A Beautiful Life: Remembering My Mom

*Content Warning: This post discusses dementia, hospice care, and death. Please take care of yourself while reading.

When someone lives a beautiful life, their absence leaves an echo that reverberates through everything they touched. On June 18, we said goodbye to my mom, Mary, and I find myself wanting to honor her memory by sharing the story of who she was and what she taught us about love, grace, and what it means to truly care for one another. This post is my way of keeping her spirit alive in this space we've created together, where we explore intentional living and the art of paying attention to what matters most. She embodied both of those things in ways I'm still learning to understand.

Fishing off the dock during a trip to the cabin in 2022.

A Life Well-Lived

I always knew losing a parent was one of those inevitable hardships that almost everyone would have to endure someday, but I never realized how changed I would feel afterward. Some people leave behind footprints, my mom left a foundation.

My mom was a dairy farmer all her life. Some of my earliest memories are of waking up at dawn to go out to the farm with her. She loved all animals, and she deeply understood the sacred responsibility of caring for living things. She was happiest outside working in the barn, particularly with baby calves. In her obituary, my family wrote: "She attended college at the University of Wisconsin River-Falls where she majored in Animal Science and minored in Farm Business. After graduating from college, she returned home and took over the family dairy... Dairy cows were Mary’s passion and working on the family farm was the only vocation Mary ever had."

Me at around age 7 with one of the calves at the farm.

My mom also loved photography. She had a photographer's eye for finding magic in ordinary moments, and looking back, I realize she was teaching me to see the world the way she did, through a lens of appreciation, noticing and capturing the perfect moments that unfold when you're paying attention.

My siblings, my mom, and me on a trip to the apple orchard in 2023.

In her eulogy, my family wrote: "Mary was a very strong woman. For example, she was mentally strong. Mary’s husband and kids remember her as the glue that held them together... She wasn't afraid to milk a thousand-pound cow on her own, crawl two stories up the hay elevator to shake a jammed bail lose, or slip into a spot not much bigger than herself on a trailer full of cattle to give a vaccine to the cow that she’d missed before loading."

"Mary was also spiritually strong. Mary had a strong faith in God and enjoyed attending mass, even if her and her family rarely made it to church before the start of the service... Along with mental and spiritual strength, Mary was also physically strong. When her son Anton was young, he wanted a pull up bar, so dad built him one in the shed. After a few weeks of working on it, he was able to do five pull ups and wanted to show off for his mom. After dragging her to the shed, he did his five pull ups and proudly dropped down and asked her how many pull ups she could do. She responded by doing eleven."

The Long Goodbye

In 2020, when Mom was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia after experiencing symptoms of aphasia, we entered a season of slow grief that would stretch across five years. She was 54 years old when she was diagnosed. It's a strange heartbreak watching someone you love disappear gradually, piece by piece, while their body remains present.

My mom and dad at my cousin's wedding in Colorado in 2023.

The disease first took her words. Mom, who had always been soft-spoken, became quieter and quieter until, by 2023, she was completely nonverbal. But even when speech left her, her eyes remained expressive, and we learned to read the language of her gestures, her smiles, and the way she would reach for our hands. Even as the disease progressed, my mom's essential self remained: her gentleness, her awareness of others, her ability to communicate love without words. She taught us that connection goes deeper than conversation, and presence is sometimes more powerful than words.

In April 2024, she entered hospice care at home. For those unfamiliar with hospice, it's about choosing comfort and dignity, and focusing on quality of life rather than fighting a battle that cannot be won. Our hospice team was a blessing, their support allowed us to care for her at home. Mom spent her final fifteen months surrounded by the sounds of the farm she loved, the voices of family who adored her, and the familiar rhythm of home.

The Sacred Work of Caring

When people learned we were caring for Mom at home through her final months, they often told us how strong we were for caring for her at home. But of course, an alternative never crossed our minds. She spent decades caring for us, bandaging scraped knees, sitting up with sick children, worrying about our dreams and heartbreaks as if they were her own. How could we do anything less for her in return?

My mom and my sister Chloe at a painting class we all took together in 2018.

In March 2025, after a brief illness, Mom became bedridden and could no longer feed herself. From then until she passed, my dad, my siblings, and I took turns at her bedside in shifts, ensuring she was never alone. When she could no longer drink from a straw, we used a syringe to give her water, drop by careful drop.

Frontotemporal dementia is a cruelly slow-progressing disease. There were days when caring for her felt like the most important thing we'd ever do, and days when the weight of watching her slip away felt almost unbearable. But even in those hardest moments, there was something sacred about being present for someone you love as they prepare to leave this world. We sang to her. We read her favorite passages from books she could no longer read herself. We told stories and held her hands and told her it was okay to go when she was ready.

In what feels now like a gift of perfect timing, we were able to have our wedding ceremony in the front yard of the farm in May of 2025, planned on short notice so Mom could be there. Even though she could no longer speak, her presence at our wedding was everything. She sat in her wheelchair, surrounded by family, watching as we exchanged vows in the place that had been home to so much of my family's story. It was simple and beautiful and exactly the kind of ceremony that honored what mattered most. Looking back, I'm so grateful we didn't wait. Sometimes the most meaningful moments happen when you follow your heart rather than convention.

It meant so much to us that my mom could be there for our wedding day.

Living Forward

I worry about the future now without her. There's a heavy kind of grief that comes with realizing you'll have to live the rest of your life without someone who was so central to who you are. Every milestone, every ordinary day, every moment when I want to call and share something, she won't be there to receive it.

My mom and me out at dinner in Minneapolis before a Billy Joel concert in 2017.

But I carry so much of her with me. The way she noticed beauty in everyday moments taught me to slow down and really see my surroundings. Her quiet strength in the face of illness showed me what grace looks like under pressure. Her devotion to our family taught me what love looks like when it's lived out daily through small, consistent acts of care.

She taught me that you don't have to be loud to be powerful, that consistency matters more than perfection, that paying attention to small things is a form of prayer. She showed me how to find meaning in routine work, how to care for living things with patience and tenderness, and how to love people exactly as they are.

The Lessons That Remain

My mom created a beautiful life through the way she focused her attention on what truly mattered and let everything else fall out of frame. She taught me that intentional living isn't about having it all figured out or making perfect choices. It's about showing up consistently for the people and purposes that matter most. It's about finding sacred in ordinary, about choosing love even when (or especially when) it's hard.

As I continue writing about intentional living, finding meaning in everyday moments, and the art of paying attention to what matters most, I'm carrying forward everything my mother taught me. Not just through her words, but through the way she lived.

Me, my dad, and my mom in front of the World's Largest Tiger Muskie in Nevis, MN.

My mom's legacy isn't just in the family she raised or the farm she tended, but in the way she taught us to love: consistently, unconditionally, and without expectation of recognition or reward. She was the best mom in the world, and while the world feels impossibly different without her, the love she planted in all of us continues to grow.

From her eulogy: "We will always be grateful for having known Mary and having been part of her life. Although we will always miss her, the little things she taught us and the lessons she shared with us will live on in us. She is free of this horrible disease now, but is and will forever be missed."

Making Christmas cookies together in 2019.

Thank you for letting me share her story here. Grief, I'm learning, is love with nowhere to go, and sometimes writing it down helps it find a place to rest.