Carrying on a Husband’s Legacy 

Dale Hammerschmidt and Mary Arneson didn’t have the typical start to a lifelong love story. They didn’t meet at a bookstore or a coffee shop, and they weren’t set up on a blind date by friends.  

They met in medical school, over a double-headed microscope looking at malignant blood cells.  

“For the rest of his life, he always carried a picture of the [cells] we were looking at in his wallet,” Mary said.  

That microscope and those cells were the start of Dale and Mary’s story. They fell in love, married, and started their medical careers— Dale an oncologist specializing in blood cancers, and Mary in occupational industrial medicine.  

At the time in his specialty, the patients Dale treated would almost always have poor prognoses. It was work that could be emotionally exhausting, but that never stopped Dale.  

“Dale was the sort of person known for his empathy with patients,” Mary said. “He was known for staying with his patients even when things went bad.” 

One resource that Dale always recommended to his patients was CaringBridge. He routinely recommended it to people and would often follow his patients’ CaringBridge pages. “It was a resource [that was] really needed when [patients and their family caregivers] wanted to keep people informed during hospitalization and stressful things like bone marrow transplants.”  

Throughout his career, Dale became known as a caring physician, passionate scholar and devoted teacher. He and Mary thrived professionally and raised two children. When it came time to retire, the two remained active, pursuing their common interests and passions together.  

“We just had our nice, happy life— going on bike rides, growing things in the garden, raising monarch butterflies in the summer, making ice luminaries in the winter,” Mary said. “And interacting with neighbors, socializing, and not really thinking much about health crises.”  

And then Dale began to have difficulty talking.  

“We thought it might’ve been a stroke, but it got a little worse,” Mary said. “We went into the hospital, and it turned out to be a brain tumor.”  

Surgery a few days later showed that the tumor was a glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer. Mary immediately thought of CaringBridge. The resource Dale recommended so often to his patients had now become one he and Mary needed themselves. They wanted to keep their loved ones around the world updated on their journey. More than that, Dale wanted his CaringBridge page to serve as a resource for medical education.  

“Dale loved to explain things,” Mary said. “He was good at explaining complex medical problems to his patients and students. It was really hard for him to not be able to communicate, and [CaringBridge] was a way that we could share what was going on with a wide range of people. We chose to make his site public because he felt his experiences could be informative for his students, but it was good to know that we could have restricted access if he needed that privacy.”  

After a successful surgery, Dale and Mary faced decisions on different therapies and clinical trials. They wanted to share it all on CaringBridge to serve as a guide for others in a similar situation. 

“We posted on CaringBridge about how we were making these decisions,” Mary said. “What choices do you have? What resources are there for finding clinical trials? How do you decide which one is the right one for you? We were also posting about how we felt and what sorts of worries there were about making the right choice. It was a reference that we could send somebody a link to if they were asking.”  

Dale entered a clinical trial to try and find a better treatment, but complications arose. A few months after his diagnosis, he lost speech and movement. “When his condition worsened, CaringBridge provided a way for me to keep everyone informed without taking time away from being with him,” Mary said. 

On a gray, rainy spring day in April, Dale died peacefully, with Mary at his side.  

Devastated, Mary found solace in knowing just how many people cared for and loved her husband, and the impact he made on the world. Nearly two years after his death, Mary continues to keep her husband’s legacy alive through helping others enjoy the things that brought him so much happiness. documenting it all on CaringBridge.  

“We’d been very involved with adaptive cycling for people with disabilities,” Mary said. “I wrote about being able to give some of Dale’s equipment to the program we were using and how good it was to be able to see his recumbent trikes being used by people who are blind.”  

And so a love story that began over a microscope in medical school continues on in a husband’s legacy and a wife’s determination to keep his memory and that love alive. Mary carries on her and Dale’s love of biking, of raising monarch butterflies in the summer and making ice luminaries in the winter.  

CaringBridge is there for the whole journey. Mary continues to fulfill Dale’s wish that his page serve as a resource for others with glioblastoma, sending out the link to those who need it and referencing back to it when others ask questions of their experience.  

For Mary, his CaringBridge page also brings her comfort in looking back at how their community rallied around them.  

“CaringBridge is a better place to communicate with family and friends, to have it be more personal,” Mary said. Through CaringBridge, her community lifts her up when she needs it most. “I always read the comments… it’s nice to know how much people cared about him.”