Carol Mauch

Fridley, MN

     Carol Mauch age 79 of Fridley, Minnesota formerly of Sibley passed away Tuesday, November 7, 2023 at the White Pine Assisted Living in Fridley.

     A memorial mass will take place, 10:00 a.m. Saturday, December 16, 2023 at St. Andrews Catholic Church in Sibley, Iowa with Ftr. Tim Hogan, officiating.  Burial will follow in St. Andrews Catholic Cemetery.

After her time as a Sibley High School cheerleader and on the homecoming court, but long before she worked as a designer at Main Street Floral and in the Osceola County Treasurer’s Office or was a cancer survivor, Carol Mauch tried a little college at Briar Cliff and Wayne State, then did the That Girl, working-young-woman of the Sixties thing at the Smart Shop in Sibley, later helping to open Michael’s and Burke’s teen shop in downtown Sioux Falls, all the while honing her true calling: love-language polyglot. Her signature chocolate cake, which many attempted but none could replicate, goes to the grave with her, along with many other delectable love languages. Gift-giving for Carol was a job of its own, practiced by shopping throughout the year, wherever she was, always with an eye out for the perfect gift for the right person to give at the appropriate occasion. She volunteered throughout her life but never really talked about it—for the HELP crisis hotline, Meals on Wheels, and in all sorts of ways for St. Andrew’s, and maybe for things we still don’t know about and maybe never will. Carol loved dancing with her husband Doug, starting when they were high-school sweethearts at the Roof Garden, still cutting a mean-ass rug at their fiftieth wedding anniversary at the vintage Lake Robbins Ballroom in central Iowa. Watching them, there, felt like time travel. Carol married Doug in 1965, raising Matthew, Stephanie, and Jay in Oelwein, Ia., and Worthington, Minn., before returning to Sibley in 1978, to the home she would decorate and set aglow, as if she’d spent a previous life apprenticing in the City of Light. Matthew, Stephanie, and Jay all eventually moved to the Twin Cities, where Carol and Doug were able to visit on weekends and holidays–and sometimes in the middle of the week—especially during their retirement. These portable family gatherings included Matt’s wife Angie, Steph’s husband Terry, as well as Stephanie’s children Ethan and Ellie and Ethan’s wife Andrea, and over the years a menagerie of grandpets. The Twin Cities visits were a continuation of the Sunday gatherings the Mauch five were part of for years and years (decades) at the house Carol grew up in with her parents Greg and Mary Kass and her sisters Sandra (older), Claudia, Lynn, and Kim (all younger), joined there by the families of Carol’s sisters and their spouses and children. It was a moveable feast that included the extended family’s annual trek to the Kasstle at Lake Namakagon in northern Wisconsin. Carol sang in the choir and loved doing so at Christmas especially, that time of giving, hopes for peace, gathering, family, for spreading the literal and metaphorical language of love that is the melting moment none can best. In the Worthington years especially, Carol loved Barbara Streisand and Goodyear compilation Christmas records, and, then, in the Sibley years, stayed current with the Xmas music trends, playing all sorts of other favorites nonstop, starting before Thanksgiving and continuing into the new year. She died on November 7 with a white-lighted Christmas tree in her nursing-home room and Christmas music playing, having been surrounded by family for days, with her children at the end. Prominent among her caregivers during those last days was her only great grandchild, two-year old Wren, daughter of Ethan and Andrea, who Carol’s dementia never allowed her to know the way we know people when we’re still us. Something magical happened in that room, that weekend. Little Wren, whose advanced vocabulary and conversational dexterity astounds even poets, demonstrated no fewer than a dozen love languages as she helped make comfortable, in her last days, the great grandmother who, if she could have, would have spoiled her such that her already spoiled grandchildren would have been aghast, as her children were when she spoiled the grandchildren. Perhaps a soul was transmigrating.

Aside from Doug, who preceded her in death, as did her parents and her older sister, Carol is survived by the aforementioned, as well as by dear brothers-in-law Ed, Mark, and Steve, their children and children’s children (Carol’s nieces and nephews), all of whom make up the Namakagon crew, congenital lovers of flamingos, flamingo culture, flamingo bric-a-brac and trinkets . . . an indubitable cult of the pink bird.

A 10 a.m. funeral and graveside service will be immediately followed by a celebration of Carol’s life at Drink Me Brewing Company, a time to tell stories over food and drink and practice our own languages of love, and maybe learn some new ones.

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