Melissa Joy Kendall

Melissa Joy Kendall, 40, of Lake of the Pines, California, passed peacefully on the evening of July 26, 2026, surrounded by the people who loved her most, after facing a rare and aggressive cancer with more courage, faith, and grace than words can hold.

Melissa was born on the evening of January 14, 1986, at Portland Adventist Medical Center, the deeply wanted third daughter of Chuck and Susie Williams. She joined big sisters Tricia and Kelly (who, at ages eight and six, insisted on helping name her, landing on Melissa Joy), and at five she became the proud big sister of her brother, Charles “Joey.” Known as Missy in her early years, she once told a friend at church that all of her birthdays came in January, and the family never let her forget it. “All her birthdays come in January” became a saying they repeated well into her adulthood.

She spent her first fourteen years in and around Portland, Oregon and Battle Ground, Washington before her family moved to Napa, California in 2000. From the start she was an athlete, playing basketball, volleyball, and flag football, and spending her summers on the water as an accomplished water skier, wakeboarder, and wake surfer, with snow skiing and snowboarding filling the winters. A senior-year mission trip to Peru, working alongside dental students at a clinic, first pointed her toward the career that would define her professional life.

Melissa earned a degree in Liberal Arts and Spanish from Pacific Union College, studied abroad near Valencia, Spain, and went on to Loma Linda University School of Dentistry, graduating in 2013 as a Registered Dental Hygienist. She began her career at the practice of Dr.Mark Porco in Lincoln. A lifelong artist, she developed her craft in her college years and never set it down.

In early 2021, while covering for a colleague at a dental clinic in Colfax, Melissa met Jim Kendall, her last patient of the day. Working in an unfamiliar office, she had to hunt for where things were kept in her room, and that search led to more conversation than a typical dental visit allows. Jim could not stop thinking about her. A week later, he took a chance and sent flowers to the office, along with a card that echoed something they had talked about, her love of hiking. “Before you can reach the zenith of any mountain, it begins with a first step,” he wrote, leaving his number and an invitation to meet for coffee. Melissa gave him that chance, a friendship grew, and it turned into love. Jim proposed on October 23, 2021, atop Mount Storm King overlooking Crescent Lake, and the two were married on February 22, 2022, at 2:00 PM, on a day that somehow held rain, sun, snow, hail, hats, and an abundance of love.

Around this same season, Melissa began to notice something was wrong. Intermittent pain in her left hip, first felt in January 2022, grew into a noticeable limp by April, and at the end of May her hip fractured. In July 2022 she was officially diagnosed with a rare and aggressive cancer, Undifferentiated Pleomorphic Sarcoma. She underwent three months of chemotherapy, and when the tumor proved unresponsive, she made the courageous, lifesaving decision to undergo a hemipelvectomy on Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 2022, the amputation of her left leg and half of her pelvis, a day she would ever after celebrate as her “Alive Day.” She refused to let it slow her down, resolved simply to “do life differently.” Ten months later, having never played organized soccer, she read the rules on the flight over and took the field in Warsaw, Poland as a member of the inaugural United States Women’s Amputee Soccer Team, wearing number 4. The following spring she organized a soccer clinic for the Greater Sacramento area, determined to show others that an active life does not end with the loss of a limb.

More than anything, Melissa wanted to be a mother, and on October 21, 2024, she and Jim welcomed their daughter, Kaylee Mae. She carried Kaylee with half a pelvis and boundless joy, and she poured herself completely into every moment of motherhood.

Just two weeks after Kaylee was born, scans brought devastating news: the cancer had returned, this time in her right pelvis. Melissa met it the only way she knew how. She faced round after round of chemotherapy and fought through every one of them, waking each morning and choosing the fight again, for her family, for her husband, and for her precious Kaylee. Between treatments she refused to stop living, filling whatever time she was given with memory after memory: camping on the Oregon coast, family photos among the big trees at Calaveras, a birthday at the zoo, the pond party, and every possible hour with her daughter. To show up fully, no matter what it cost her, is how all who loved her will remember her best.

Melissa was a candle that burned at both ends, and that is exactly why her glow was so bright.She gave herself away freely and completely, and in doing so she touched countless lives with her positivity, her love, and her unshakable optimism.

Melissa is survived by her husband, Jim; her daughter, Kaylee Mae; her parents, Chuck and Susie Williams; her sisters, Tricia and Kelly; her brother, Charles “Joey”; her devoted dog, Loki; and a large extended family of nieces, nephews, and dear friends who adored her.

Melissa was laid to rest at Elster Memorial Cemetery, near her home in Lake of the Pines, in an intimate graveside service among some sixty family and friends. A Celebration of Life followed, drawing a couple hundred people who came to honor her and to give thanks for a life that gave so much to so many.

Melissa’s faith was the center of her life, and she held fast to the promise of resurrection and reunion. Those who love her will go on telling her story, and will long for the morning they are together again.