By Kyle McDonald | Staff Writer

Spring commencement ceremonies close the Kent State University academic year Saturday with 4,285 students prepared to receive their hard-earned degrees.

But, architecture major Za-Non Miller likely wouldn’t have joined his fellow graduates, let alone lived, without a tremendous amount of focus, determination and a crucial gift from his mother.

“The summer of 2005 I became very ill without knowing it. I went to the hospital for a headache and I never came out until two months later on,” Miller said.

Miller, 20 at the time, discovered his body contained only six of the 13 pints of blood needed to live, the result of a kidney that had failed two years earlier without his knowledge. The East Cleveland native had just finished his second year at Cuyahoga Community College and was gearing up to enter Kent State’s notoriously demanding architecture program.

“I was really shocked. They gave me a blood transfusion that night, but I lost it the next day and then some more blood,” he said. “I was pronounced dead on the bed.”

But dead he wasn’t, and in the fall of 2005 Miller began undergoing dialysis, which required four hours, three days per week for a year. Although it wasn’t possible for Miller to go to Kent State at the time, he began taking part-time courses at Cleveland State University to stay busy.

“It was stressful, but I always want to be on the go. I can’t just sit and wait,” he said. “I would push myself and do homework while on the machine.”

In 2006, Miller’s mother, Charmaine, donated a kidney to her son, and one year later, he was finally able to begin courses at the university he anticipated attending two years earlier.

“She gave me a second life,” he said of his mother.

Miller will receive his bachelor of arts degree in architecture studies Saturday, but said he already plans to return in the fall to work for another two years and earn his bachelor of science in architecture, the professional degree. He hopes to apply his passion for post-modernism design to residential architecture in the future.

“I love space and I love to work within that space to see what’s going on within that experience,” he said. 

And, while Miller is excited to finally walk across the stage, he said his mother’s excitement far exceeds his own.

“She’s going crazy right now — her and everybody I’m close to because I kept on going,” he said.

Miller said he’s kept his story within a close circle of friends and family, rather than let his illness become an excuse for sympathy.

Instead, Miller said he prefers to be spontaneous and find the parts of life worth enjoying such as rock climbing, traveling and learning many dance styles including Latin, swing, ballroom and tap, which he plans to show-off when it’s his turn to cross the stage.

“I don’t want people to treat me differently because I’m sick on the inside,” he said. “It has been a long journey for me. I call it my dialysis-to-diploma stage. It doesn’t matter how down I am inside, because my spirit is always alive.”

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