Linnea Christine Lauer

Linnea passed away very peacefully on November 8th, 2024, after fighting Primary Progressive Aphasia and Alzheimer’s for many years. She was surrounded by the love of her family.

Linnea began her life as Linnea Nygren, when she was born to young parents Bernard and Elizabeth who were stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. She grew up in Santa Clara County in California and became Linnea Lauer when she met and later married Tom Lauer at Santa Clara University while she was pursuing her studies in Sociology. Life had odd and wonderful plans for Linnea. Tom soon joined the Foreign Service and away they went to Austria, Taiwan, Burma, China, Belgium, and Germany, returning to Virginia in between those moves. Linnea adapted like a champion, and took on many roles through the moves. She volunteered with her young daughter in a Taiwanese orphanage for the severely disabled and terminally ill; she typed up the very first Nike contract with China; she counseled teens at the International School of Rangoon; but most importantly to her and to us, she restarted the Shanghai American School from pre-WW2 days. As acting principal, she got that tiny school birthed in our living room and then moved it to what used to be stables on the US consulate grounds. Today that school spans two large, cutting-edge campuses in the sprawling city of Shanghai. When she later moved to Bonn, Germany, she began to pursue studies in child psychology at the University of Maryland. Linnea truly flourished as she dedicated her life to helping those who could not help themselves. She loved this work with her heart and soul. The scars from some of those battles haunted her in her decline, as she had vivid hallucinations of children who were being harmed, or who needed help. These visions haunted her because she couldn’t help the children in her dreams, but in reality, she had been a lioness who made a great difference for so many. Linnea kept a private practice for many years, but she also worked with the Seattle Children’s Home and within the Kitsap Schools system, putting in many hours of driving in all kinds of conditions in order to reach her young students. During her last few years, she specialized in adoption and fostering, and considered this to be her most rewarding work ever. 

While developing her own career as a therapist, Linnea also helped one of her sons establish an Asian antique shop on the island. Together, they would hunt down treasures far and wide to stock the floor and shelves of this magical place, The Mandalay Road Trading Company, where art was grounded in faith and history. During her final years, she would flip through the beauty encased in her “Arts of Asia” magazines with awe for the divine beauty held inside its pages. The variety of the roles she was able to take on never ceased to amaze her family.

If you were ever invited to Linnea’s house for a meal, you knew you were in for a glorious affair. She was an intuitive and eclectic cook, mastering styles and dishes from all the routes her travels took her. While she cooked, one might be able to hear the deep-throated strains of Edith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose”, or Debussy’s soulful “Clair de Lune” in the background...or the boisterous Wolfe Tones belting out an Irish folk song. She so much enjoyed bringing people from all walks of life together over a lovingly made meal. Her family especially misses those days.

As much as she loved cooking, Linnea adored her dogs. Her German Shepherds, a Great Pyrenees, a Rottweiler, Irish Wolfhounds aplenty, and a couple of rescued mutts. Her love for her canine companions was so great that it was palpable to the spiritually sentient: she accepted payment in kind for her therapy work, and at one point a tribal member retreated into a sweat lodge and emerged with the vision to craft a drum for Linnea that would feature a dog paw design, as he saw that was her totem animal. We are sure she is reunited with them all, as well as with her beloved human family members who have passed on.

Linnea’s life was rich in tastes, textures, and sounds; rich in guiding, connecting, leading, striving, and giving. She was a wife, mother, sister, role model, pioneer, founder and guide. Linnea was a star who graduated in Life summa cum laude. She is sorely missed.

Linnea is survived by her husband Tom Lauer; her sister Jill Schatz; her children Kirsten Lauer Karahan, Nathan Lauer, and Matthew Lauer; her grandchildren Teo Karahan, Hung and Elizabeth Lauer, and Max and Michael Lauer; and her niece and nephew Adrienne and Dave Schatz.

Her family wishes to thank the wonderful staff at Fieldstone Memory Care, here on Bainbridge Island.

If you would like to do something in her memory, please make a donation to Medicins sans Frontieres, her favorite charity.