After losing her son in Afghanistan and husband to cancer, this Cherry Hill woman turned to politics. Next week she joins the N.J. Assembly.

When Melinda Kane joins the New Jersey General Assembly on Jan. 23, it’ll be the 15th anniversary of the death of her son, Jeremy, a Marine reservist killed by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan.

“It’s a coincidence,” said the Gold Star mother of three, who previously served on the Cherry Hill Township Council and the Camden County Board of Commissioners.

“But then some people say there are no coincidences.”

Kane won a special election of Democratic committee members from Camden County last Saturday to replace Democrat Pamela Lampitt, who resigned from the Assembly on Dec. 31 after serving 18 years, the last 10 of them as Deputy Speaker. She became Camden County Clerk earlier this month.

Kane plans to seek a full term this year to the 6th Legislative District, which includes Cherry Hill, Haddonfield, and Voorhees. All 80 seats in the New Jersey General Assembly will be on the ballot this year, along with the governor’s office.

A former special education teacher, Kane, 67, who lives in Cherry Hill, used the last 15 years to reinvent herself, a metamorphosis fueled by grief and a family desire to serve. Her husband Bruce, who died of stomach cancer a year before Jeremy, was a physician in the Army before becoming a pathologist at Cooper University Health Care in Camden.

“That’s something Jeremy talked about,” Kane said. “Service. The importance of living a meaningful life.”

Kane said she never thought she’d become a politician. “But,” she added, “there’s a quote I once heard that goes something like, ‘If you’re living the life you never thought you’d live, you might as well do things you didn’t think you’d do.’”

Kane likes to tell people she moved to New Jersey from her native Buffalo “for the weather.”

She taught special education just out of college at Penns Grove High School in Salem County in 1979. Three years later, she was teaching in Triton High School in Runnemede, Camden County, where she remained another four years until Bruce was stationed in Louisiana, where Jeremy was born.

After three years in Louisiana, the family moved to Cherry Hill where Kane raised her sons, including Jeremy as well as Daniel, 34, a foreign service officer for the state department, and Benjamin, 31, who works at the Battleship New Jersey museum ship in Camden. While the children were young, Kane created a business, Optical Jewels, in which she designed and made jewelry.

Jeremy first attended college at Towson University in Maryland, than transferred to Rutgers University-Camden. He’d joined a Marines reservist program designed for college students. Jeremy was “compelled” to serve after Sept. 11, Kane said.

“My husband and I were proud of his desire to go into the military, but we were very much against it,” Kane said. “We were frightened for him and tried very hard to convince him not to join the Marines.”

Bruce died in 2008. A year later in October, Jeremy was deployed to Afghanistan. On Jan. 23, 2010, in the Helmand Province, he encountered a “suspicious man,” according to Kane. Jeremy detained the man, keeping him away from his fellow Marines, likely saving their lives. The man then detonated a bomb strapped to his body. Jeremy was 22.

“How could two horrible things happen to one family?” Kane asked. When Jeremy went off to war, “I thought the worst in our lives had happened, and he’d come home safe,” she added. “I was naive.”

After Jeremy’s death, Kane said she was interviewed by reporters and was asked to speak at community events, such as Memorial Day ceremonies: “I spoke out about who Jeremy was, and how proud I was of him.”

Jeremy, who’d completed his junior year studying criminal law, was awarded a degree by Rutgers-Camden posthumously.

Kane said that “someone who’d heard me speak — I don’t remember who — approached me to be in public service.” Because both Bruce and Jeremy had served, she thought she could honor them by doing so herself.

“And it’s become an amazing way to live my life over the last 15 years,” Kane said. “It was a way to find meaning.”

She ran for Cherry Hill Township Council in 2011 and won. “I may not have been the happiest candidate,” she recalled. “I was grieving. But people saw someone who they could relate to and share their struggles with.”

Kane is admired for having “turned pain into purpose,” according to Cherry Hill Mayor David Fleisher and Camden County Commissioner Jeff Nash, both Democrats, who used the same phrase to describe her.

Kane was uniquely qualified for dealing with military families, Fleisher said, adding “she gave special meaning to our Memorial Day events. But her thoughtfulness as a leader is much broader than that.”

Kane was on council for nearly eight years. During that time, she said, “things were quiet in Cherry Hill, and prosperous.” The median household income there was more than $125,000 in 2023, according to Census data, about 1.5 times Camden County’s income figure of $84,000.

In 2019, Kane was asked to fill the unexpired county commissioner’s seat of William Moen. He’d go on to the New Jersey legislature the following year to become an assemblyman and deputy majority leader representing the 5th Legislative District, which includes Camden and Gloucester Counties.

“I was Melinda’s neighbor in Cherry Hill, and I watched her evolve as a commissioner,” Nash said. “She cares for people, and she’s made it her personal mission to make sure the veterans of Camden County get the benefits they deserve.”

Kane said that during her tenure, the commissioners took pride in the expansion of parks in the county, as well as in the reduction in crime in Camden City.

Later this month, after nearly six years as a commissioner, she’ll take her seat in the legislature.

In last Saturday’s special election, around 200 Democratic committee members from municipalities in the 6th Legislative District gathered to vote. Each political party has its own committee members, who themselves are elected representatives. Because Kane was vying for a Democratic-held seat, only Democratic committee members could vote.

Reflecting on the last 15 years, Kane observed that she’s “so profoundly changed.” She added, “My life is vastly different because of Jeremy’s death.

“I wish he were here. I hope I make him proud.”