Georgia Mollerud

Georgia Marie Mollerud died in her home on November 3, 2025. She was surrounded by loved ones when she left her failed body and found her final peace. Her death was a merciful and welcome end to a very long few months for her and all who knew and loved her.

Georgia blessed every life she touched, and she touched many. She will be sorely missed by all who knew her and also by the many who didn't because she was taken so young. The world we live in is, and forever now will be, a poorer place that Georgia's gone.

Georgia was born to George and Grace Lobacz on June 13, 1947. The oldest of six siblings, she grew up on the farm her family had outside Thorp. Life on the farm was hard in many ways, and Grace's health issues did not make things easier on Georgia.

It is likely Georgia's unique place among her siblings (Walter, Suzanne, Carol, Barbara and Debra) in life was founded on her status as oldest child in a farm family with a mother who was sickly at times. What is for sure is that all of her siblings regarded her equal voice on family matters as a little more equal than theirs, and that Keenie, as Georgia was known to her siblings, held her unique role among her siblings to the very end of her life, probably because she never used her influence within the family or among her siblings for selfish reasons. Indeed, it is Georgia's deep and abiding selflessness that most singly and completely defined who she was in life.

Georgia graduated from Thorp High School in 1966. While Georgia was at Thorp High, a handsome athlete named Tom Misfeldt caught her eye. Tom and Georgia dated and even served as King and Queen of Winter Formal together while Georgia was at Thorp.

And Tom and Georgia stayed connected after Tom graduated in 1965, eventually marrying in Thorp on a very cold day in January, 1968.

Like many young marrieds, particularly those exposed to the Vietnam draft as Tom and Georgia were, they moved frequently as they were starting out. And they each had several jobs in support of each other and the family they started shortly after marrying.

As Georgia moved around the state, though, she never really left the farm, and there was no point in her life where her time on her family's farm as a child and teen did not fundamentally inform how she engaged with whatever was in front of her at the moment.

The farm taught her thrift and perseverance and a thousand other real and true virtues, and it gave her a love of and respect for animals that stayed with her to the end of her life. But, more than anything else, life on the farm gave Georgia grit and competence, along with the confidence that follows from having been through a lot and knowing you can still take a helluva lot more.

And Georgia was, right up until the end, grit and competence upright and walking around on two very determined feet.

Though Tom and Georgia eventually divorced, they accomplished a lot in their time together. They had and raised three boys: Travis (born 1968); Trevor (born 1970) and Troy (born 1974). They got Tom through Law School at the University of Madison and into life as a lawyer in the southeastern part of Wisconsin. And they managed to move their family back to northwest Wisconsin a few years into Tom's practice so they and their children could be closer to their friends and family in Thorp as the children grew up.

While Tom practiced law in Eau Claire, Georgia focused most of her attention on raising her three boys in that city's Third Ward. For whatever reason, none of the boys were particularly interested in being raised, and their early indifference to guidance, practical and otherwise, only got more pronounced as they grew older. Nonetheless, Georgia was always a loving, attentive and patient Mom to her boys, not only when they were growing up on McKinley Avenue but as they have grown up and lived their respective lives as adults.

Never have any of Georgia's boys ever doubted that their mother loved them, completely and unconditionally, whatever they did, with her whole heart. And each of them will move forward in life after her passing with that mother's love held safe in their own hearts.

After Tom and Georgia separated in 1984, Georgia had to map her own future. She had been a stay-at-home mom and homemaker during her marriage to Tom. Not for a lack of talent or ambition, of course; it was merely the role she had in her partnership with Tom.

Having spent almost her entire life to that point herding children, Georgia naturally gravitated to education. And as Georgia became a teaching professional, her basic orientation towards putting others before herself found new ways to express itself.

Eventually, Georgia found an educational niche where she could not only pour herself into helping the most helpless among us but she could also do so without any reasonable hope of receiving adequate thanks or compensation, or anything else really, for the effort, except, maybe, the satisfaction of knowing that she was doing hard, thankless work that needed doing as well as it could be done.

And once Georgia got into special education and was given her own classroom by the Altoona School District, she gave that District, and every kid she taught, and every parent of every such kid, everything she had for 20 consistently excellent years as a teacher.

As Georgia was setting off on her independent journey through life, she met Ted Mollerud through one of her children.

Ted, who had previously lost a wife to cancer, was a medical professional in town, and he and Georgia had an easy compatibility that was nice for each of them after their marriages had ended. Ted and Georgia married in 1997, and lived as husband and wife in Altoona until Georgia's death.

