Gretchen Carew — Not an Obituary, A Celebration

A huge hole is left in my heart with the death of Gretchen Wurden Carew, on October 28, at age 88. She died from complications after a recent fall at her home. In so many ways Gretchen was strong, practical, and unsentimental. She specifically said that she didn’t want an obituary or funeral. But she can’t stop me from working through my loss with a celebration of her life and what she meant to me and others. Gretchen was my father Robert Wurden’s first cousin; she was like a beloved aunt to me.

Gretchen was born on February 7, 1936, to Gladys Lystad Wurden (1902-1994) and Edwin Wurden (1896-1978). She told me in the past that it was a very cold day, so I looked it up. The high temperature that day was -15, and the low was -38 Fahrenheit, one of a string of cold days during the coldest February recorded in Minnesota. 

She grew up in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, with her younger brother Don. She attended the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, just across the river. She married Keith Carew in 1962. Keith covered state politics in Michigan for a Detroit newspaper for several years before they moved to Tucson, Arizona, where Keith became an editor of the Tucson Daily Citizen. Gretchen was a life-long and innovative special education teacher. I remember that her work with her students and horses was profiled on a Tucson TV station.

I came to know Gretchen well after she retired from teaching and began spending summers in Minnesota at the family cabin in Bemidji. Gretchen cared for her mother Gladys in her final years, until her death in 1994.

Gretchen and Keith enjoyed many summers at their cabin in Bemidji, She and Keith watched baseball and British mysteries on TV and walked their dogs. Gretchen and Keith were great fans of classical music, which was often playing on the fancy Bose speaker in the dining area. While her friend Adelaide was alive, Gretchen went for a swim with her and Helen Sorlie each afternoon. Cocktail hour, always with snacks, came soon after.

For many years, when we visited the cabin, each morning I would sit with Keith and read the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Bemidji paper. As a former newspaper editor, Keith had a keen eye for mistakes. He never missed a chance to point them out. Gretchen told me she was so happy when I came because I could sit at the table and listen to the daily litany of misspellings and bad grammar.

I loved breakfast at the cabin, where we often had thin, crepe-like pancakes from her aunt (and my great-aunt) Tensie’s recipe. 

Keith developed dementia and eventually he wasn’t able to tolerate the disruption of being away from their Tucson home. Gretchen’s care for Keith was unfailing, but his decline was crushing to her, to lose the intellectual companionship of her brilliant husband. She wrote in 2020, “Keith is in a static state but still manageable at home. My usual long range planning is now “go day by day.” Keith moved to a memory care facility in 2023, when Gretchen could no longer care for him because of her physical problems. 

Gretchen had admirable skills as a hostess; she was greatly interested in the lives of her friends and family and showed her love through her hospitality. She set an impeccable table. Dinnerware matched, and special touches were added. Flowers were mandatory. No paper plates or paper napkins were allowed. She loved entertaining her family and her birthday group.

Gretchen prowled estate sales and antique shops. Each shelf and dresser and tabletop in her home and lake cabin was an opportunity to arrange treasures beautifully. 

Rosemaling (Norwegian rose painting) was her primary passion, and she had true talent. She began studying in the early 1980’s, and participated in six rosemaling trips to Norway with Vesterheim. She earned her gold medal in rosemaling from the museum in 2007.  For many years Gretchen traveled from Tucson to Phoenix to meet with her rosemaling group, which she described as a “great monthly treat.”

In her final years, while dealing with the difficulties of back pain and caring for Keith as he lost cognition, her email notes to me indicated how central her painting remained. “How great to have an activity that gives me such pleasure,” and, “How wonderful to have a hobby that keeps me happy. Will just do big projects in the future.”

I benefited from those big projects. She would often enter a painted piece in Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum’s National Norwegian-American Folk Art Exhibition. If a piece did not sell during the exhibition, it went to me! Over a couple of decades, I acquired four of my most treasured pieces. 

Gretchen carried on her mother Gladys’s Norwegian baking traditions. When I was a little girl growing up on a farm in northwestern Minnesota I would often “stay in town” with Great-aunt Gladys and Great-uncle Edwin. I was close to them. At Christmas Gladys would bake sandbakkels, spritz, Berliner kranser, divinity, fattigmann and lefse. Gretchen was equally avid about Norwegian cooking traditions. Once I drove up to the Bemidji lake cabin for a visit when Margaret was thirteen. When we arrived, Gretchen had a griddle on the back porch, next to a bowl of lefse dough, ready for us to start rolling and cooking the rounds of potato lefse. Meanwhile she accompanied us with Norwegian folk tunes on her accordion. I told her, “You know, Gretchen, that this is more Norwegian than Norwegians.”

Gretchen not only played the accordion, she was a savior of accordions. She would pick them up at estates sales, pay to have them refurbished, and then give them to musicians who would promise to play them, to keep accordion music alive. 

She was a stalwart of the Norwegian-American community in Arizona. The Tucson Nordic Guild held a fair and sale each Christmas season, and Gretchen was the chair of the event for sixteen years. She baked thousands of cookies to benefit the group. She was the president of the local Norse Federation. She was a long-time member of a book club that read exclusively books by Scandinavian writers. 

Gretchen was my solid weaving supporter. Once she told me that she would buy whatever I wanted to weave; she would be my patron. When she added space to her lake cabin, she said she would buy a floor loom so I could come up and weave. (I didn’t have time to use a second loom!) Whenever I posted anything on social media, Gretchen was always among the first handful of likes.

Gretchen was generous and rarely did anything halfway. She was a talented and prolific quilter. All of the babies in her extended family received special quilts, including my children and grandchildren. She also sewed cloth bags of many shapes and sizes. One year she spent Christmas Day making bags for a support group that helped local child protection service workers. The bags were for kids to pack their belongings in when being removed from their homes. Gretchen wrote, “Since I have such a large supply of fabric given to me by friends I hope to put a dent in the quantity taking up space in my sewing room and shed.”

Gretchen and Keith did not have children, but they had important family support in Arizona. My mother Eileen Wurden lives in nearby Phoenix, and their kindred love of rosemaling deepened their relationship in the past decades. Her cousin (and mine) Diane Hansen and her husband Tom have been her greatest support, day to day. Their son JP and his wife Lindsay have been enormous help, and have supplied close-by access to kids! Their three children Parker, Anya and Payson added spark to Gretchen’s life. And I know Gretchen appreciated following the lives of many other family members and their children and grandchildren through emails and texts and visits. 

There won’t be a big church funeral for Gretchen, as she did not want one. But let’s ring the bell in her honor!

Bonus family photos in celebration of Gretchen