Kathryn “Kathy” Petrunia (née Schmidt) was born May 18, 1948, in Taber, Alberta. For the first ten years of her life, she grew up in a small farmhouse five miles south of town before her family moved half a mile up the road to the family farm, where she remained until graduating from high school in 1966.

As a young woman, Kathy dreamed of becoming a nurse and enrolled at the Galt School of Nursing in Lethbridge. Illness ultimately prevented her from completing her training, although her tendency to faint at the sight of blood may also have suggested that life had other plans for her.

And life certainly did.

Following a heated disagreement at home, complicated somewhat by a broken foot, Kathy packed her belongings and left Taber for Calgary, determined to make a life of her own. There she worked as a legal assistant with Macleod Dixon and later at the University of Calgary library. It was at the University that she met a dashingly handsome student named Tom Petrunia.

The two fell in love and, much to the chagrin of both sets of parents, proceeded to live together for six years before finally making things respectable and marrying in 1975.

Together they built a family. Their first son, Marc, was followed by Trent and, a few years later, Eric. Kathy devoted much of those years to raising her boys, but her concern rarely stopped at the boundaries of her own family. When she saw a need, her instinct was to do something about it. At Braeside Elementary, she helped establish a school lunch program for children whose working parents could not be there at lunchtime. The program endured for years after her own children had left the school, quietly improving the lives of families she would never know.

As the boys grew older, Kathy returned to the workforce, recognizing that raising three children on Tom’s salary alone was no longer realistic. Then life changed abruptly and profoundly.

Tom’s cancer became more aggressive and he died in 1992, leaving Kathy to raise their three sons alone. The future she and Tom had imagined together disappeared with him, but the responsibilities of the present did not. Kathy met them with the determination that had characterized her life from the beginning. She worked full-time for the next fifteen years while seeing her sons through adolescence and into adulthood.

When her boys had left home, her attention increasingly returned to Taber and to her aging parents. Once again, she saw needs in the community that were not being met. And once again, rather than simply pointing them out, she set about meeting them.

Together with community nurse Lori Sincennes, who would become a cherished and lifelong friend, Kathy helped establish a diabetes support group in Taber. Their work gave people living with diabetes a place to find information, encouragement and community, helping them take greater control of their health and live full and meaningful lives. What began as a shared commitment to helping others grew into an enduring friendship that remained an important part of Kathy’s life for decades. In her later years, Lori became one of Kathy’s most steadfast advocates, offering not only friendship, but compassion, guidance and an unwavering concern for her health and well-being. Her devotion to Kathy, particularly when Kathy needed someone firmly in her corner, was a gift to her and to those who loved her.

After her father, Bud, died in 2007, Kathy decided the time had come to pursue a dream she and Tom had begun imagining many years before. She packed up her mother, Lois, and headed west to the Columbia Valley to create the retirement home she and Tom had once hoped to share.

At the foot of the Rocky Mountains, in the place she affectionately called “God’s country,” stood a rustic log cabin once inhabited by her great-uncle. Kathy transformed it, piece by piece, into a beautiful home. Sadly, her mother died before she could share in the life Kathy was creating there.

But Kathy stayed.

After decades spent working, raising a family, caring for others and responding to whatever life placed before her, she found a quieter existence in the mountains. She loved being away from the city, surrounded by the landscape she had chosen for herself. And there, increasingly, she turned her attention to her garden.

Perhaps that is a fitting place to remember her: at the home she created from an old log cabin, beneath the mountains, tending the things she had planted and watching them grow.

Kathy’s life was not always an easy one, nor did it unfold according to the plans she made as a young woman on a farm outside Taber. It was instead a life shaped by unexpected turns, profound losses, hard work, independence and an extraordinary capacity to carry on. From the young woman who left home with a broken foot to make her own way in Calgary, to the mother who raised three sons after losing her husband far too soon, to the woman who repeatedly saw needs in her community and worked to fill them, Kathy met life on her own terms.

She leaves behind a family whose lives were shaped by hers, and a home and garden beneath the mountains that bear the unmistakable imprint of the woman who made them.

Kathy is survived by her sons, Marc, Trent and Eric; her daughter-in-law, Tiffany; and her granddaughters, Shea and Tenley.

She was predeceased by her husband, Tom, in 1992; her brother, Ben, in 1993; her father, Wayne “Bud” Schmidt, in 2007; and her mother, Lois Schmidt, in 2010.

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