Mary Linder

Mary Linder

Our mother, Mary Linder, passed away in her sleep Friday, May 23, 2025 at Good Samaritan Society in Millard in the room she shared with Dad. She had been declining in health over the past few years, but it started accelerating since January and her health was never improving with the hospital stays. At the end of April Mom decided that hospice was the best course of action, and she ultimately passed around 2AM Friday morning.

"You don't exactly get over it, an offensive phrase under any circumstances, but the grief, in time, does turn into a nostalgic ache that is almost comforting."

  • P.J. O'Rourke

Funeral Information

We would like to thank everyone who has expressed their kind thoughts and wishes during this time as we deal with the loss of Mary Ann (Dangler) Linder - beloved wife, mother, grandmother, sister, and friend.

Thank you,

The Family of Mary Linder

Events

Listed in order of occurrence:

  1. Visitation: Thursday, May 29, 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM, at Higby-McQuiston Mortuary, Aurora, Nebraska
  2. Funeral: Friday, May 30, 11:00 AM, at the United Methodist Church, Giltner, Nebraska
    • See Facebook live-stream link below.
  3. Burial: Following the funeral, at Case Cemetery, Giltner, Nebraska
  4. Reception: Following the burial, at the United Methodist Church, Giltner, Nebraska

Details for each event are below.

Visitation

Visitation for Mary and time with the family took place on Thursday, May 29, at Higby-McQuiston Mortuary in Aurora, Nebraska, from 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM.

Address: Higby-McQuiston Mortuary, 1404 L St, Aurora, NE 68818 Google Maps: Higby-McQuiston Mortuary

Funeral

The funeral was held at the Giltner United Methodist Church on Friday, May 30, at 11:00 AM.

The church live-streamd the funeral on their Facebook page:

We captured the service and I've uploaded it to my YouTube channel as well. It may be blocked in some countries due to copyright restrictions around the music used during the service.

Address: 418 North Derby Ave, Giltner, NE 68841 Google Maps: 418 N Derby Ave, Giltner, NE

Participants

Officiant: Pastor Jon Annin

Pianist: Myra Higgins

Eulogy: Amanda Hackwith

Amanda wrote a very touching story of an interaction with Mom and the fleeting moments that make up our lives and the memories of our loved ones. The story is in the Eulogy section below, and I'm sure it's on her personal blog site as well, ajhackwith.com.

Tribute: Jillian Linder

Pallbearers:

  • Lee Chaney
  • Dave Dangler
  • Wade Dangler
  • Nick Dimitrov
  • Daniel Linder
  • Liam Linder

Special thanks to Dan Lanphier and Kodjo Aziamble for helping us move the casket before the services.

Burial

Mary’s burial took place at the Case Cemetery, about a mile from the homestead where she grew up. If you prefer, you are welcome to remain at the church—family members will return there for the reception following the burial.

Directions from the Giltner United Methodist Church:

  1. Head south on N Derby Avenue for 0.25 miles
  2. Turn right (west) onto W 6 Road
  3. Continue 6.3 miles west to S D Road
    • You’ll see "Bish Enterprises" on the south side of the road at this corner.
  4. Turn left (south) onto S D Road
  5. Continue 6.3 miles. Case Cemetery will be on your left (east side)
    • Look for a simple metal sign and a chain-link fence surrounding the site.

Mapping tools:

Reception

The reception was held at the Giltner United Methodist Church following the burial.

A small selection of drinks (coffee, tea, and water) and finger foods (including Hy-Vee sandwiches and chips) were provided.

Many stayed to share their memories of Mary, and helped us celebrate the life she lived.

Donations and Gifts

Dad’s needs are few and currently met through their savings. In honor of Mary’s love of animals, the family asked that families consider donating to your local humane society to support their work in caring for animals.

Flowers at Service

  • Kaye Schuyler, Una Robertshaw, Dianna Tereptow
  • Ron and Freda Hocking, Dave and Eileen Oates, Dave and Judy Dangler
  • Greg and Judy Linder
  • Caleb Applebaum
  • Troy Vasa and Family
  • Dreamweavers Foundation
  • Nebraska Psychological Association
  • Peraton ITCC Team
  • ITCC DevSecOps and Dev/Test Team
  • STRATCOM J61 Team
  • Robin Sanderson & Homestead florist crew

Notice and Obituary

Notice

Mary (Dangler) Linder, age 77, of Omaha, formerly of Giltner, passed away Friday, May 23, 2025, at the Good Samaritan Society in Millard.

