighten those arms!” ordered Maire O’Connell, the school’s director, in a brogue resounding of her native Galway. “Only a few more minutes now.”

O’Connell said she couldn’t believe Kim was gone.

“Ah, she was a bundle of laughs,” she said. “And such a passion for dancing. . . .”

In her teens and 20s, Kim was an award-winner, a champion competitive dancer in a discipline that requires ample amounts of wind and will, as well as a pair of shock-proof feet.

Irish dancing means straight-backed, arms-at-sides, mile-a-minute legwork. The popularity of “Riverdance” catapulted it into the limelight in the U.S., and it didn’t hurt the Claddagh School in Ventura, one of the largest in the West. But Kim immersed herself in it when she was a kid, long before “Riverdance.”

“She was the most beautiful soft-shoe dancer we’ve ever seen,” O’Connell said. “The older girls know her as the one they always wanted to be. . . .”

Kim’s younger sister Colleen also was an Irish dancer. She died of cystic fibrosis when she was 10.

But Kim soldiered on, setting up goals and mowing them down. She skied and she danced, and indulged in what a relative called “goofy spontaneity.” She got a job at Amgen--where Sam also works--and didn’t let anything as mundane as a debilitating illness sideline her.

“Sometimes it was hard to believe she had a respiratory illness,” joked her cousin, Kathy Watkins. “My father used to call her ‘a set of lungs with a mouth.’ ”

Seven years ago or so, dancing became too much for her. But she was perennially active around the school.

“She was always there with her boombox, dragging kids around to perform at the hospitals and convalescent homes,” said Donna Jordan, the mother of a 10-year Claddagh student. “The old folks love to see those babies in their little dresses.”

In 1996, she would have died without a lung transplant. Two of Kim’s cousins each donated a lobe. Claddagh donated $20,000 from raffles, candy sales and a casino night.

The people at the school were planning to pitch in again this summer. Cystic fibrosis is one of those diseases that can devastate almost every vital organ. Kim’s lung transplant had been successful but now one of her kidneys was shot, and so was a portion of her liver.

A surgical team at the University of Southern California was standing by. Kim’s husband Sam and a good friend had volunteered as donors, and were about to undergo elaborate testing.

But Kim’s health deteriorated over the summer. Never again strong enough for surgery, she died Aug. 2.

The casino night that was to help with her transplant expenses will still go on. Local companies have stepped forward as sponsors. The funds will be used for funeral costs and family debt associated with Kim’s illness.

The event will be Saturday night at Oxnard’s Casa Sirena, which simultaneously will host the Claddagh School’s annual regional competition. More than 1,000 dancers will show up. If Kim had been healthier, she would have been there encouraging and cajoling, taking pictures, fussing over Sam and Brittany, issuing boisterous advice from the sidelines, frantically keeping tallies, and issuing awards to the lucky winners.

Meanwhile, Sam will be performing his own kind of tribute. He’ll be doing jigs and reels at the competition, dancing his heart out along with other Claddagh students.

“Kim would say, ‘Get out there and do it,’ ” said O’Connell, the school’s director. “ ‘Don’t feel sad on my behalf,’ she’d say. ‘Just get out there and do a good job.’ ”

Steve Chawkins can be reached at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.