All marriages that last decades change as the years go along, but the ones that last are true partnerships at the start and remain so the whole time. Through all the years Ted and Georgia were married, what each was doing in their individual lives, and what they did together as they finished their professional careers and moved into their later lives, may have changed, but their love and support of each other, and their continuing mutual commitment to the life they built together, remained constant to the end.

After retiring from the grueling and largely thankless job she had in education for two decades, Georgia immediately did what everybody who knew her knew she would do - she got a job and went to work.

In Georgia's later years, she held a number of retail jobs before retiring last month after nearly a decade behind the jewelry counter at JC Penney's in Oakwood Mall. As anyone who bought anything from her or interacted with her at JC Penney's knows, she was always a knowledgeable and enthusiastic salesperson who approached her job selling jewelry like she approached being a mom and teaching kids with special needs and everything else she did in her life, i.e., like a total pro.

But Georgia's work life, as remarkable as it was, was still really a very small part of who she was and what she meant to the people who meant the most to her, i.e., her family. Though she was the oldest of the six Lobacz siblings, only Carol survives her; her other four siblings have already died, as have her parents. George died first, and Georgia took the lead role in getting Grace settled and secure after that death. Then, Georgia spent the many years between that death and her mom's much more recent death managing her mom's care and making sure her mom was safe and comfortable in her final years.

Georgia's youngest siblings, Barbara and Debra, died in middle age, when each had children who were young adults. When each sister died, Georgia eagerly took on a support role with respect to the deceased sister's children and their children, serving as a sort of surrogate grandma for the grandchildren of her predeceased siblings. In this role, Georgia, and her surviving sister, Carol, regularly drove across the state to the Green Bay area, where these families lived, to attend school functions for her grandnieces and grandnephews who were missing their grandmothers. Indeed, Georgia had just such a trip planned for the weekend after she was hospitalized for the last time.

True to her roots on the farm, Georgia also remained engaged with flora and fauna throughout her life.

She loved to garden, and particularly enjoyed the challenge of trying to get plants to grow in spots too hostile for plant life. If she had a fault as a gardener, it was that she pruned too hard. No doubt, however, she pruned as hard as she did at least in part so there'd always be spots to fill in the Spring. And there always were, but any yard where Georgia lived showed her diligent and experienced care and management and was filled with the fruits of her efforts to beautify her natural surroundings for all to enjoy.

Georgia also enjoyed watching the veritable airshow of birds jetting in and out of the Otter Creek drainage to the elaborate set of feeders she had off the back porch of her Altoona home and had many stories of bears and other large mammals coming up out of the forested drainage below her home to forage through her neighborhood. She also loved and doted on a long series of small, hairy, loving dogs culminating in her pet widower, Marley.

Georgia lived her whole life in Wisconsin. Of course, she left the state regularly for travel as an adult like many Wisconsinites do, but she never lived anywhere else, and she never considered living anywhere else.

That's because Georgia loved Wisconsin. Sure, she loved the things lots of people love in Wisconsin, like the seasons and the Packers and the liquidation stores. But what she really loved about Wisconsin was how it was between people in Wisconsin when she was young.

Georgia grew up in a Wisconsin where people sticking together and helping each other out was commonplace and even expected.

The world around her might have changed into a more hostile, dog-eat-dog place, but Georgia never changed. She was always ready to do whatever she could for anyone she could help. She was that way because she was raised that way and never found a reason to live less generously. That she never found such a reason was almost certainly because she never looked for one. Georgia believed in being and doing good in the world, and she exhibited and lived that belief as long as she could.

Georgia is survived by her husband, Ted Mollerud (Altoona, WI); her three sons, Travis Misfeldt (Eugene, OR), Trevor Misfeldt (Madison, WI) and Troy Misfeldt (Altoona, WI); three grandchildren, Griffin Misfeldt (Eugene, OR), Spencer Misfeldt (Portland, OR) and Harper Misfeldt (Eugene, OR); and her beloved yorkiepoo, Marley. At Georgia's request, there will be no funeral or memorial service; instead, the family asks that you remember Georgia by showing the people you encounter in your life kindness, dignity and compassion, whether you know and agree with them or not. No cards or flowers, please, but Georgia would have been thrilled to know you made a donation of whatever amount to an animal welfare organization in her name.

Last, Georgia loved "Days of our Lives". Little could keep her from watching the show; it is no stretch to say that only death will do it permanently, as she probably won't be watching Days much anymore. But she would have appreciated how, if she had been able to see her own end as her survivors saw it, what it says in the beginning of the show turns out to have been true about her and her life in the end - despite the innumerable and compelling reasons this life should not have ended when and how it did, like sands through the hourglass, so to, ultimately, were the days of Georgia's life.

She was an extraordinary person who lived an extraordinary life in a place she loved. We've lost a great one with her passing.