Funeral Services will be held at 11:00 A.M., Friday, May 30th at the Giltner Global Methodist Church in Giltner. Rev. Dave Mendyk, will officiate. Interment will be at the Case Cemetery west of Giltner. Visitation will be from 5 to 7 P.M. Thursday at Higby-McQuiston Mortuary. Memorials may be made to the Nebraska Humane Society. Higby-McQuiston Mortuary in Aurora is in charge of arrangements. Condolences may be sent to the family through the mortuary website at www.higbymortuary.com.

OBITUARY

Mary Ann (Dangler) Linder, the daughter of Kenneth Elwood and Lucile Christine (Ruebsamen) Dangler, was born in Aurora, Nebraska on March 24, 1948 and passed away in Millard, Nebraska on May 23, 2025 at the age of 77.

Mary grew up in Giltner Nebraska and graduated valedictorian from Giltner High School in 1966.

Mary was united in marriage to Gary W. Linder on June 6, 1966 in the family home in Giltner. Following their marriage they lived in Giltner, Topeka Kansas, Juniata Nebraska, and Columbus Nebraska, where Mary was a homemaker, teacher’s aide and a medical transcriptionist. They moved to Plattsmouth Nebraska in 2002 to be closer to family.

Mary was a member of many church and choir groups during her life, singing with the Consonaires in Columbus. She enjoyed sewing, knitting, crocheting, and above all, spending time with her family and their many pets.

She was preceded in death by her parents; sister, Ruth; sister-in-law, Judy (Story) Dangler; and brother-in-law, Chet Pezley.

Those left to cherish her memory are her husband, Gary of Omaha; three children, Daniel (Kris) Linder of Bellevue Nebraska, Kate Linder (Nick Dimitrov) of Omaha, and Amanda Jo (Levi) Hackwith of Vancouver Washington; three grandchildren, Jillian Linder of Portland Oregon, Nikolas Dimitrov of Omaha, and Liam Linder of Bellevue. She is also survived by her brothers, Robert Dangler and Willard (Shirley) Dangler, and many nieces, nephews, other beloved family and friends.

Special Thanks

And special thanks to everyone for their support of us in this time.

  • The staff at Good Samaritan Society - Making Mom and Dads lives easier
  • The Suncrest hospice staff - Making Moms passing easier
  • Jen N. and Pastor Jon at Good Sam - Helping Dad and us adapt to the new norm
  • Tommy Amaral - Donation to Humane World for Animals/HSUS
  • Tessa Holscher - Donation to Nebraska Humane Society
  • Troy, Paula, Isla, and Millie Vasa - Boquet of Lilies and Roses
  • Nebraska Psychological Association Board of Directors - Peace Lilly
  • Myra Higgins - Donation to Aurora "Adopt-a-Pet"
  • Shelly Dedrick and Christie (Behrends) Luedtke families - Donation to local sheters
  • Jim and Nancy Hanna - Donation to Nebraska Humane Society
  • Many others who donated to the family.

Family Contact Information

If you need to reach the family, please email us. We’ll respond as soon as we’re able.

Email: [email protected]

Thank you - Gary, Daniel, Kate, and Amanda

Family Thoughts

Eulogy

By Amanda Hackwith - https://ajhackwith.com/

In the end, we'll all become stories.

It's a quote by a Canadian author, Margaret Atwood, that I have felt echo this week, in the dozens of stories about Mom we've passed around. Storytelling is a natural response to grief, a ritual against loss we've been honing for thousands of years. Tell this tale, and you'll remember the people. Remember when, and you won't forget the who.

We exist as moments when we're alive. In the brief personal moments when we make choices, become memories, and therefore escape time all together. It's the memory of those moments, and the stories within them, where we live without end.

So.

It's like this. When I realized my mother was dying, I reached for stories. I looked for poems that could possibly express the wonderful, complicated, singular experience of Mom's life, and the person I knew.

I looked for an essay with words in the shape of the empty space she leaves behind. For wisdom that tells me what to do with this deeply human experience of grief, which is one part sorrow, and gratitude and regret and relief and loss. I looked for the literary balm which would…would smell like the Estee Lauder perfume mom wore and feel like butter brickle ice cream, enjoyed after a summer sunset, listening to MASH on the television and the creak of a recliner. I looked for words that would feel sound like june bugs, crowding a window screen. Like the click of rummikub tiles under Mom's manicured nails.

