Deborah (Deb) L Holland

Deborah Lee Holland, age 68, passed away on August 17, 2017 at 9:32 PM Pacific Time at Samaritan Evergreen Hospice House in Albany, Oregon after a 9 month battle with metastatic cancer. She will be cremated in Newport, Oregon. Ashes will be used in ceremony, and be scattered by her closest friends in Bloomington, Indiana, and her spouse, Michael D. Main, will also scatter ashes in her favorite places in and about Newport and Lincoln County, Oregon. Deb was born December 14, 1948 on Whidbey Island, Washington to Norman Holland and Irene Lee. She was raised and grew up in Hammond / Munster, Indiana between 1948 and 1968. She graduated from Bishop Noll Institute, a Catholic High School, in 1967. She left for Indiana University - Bloomington in 1968, marrying Ted Ostaszewski in October 1968, and giving birth to her first son, Dan, in May 1969. Her first marriage was a short one, and, in September 1974 she gave birth to a second son, Matthew, whose father was Boyd Berry. Deb struggled and sacrificed for many years in order to raise Matthew as a single mom at a time when single mothers could count on little support or respect from society at large. Deb lived in Bloomington Indiana between 1968 and 1998, with a brief stint in Shaker Heights, Ohio (Cleveland area). She worked between 1981 and 1990 as a Lab Technician in I.U.'s Biology Dept., and she completed her B.A. in Biology from Indiana University in 1989. Her favorite career job during this time was working as a chef for Bloomingfoods Deli between 1995 - 1998. Deb met Michael Main in 1990: they married in 1996. In 1998, Deb and Michael left Indiana for Rochester, Minnesota. They purchased a home in downtown Rochester. Between 1999 and 2000, Deb worked at Barnes and Noble Bookstore as a bookseller in Rochester, while Michael worked as a Technical Writer at IBM. Her favorite experience in Minnesota involved multiple vacation trips to the northern Boundary Waters. Deb and Michael, desiring even more access to wilderness experience, migrated to Beaverton, Oregon in January 2001, where Deb worked at Barnes and Noble in Beaverton while Michael worked at IBM-Beaverton. In October 2003, Deb and Michael moved from Beaverton to Newport on the wilds of the Pacific Oregon Coast, and worked to rehab a vintage 1939 beach cabin which they purchased. While Michael commuted daily to Corvallis to work as a Technical Writer for Fiserv, Inc., Deb worked as a Perishables Manager at Newport's Oceana Natural Foods Coop between 2003 and 2014. Between 2004 and 2013, Deb was actively engaged as a Judge for the Oregon Daffodil Society in the Oregon Willamette Valley area. She retired from Oceana Foods in 2014, but immediately began full time volunteer work as the managing Lincoln County, OR reviewer for EBIRD.org, Cornell University's online Ornithology global bird counting database. During this time, she herself spent several hours daily in the field vetting bird sightings and working as a citizen scientist to authenticate data from other birders. The final 20 years of Deb's daily life centered around home chef activity, home gardening, statewide work with the Oregon Daffodil Society, reviewing for EBIRD as an engaged citizen scientist, and her love of multiple generations of pet Siamese cats. Deb's first grandchild, Lucy, was born in late April 2016- and Deb's last travel trip -and big adventure- in life involved going to meet her new grand-daughter in Missouri in the Autumn of 2016. Sadly, this is when her illness began its earliest stages- whose actual diagnosis and severity was unknown to all until it was discovered upon hospital admission on July 7, 2017. Deb is survived by both her first husband, Ted, and second husband, Michael, as well as by both her sons, Dan and Matthew, and by her 1 year old grand-daughter Lucy. Services to be announced.

Tributes

Deborah (Deb) L Holland

December 14, 1948 - August 17, 2017