Patrick Allen Duff

PATRICK ALLEN DUFF 
(17MARCH1960—28JANUARY2021)

A kind, gentle, and angelic soul—quiet and reserved but full of life and light and loved by all who knew him personally and professionally is with us no more.

Patrick Allen Duff died Thursday, January 28, at 9:27am. His short three-month battle with Stage 3 Lung Cancer was punctuated by courage, fortitude, determination, good cheer, and his ever-so-loved and memorable smile and twinkling eyes, sustained right up to the end. 

Allen took great pride in his career as a Certified Surgical Technologist (CST) having worked since 2016 at Valley Health’s Shenandoah Memorial Hospital in Woodstock, VA.

Before joining Valley Health, he served as the Director of the Surgical Technology Program at Piedmont Virginia Community College (Charlottesville), and he distanced-taught the first Surgical Technology classes offered at Lord Fairfax Community College (Middletown and Warrenton).

Additionally, he served as a Certified Surgical Technologist at Augusta Health (Fishersville, VA), and during his prior years as a traveling Surgical Technologist, he distinguished himself at Geneva General Hospital (NY), at St. Vincent’s Hospital Emergency and Trauma Center (Green Bay, WI), and at Stonewall Jackson Hospital (Lexington, VA). 

Allen earned his CST degree at Jupiter Medical Center (Jupiter, FL) and always celebrated and remembered one of his professors there because she nudged him onward and upward.

He is survived by his soulmate and life partner of twenty years Brent L. Kendrick, Professor of English at Lord Fairfax Community College; by his mother Mary Sue Rozar Duff Brewer and his stepfather Mike Brewer; and by his brother Colonel Ronald R. Duff and wife Suzanne. Allen was preceded in death by his father William Eugene Duff and by his brother John Matthew Duff.

Allen had many interests about which he was passionate and energetic. He began every day—without fail--by awakening at 4am religiously and by reading in silence The New York Times and The Washington Post (with freshly brewed coffee in hand) before starting his day’s work in surgery at 6:45am. After work he loved to cook, and his partner and their friends praised his downhome Southern cooking as well as his Chef’s Table Asian dishes, with Thai cuisine outranking all others in his culinary repertoire. He also loved Nature and the great outdoors, especially hiking arduous and scenic mountainous trails and biking historic Rails-to-Trails throughout Virginia, West Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Vermont, and California. 
Of all the things that brought him joy, however, most important to him without doubt was his love of gardening. He helped turn a mountaintop wilderness into a coveted botanical oasis for him and his partner. Always true to himself and his beliefs, Allen took greatest joy in watching small, undernourished—and sometimes unwanted—plants thrive and flourish under his care, against all odds. Perhaps even greater was the perpetual joy that he derived from the ever-so-constant, ever-so-required, and ever-so-faithful maintenance of his gardens, spending hours and hours and hours on end—with great satisfaction—pulling weed after weed after weed, fervently and constantly, up by the roots, one by one by one.

Now, Allen gardens forever and forever and forever with angels. 

Special thanks to the Woodstock (VA) Fire Department and to the Mt. Jackson (VA) Fire and Rescue Department for transporting Allen to the hospital; to everyone—truly everyone--at Shenandoah Memorial Hospital for all that they did to help Allen—their friend, their colleague--to comfort him and to see him safely through his final hours to his Heavenly home and angelic garden on the other side.

Allen’s life and the establishment of an endowed scholarship in his memory will be celebrated with his partner, their families, their friends, and their colleagues later this year in the gardens of his mountaintop home in Edinburg.

Expressions of sympathy may be in the form of memorial contributions to the Foundation for Lung Cancer, P.O. Box 418372, Boston, MA 02241-8372.
“Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels.” –Lydia M. Child

You may sign the guestbook and submit condolences to the family online at www.stoverfuneralhome.com. 

Stover Funeral Home and Crematory, Strasburg, VA is serving the family of Patrick Allen Duff.