Emily Dickenson and Wordsworth failed me. Church hymns were not quite right. No one else's stories expressed the watercolor spectrum, both muddled and vibrant, of mom's life. It felt like an injustice, failing a Mom who put so much faith in her daughter's words. In search for words to draw the lines in the constellation of my mother's galaxy, and am left with this:

The story of my mom's death is simple and elegant: she lived, she grew old, and she fell asleep holding the hand of the man she loved.

Yet the story of my mom's life is complex, vast and fiercely beautiful.

So, again. Where do I start?

Maybe you expect me to tell you stories of Mary Ann Linder as a mother. And I could. It feels selfish to spend time on that when describing the fullness of her life, but I know that story was one of her favorites.

She was an intensely curious, intelligent person, who was determined to pass that on to her children. Our middle class household struggled at times, but it was always, always, filled with a wealth of books, encyclopedias, documentaries, historical movies, piles of homework at the kitchen counter. Mom had a love for music and a stunning singing voice. I could tell the story of accompanying her to countless concineers rehearsals, napping in the church coat room as I heard Mom's voice drift down the hallway. Putting on the Ritz. Moon River. Secondhand Rose. Classics.

There are stories, with dirt under the nails, of Mom as a hard worker. When money grew tight, she maintained a meticulous budget in beautiful longhand in the checkbook. And when it grew tighter still, she didn't make a fuss. She quietly took medical transcription courses at night, then work at transcribing the tapes and recordings of doctors, work that paid for dance classes, summer camps, any opportunity for her children.

I could share the lesser told story of how Mom was a fighter. The fates saw fit to grant her three children that came from the factory with the default settings stuck at hard mode. She hated conflict, but for her children, she would fight. went up against schools, against doctors, against the world itself, until it had to bow before her and make space for her children's needs. Whether it was Dan's appendix, or Kate's performances, or my--....well, let's just say as the youngest child, it was good mom already had a lot of battle experience.

Whatever it was, Mom would not relent, would not let the world diminish her children's shine.

Maybe many of you are here today for the role you played in Mom's story of service. These are stories she insisted be told at a whisper. Stories she would tiptoe through. You'd have to listen close to hear how she fed neighborhood gatherings and directed the contained chaos of a church kids camp. How she housed struggling family in their times of need, adopted everyone’s school friends, and mothered an entire girl scout troop. It's become more of a legend in our family how mom, along with three other church ladies of similar heroic vigor, single-handedly populated the entire Juanita methodist cookbook the year I was born. Though quiet, I think these were some of the happiest moments of my mom's life.

Or maybe you know my Mom's favorite love story: her first and last boyfriend, the man she married. Mom loved Dad, quietly, fiercely, immovably. She used to take pride that none of her children ever saw them fight, but I think what is more impressive is that we never saw them hesitate to reach out for each other, hand in hand. A story that held true to the closing chapter.

What is the constant--the type set, the font face, the very ink of my mom's stories--is the presence of love. The work of love she chose, again and again.

Mom made us, everyone in this room, her life work. Can I tell you a secret?

(Shh, no listening here, mom.)

I hated those Giltner family reunions when I was a kid.

At least, I hated getting ready for it, because Mom fussed over what I wore, how I looked, who would be there and what we would bring and whether we would be on time. As a teenager, I hated it because I thought it was silly, but I was wrong. Mom cared about the details of that family reunion not because she had anything to prove, but because family was everything to her. She loved everyone in this room so much that the reunion was the highlight of her year. She'd be the first to arrive, setting up hotdishes and marshalling us into a folding chair brigade, and she'd be the last to leave, wiping down tables and wielding tinfoil and tupperware like a weapon. She bloomed at reunions, lighting up, beaming, soaking in the presence of her people, her community, her family.

In the end, we all become stories of what we love.

And these stories stack up, no beginning, no end, until you have a life. These stories. These moments that escape time and death.

The moment Mom will live on in, for me, was when the sky split open and the rain poured down.

We were in Madison, Wisconsin, where I was speaking at a conference shortly after college. Mom, in a rare adventure without dad at her side, had come along to keep me company on the long drive. It was a conference on technology, and Mom was happy to stay out of the way, as I put on my ‘professor’ suit and pretended I was more adult than I felt.

On the last evening, we decided to celebrate in the way Mom loved best: good food at a fancy restaurant. We made reservations at one that was a few blocks down the street from our hotel. A bit of a walk, but doable in the mild June heat. We dressed up and set out.

