Nov. 4, 2025: When Mike Schmidt talks about his wife, Heidi, his sentences fill with warmth and love: green grass under her bare feet, vacations with the kids, laughter that “could be heard from aisles away” at the Baxter Walmart, where she proudly worked for more than three decades.
In early 2022, that’s when everything changed. Heidi was diagnosed with a rare sarcoma that began in her thigh and spread. Treatments were punishing and calendar-defying. “Cancer doesn’t care about holidays,” Mike said. “Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, the Fourth of July, all the birthdays, we were at Mayo.”
When the chemo stopped helping, the family focused on comfort, presence and some honest and raw conversations.
“Heidi was brave about the hard talks,” he recalled. “She was thinking about the kids. A lot of those conversations weren’t for her. They were for them, and difficult for me to hear from all sides.”
Choosing hospice
By January 2023, Mike met with Lakewood’s hospice team.
“For me, hospice was relief,” he recalled. “I remember telling them, ‘Because you touch her the way you do, I can be her husband again.’ My touch had become task and tension — showers, meds, safety. Hospice let me love my wife without being the ‘bad guy.’ ”
The support was practical and deeply compassionate, he said. Nurses organized medications in a way Heidi trusted. Equipment arrived without hassle. Small kindnesses like lotions massaged into her arms, foot rubs, a favorite candy bar, restored moments of dignity and delight.
“They’re trained, yes,” Mike said, “but the part that mattered most was who they are. It’s a calling. It’s with such purpose. They floated through our home with grace.”
Heidi was, in Mike’s words, “painfully introverted.” Lakewood’s team met her where she was.
“They knew how to gently break down walls,” he said. “Some days were heavy. Some were lighter: check the meds, share a story, bring a smile. It gave her something to talk about when I got home. The hospice team gave both of us air.”
Moments that remain
There were hard days, like the afternoon the family helped Heidi shave her hair, “the first time the kids saw how real it was,” Mike recalled. And there were quiet, ordinary gifts like thrift-store strolls after treatment and a fish fry with friends on an unseasonably warm February day.
“People thought we’d have a pool party in July” Mike said softly. “That day, she said goodbye.”
When Heidi died on March 20, 2023 at home, in the sunlit room she loved, Lakewood’s team tended to the details with an abundance of gentleness. She was 54 years old.
“I turned off the oxygen and the house got quiet,” Mike recalled sadly. “The [hospice] nurse handled everything — the meds, the equipment, the calls. When she left, it was as if cancer never happened. They made the house better for me.”
What hospice meant
“In every decision we had to make, hospice was the easiest. And the most generous. Everything else pertained to medicine and dying. Hospice was about living,” Mike said.
He has a message for families who hesitate: “You’re not giving up. You’re giving your loved one comfort, dignity and time you didn’t know you could have. Hospice opens doors of time.”
It also gave Mike a chance to be present in a new way.
“Because hospice took the physical strain, Heidi and I found a different kind of closeness at the end,” he said. “We got the ending we needed.”
To learn more about Lakewood’s hospice services, please visit: https://www.lakewoodhealthsystem.com/care-services/home-based-services/hospice/
After walking through his wife’s 14-month cancer journey and the support this family found through Lakewood’s hospice program, Mike Schmidt turned to music to help express the emotions of love and grief that followed.
He co-wrote “Holding On, While Letting Go” with AJ Spoff, recording the song at Rockhouse Productions in St. Joseph, Minn.
A moving tribute for anyone who’s ever loved deeply and had to let go.
Listen here:
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