Hop(e)

Before Hop was a practice, Hop(e) was a person.

Brenda Lee Molnaird Hopkins was Josh’s mother — driven, compassionate, and fair in the order her youngest still reaches for when he has to describe her to a stranger. She loved her sons above everything else. She was also, without apology, an accomplished professional in her own right.

She earned her accounting degree in three years at Southern Arkansas University in Magnolia, then moved to Northwest Arkansas with her husband. She became a CPA and worked across private and public roles. Late in her life, during Josh’s last year of high school and the start of college, she returned to CPA and tax work alongside her older son — still in the craft, still showing up.

She was born in El Dorado and made her life in Rogers. In April 1998 she learned she was ill, while she was still in good health. Chemotherapy came next. What Josh remembers is not only the treatment. It is what she did with the room.

“As she began chemo she took it on herself to start reaching out to the other patients and making friends. Before it had a chance to wear her down she became an advocate for those that were already worn down.”

Nurses were glad to see her walk in. They knew other patients would leave happier. While battling Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she also served on the board of HOPE — Helping Oncology Patients Excel — a Northwest Arkansas nonprofit built for oncology patients who needed more than a waiting room. On January 29, 2004, she passed in Dallas during a stem cell transplant at Baylor Medical Center.

Josh does not claim a perfect memory of every board meeting. He was young enough then that some of that work passed beside him. What did not pass is the shape of her: the fairness, the drive, the instinct to lift the people already tired.

Hop CPG names HOPE as its prime charitable benefactor. The organization lives on today as Hope Cancer Resources. No slogan. Just the work she started in those rooms, and a practice that refuses to forget it.

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