It was after dusk, so most of the little shops we passed were closed. We were halfway down the street when the sky split open and the rain came down--in buckets. It was not merely just raining, it was torrenting down. I shrieked and we skittered to the sanctuary of the nearest awning, but not before we were drenched to the bone.

The awning was more of a ledge above a locked door, and it was only as I was attempting--and failing--to wring water from my skirt that I realized the real predicament.

Anyone who knew my mom knew that, despite growing up on a farm, she preferred to stay sensibly indoors. Where it was neither too hot nor too cold and especially where her curled hair would not get mussed. Mom was known to carry around a little plastic bonnet in her purse which she would deploy at the slightest hint of wind.

But that wasn't the mother I saw when I finally looked up. In that rain, Mom was transformed. She was giggling, flush-cheeked, with a bright glint in her eye that would have been more familiar in an impish kid than in my stalwart, proper mother. Rain had plastered all the curls to her head but she was laughing. Bright and clear and more spirited than the rain.

"Want to run?" she said, and suddenly I knew I was seeing through time. To a younger woman who had the audacity to herd cows, with the confidence to laugh without a worry, a woman who knew that every storm runs out of rain eventually, and that the cold could ever only be skin deep. The version of my mom as a young girl, a version I'd never gotten to see but was still there. "Want to run?" this woman said.

I could not answer for a moment because No! my heart said, no, I don't want to run and break this spell, to leave this moment that's summoned us. I wanted to stay under that awning and hold her tight, this woman who raised me, who contained so much strength I often couldn't see.

But that's not the way time works, and no one tells a story by standing still. I grasped her hand and we ran, cold and giggling, soaked in rain and stories.

We reached the restaurant, which was empty, and the staff, which were kind, and the food, which I can only imagine was good. Because I don't remember a single detail of the fancy meal that night. But I remember the surprise and pleasure of my mom's bright laugh, I remember the warmth of her hand, as we walked, undaunted, through the rain.

That's the moment my mom will live in forever, for me. Laughing, fearless, made more beautiful by the storm.

In the end, we'll all become stories.

Tribute poem

"Love is Immortal" - Anonymous

Read by Jillian Linder

Love is pure energy and

No matter how hard you try,

You can never kill love

Because pure energy can’t die

The feeling of love can fade,

And the body can cease to give,

But the energy created by love

Is immortal and continues

To live.

(author unknown)

MY LITTLE SISTER MARY ANN

"MY LITTLE SISTER MARY ANN"

By Bob Dangler

I use the term “MARY ANN”, because when she was small, we all called her MARY ANN. For the longest time, I believed it was just MARYANN.

The other thing I remembered was she was the smallest person I knew wearing glasses. This was due to the carelessness of the nurse in the delivery room who put double drops in one of her eyes (to clear vision) before she was stopped. Now days that would have resulted in a large legal suite against the hospital I believe. But those were different times. Mary struggled for a long time due to that error.

When the girls were small, they LOVED to jump on the bed! It was pretty much an every night thing. At times it quieted down – somewhat – but not a lot.

One night the shrikes of fun were interrupted with FIRE! The girls were met coming down the stairs about midway by worried parents going up the stairs. Dad soon discovered the source of the FIRE was a lot of smoke at the center of the foot of the bed (but where there is smoke, as we all know, there is often fire). Dad cut into the electric blanket and soon discovered a short back from the connector, causing the fire. If anyone would care to examine the evidence, I believe it is still wrapped in a plastic bag in our old house. We never throw anything away!

Mary was always the giving one. Good from start to finish, with a loving personally, always. Wonderful sister always.

Bob Dangler

Footnotes

The Case Cemetery is a small family cemetery established by the Case family in 1873 for their descendants.

Over the generations, many family members have been buried here—some who lived remarkably long lives (over 100 years), and others whose time was heartbreakingly brief, including mothers and their newborns laid to rest together.

As a child visiting in the 1970s and 1980s, I remember seeing headstones so worn and weathered that they had fallen over or were nearly illegible.

While visiting to prepare for Mom’s burial, Kate and I walked around and saw that these old stones had been restored—cleaned, remounted, and preserved for future generations. I am deeply grateful to those who donated their time, money, and skills to this effort.

Mom and Dad’s headstone is of the “bench” variety - meant to be used. If you find yourself there, please take a moment to sit, reflect, and honor the memory of those who came before us.

— Dan Linder

Headstone