Tamra Ann Rolf

Tamra Ann Rolf passed away on November 18th in hospice care at LMH Health in Lawrence, Kansas. She died from gastric cancer. She was 47.

Tamra was born in Seoul, Korea on June 20th, 1977. At three years old, she was adopted by Tommy Joe and Barbara Ann (Tyler) Smith who raised her and her sister, Dawn, in Wichita. Tamra studied graphic design at Kansas State University, working her way through college to become the first in her family to earn a degree. She spent her professional life working as a graphic designer and art director developing projects ranging from books, magazines, and album covers to apparel, branding systems and environmental graphics. During her career – the past decade in independent practice – she worked for and with magazine publishers, independent record labels, nonprofit organizations, universities and professional sports teams, including the University of Kansas and the Kansas City Chiefs.

Tamra met Dan Rolf in Kansas City soon after starting her design career. After a year of friendship – formed easily through mutual interests in art, music, nature, and laughing uncontrollably while examining life’s absurdities – they understood they were fully and completely in love. And they understood that life, whatever it would bring, would be better, happier, and more beautiful if they experienced it together. So, with those truths understood, they moved forward to travel thousands of miles throughout North America, backpack through Europe, and just enjoy being together wherever they happened to be. While working in the Bay Area, a job opportunity brought about the chance to return to the Midwest. Lawrence, Kansas felt like the right place for them to start their family. On November 30th, they left California, stopping a few hours later at Lake Tahoe to obtain a marriage license and marry in one of Nevada’s same-day wedding chapels. They exchanged simple wedding bands they’d purchased from a roadside silver shop. Then they continued on toward Kansas. People who know them tend to-when learning about this modest wedding-nod and say something like, “Yep, that sounds about right.” Dan and Tamra’s love story needed no added pageantry or fanfare. They shared an absolute bond, and the clarity and inviolability of this bond allowed them to focus on their most essential shared truths-they wanted to be together and so they were; they wanted to marry and so they simply did, as immediately and efficiently as possible; and they wanted to have a family and so they had the most beautiful family-three boys, Sun (21) and twins Taeo and Aalto (10). In 2022, Sun and his fiancée, Elle White, had Yumi, Dan and Tamra’s first grandchild. All reside in Lawrence. As a mother to all boys, Tamra had a special connection to her granddaughter. Even though Yumi is not yet two, it is clear she already shares many of Tamra’s personality traits- creative and good nature, a palpable toughness, a quiet but unmistakable confidence.

The reality of Tamra’s death still feels ungraspable. This is in part because her cancer, diagnosed in June, advanced so rapidly, the illness seeming able to just sweep her away on its relentless current. Within months, a busy life that started each day with a pre-dawn jog and ended only when all necessary tasks were complete rapidly became governed by illness. But our incomprehensibility stems more so from the fact that it is brutally unfair that a woman so good-so deeply and truly good-could be gone. Tamra had a once-in-a-lifetime combination of impossibly excellent traits. Her style: unassailable. Her taste? Impeccable. Her work ethic unstoppable. And above all, she was purely the nicest person most of us have ever known. She was cool and kind; brilliant without a hint of snobbery; both gentle and strong as hell. She was direct, honest, and never entertained an ounce of anyone’s BS. She could set you straight if that’s what was needed, but it would come from a place of compassion and humor. She didn’t seek out self-celebration, but she gave her labor in celebration to others, especially her kids, for whom holidays and birthdays were made extra memorable by small and thoughtful details-handmade gifts and decorations, their names spelled out in balloons, their favorite meals served. Nothing was ostentatious, everything was personal.

There is an endless list of things that made her an incredible partner, parent, and friend. Here are three of the most extraordinary:

1. She really knew herself. She knew who she was and what she valued. She never placed herself at the center of attention, not because she was shy-she wasn’t. But because her sense of self required no external validation.

2. She was utterly against the judgment of others, and she would squirm uncomfortably at the slightest hint of gossiping or weighing in on how others behaved. “You never know what kind of day someone else is having,” she might have said to us, or she would have put it more bluntly: “Just let people live their lives.” Her acceptance of others was not a posture, nor did it come from naivety or willful ignorance. It came from an unshakeable belief that people were free to be who they were and that it was not her (or your) business to make any suggestions, assumptions, or to exert control over people. She demanded the same freedom for herself. Good luck trying to control Tamra or tell her what to do! We would not have dared. She was the most correct person we knew, with an eye trained on a truth that we could not always see, but did not question. Best we could do was try to learn from her, emulate her, try and fail to copy her, admire her, respect her, and leave her be.

3. She had the patience and wisdom of a person who fully inhabited the present. She didn’t waste time anxiously worrying about the past or the unknowable future. Instead, she observed, lived in, and did the work required of her present moment. Cancer made appreciating the present harder, of course, and she did worry about what she might miss out on in the future. But, still, she tried to take things day by day. She fully lived within the time she had left and often expressed how grateful she was to be with Yumi, for the chance to watch the twins play football (even if by video when she was too sick to attend their games), for the nourishing food Sun made her, and for the diligent, loving, daily care Dan gave her.

It may seem like an obituary would naturally inflate a loved one’s good qualities while obscuring the less flattering aspects, but that is not the case here. Tamra valued and told the unadorned truth, and it would be disrespectful to her memory to not do the same. So here it is: She was really this good and the world is worse without her in it.

Tamra is preceded in death by her father and is survived by her mother, sister Dawn Williams and brother-in-law Michael Williams, her husband Dan and their sons Aalto, Taeo, and Sun Rolf, as well as Sun’s fiancée, Elle White, and granddaughter Yumi Rolf, and numerous nieces, nephews, and friends.

Tamra’s family invites friends to join them in celebrating her life at the Lied Center in Lawrence on Saturday, December 14th at 4:30pm.

One of Tamra’s last wishes was to be cremated and to have her ashes spread in the sky. When Dan suggested this, she said, “”Yes! Put me in the sky!”” It’s something Dan and Tamra did every night, both together and independently – they looked at the sky as the sun set and felt the brief shock of its beauty, its elaborations of color and illusions of form, its inaccessible and impossible landscapes. Many of Dan’s pictures of Tamra are of her with her back turned to the camera, head up, watching the sky. So that’s where she will be, where we will always see her.

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