Tye was a lifelong Mabel, MN resident. A blonde-haired blue-eyed Scandinavian boy that loved the outdoors. He farmed all of his life with his father and spent many days out in the sun. If he wasn’t working outdoors he was playing outdoors. He loved canoeing, camping, mowing lawn, and landscaping. Tye grew up in an era where sunscreen wasn’t really talked about or emphasized as a safety measure. It was not a habit that he or I grew up with. We didn’t use sunscreen. We didn’t seek shade. We enjoyed our summer tans. We WORKED on our tans.

In 2008, I found a mole on his back. I knew it had changed. It was darker, the edges were irregular and it was bigger. As with everyone, our life was busy. I kept saying “We need to get that mole looked at. We need to get it checked.”. But we had planting season and spraying season and harvest season, a daughter that was graduating, a son and another daughter that would graduate each consecutive year and a 3-year-old. We were busy. Finally, out of frustration, I blurted out, “Well when that melanoma kills you, you will wish you had gotten it looked at.” That lit a fire. We made that appointment. We got it biopsied and it was melanoma. We had surgery in Rochester in the fall of 2009. It was deep but the surgeon felt confident they had gotten all of it. The best news was that the sentinel node biopsy was negative meaning it had not spread. But lo and behold we found out 2 years later that it had spread. It had spread to his brain. We found out something was wrong while we were on vacation taking our little boy to the Minnesota zoo. Tye passed out while getting the stroller ready. He fell face-first into the pavement. He had felt a little dizzy, “a little off” during the drive to the zoo but nothing that couldn’t be explained away. Even at the hospital, they were able to explain it away “A vaso-vagal episode”. Until it happened again 2 weeks later. A CT scan showed two lesions suggestive of metastatic melanoma. From 2011 to 2015 we battled melanoma with surgery, radiation, gamma knife procedures, and waiting for new medications and immunotherapy options to be FDA approved because you see, his brain mets disqualified him from any trial studies available. Instead every three months we had PET scans and MRIs and prayed for NED (no evidence of disease) and then eventually just praying for no increase in the size or spread of the lesions that came back. In December of 2014, the spread of melanoma that had invaded the leptomeningeal layer of his nervous system a year earlier could not be contained and there was nothing more that we could do. We stopped treatment and took Tye home to the place he loved best…our farm. Tye died on March 8. 2015.

Tye’s death affected more than just me, our children and our families. His lifelong residency in our little tri-state area touched many lives. Lives that knew little to nothing about melanoma. Carl and Steph Westby started the Run from the Sun because they saw how much our community needed education and awareness about the dangers of sun exposure and the devastating effects of skin cancer. As Tye’s family, we needed his death to make some sort of sense, to have some sort of meaning because even after 8 years the consensus for all of us is “he should be here.” Therefore, we had to find another avenue to understand all the “why’s” that we lost him and what can we do to leave a legacy of hope for people that encounter a story similar to ours. The legacy being…

For the Love of TYE

Check-your skin for moles that are new or changing

Protect-your skin and your children from the damaging effect of UV rays

Educate-share what you learn from us or any other credible site about skin cancer prevention