Thomas "Tom" Yonker
1957 – 2026 · 69 · Maple Bend
Thomas "Tom" Yonker, 69, of Maple Bend, died unexpectedly on Tuesday, June 30, 2026, at home.
Visitation Sunday, July 5, 2:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. — Solemn Oaks Funeral Home, Maple Bend.
Obituaries
Every life in our care, written down with care. Each obituary carries the services, the directions, a place to leave a memory, and where to send flowers or a remembrance.
June 2026
Leonard "Len" Brandt
1933 – 2026 · 93 · Maple Bend
Leonard 'Len' Brandt, 93, of Maple Bend, died at home on Sunday, June 28, 2026, four blocks from the square where he ran Brandt Hardware for forty-four years and sold the town — board by bolt by gallon of paint — most of what it built of itself across the second half of the last century.
Services were held July 2 at Maple Bend Reformed Church, Maple Bend.
Marisol Vega Hendricks
1971 – 2026 · 54 · Maple Bend
Marisol Vega Hendricks, 54, of Maple Bend, died at home on Sunday, June 28, 2026, with her family around her, after two years of an illness she discussed the way she discussed everything — honestly, once, and then back to whoever needed her.
Visitation and rosary Monday, July 6, 5:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. — Solemn Oaks Funeral Home, Maple Bend.
Marcus Delgado
1996 – 2026 · 29 · Newaygo
Marcus Delgado, 29, of Newaygo, drowned in the Muskegon River on Saturday, June 27, 2026 — the same river he had fished since he was six, worked since he was nineteen, and loved, without complication, the whole of his life.
Memorial gathering Sunday, July 5, 3:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m. — Solemn Oaks Funeral Home — Gathering Room, Maple Bend.
Lois VanderPloeg
1938 – 2026 · 88 · Fremont
Lois VanderPloeg, 88, of Fremont, died Wednesday, June 24, 2026, at the Newaygo County Medical Care Facility in White Cloud, after a long and full life measured out in shifts, hands of euchre, and the particular sound of a canning lid sealing.
Services were held June 27 at First Christian Reformed Church, Fremont.
Cheryl Baumgartner
1951 – 2026 · 74 · Hesperia
Cheryl Baumgartner, 74, of Hesperia, died Monday, June 22, 2026, at the farmhouse where she had lived for more than fifty years, three weeks shy of the county fair she had helped run for most of her life.
Services were held June 26 at Hesperia Community Church, Hesperia.
Harold "Hal" Brinkman
1938 – 2026 · 88 · Maple Bend
Harold "Hal" Brinkman, 88, of Maple Bend, died Sunday, June 21, 2026, at Corewell Health in Grand Rapids, three miles as the crow flies from the farm on Baseline Road where he was born, and where he milked cows twice a day, every day, for the better part of sixty years.
Services were held June 26 at Maple Bend Reformed Church, Maple Bend.
Melissa Hough
1974 – 2026 · 52 · Maple Bend
Melissa Hough, 52, of Maple Bend, died at home on Wednesday, June 17, 2026, of ALS, which she faced for two years with a short list of complaints and a long list of things she still meant to get done.
Services were held June 20 at Maple Bend Reformed Church, Maple Bend.
Donna Jean Silvis
1948 – 2026 · 77 · White Cloud
Donna Jean Silvis, 77, of White Cloud, died at home on Monday, June 15, 2026.
Services were held June 19 at White Cloud Wesleyan Church, White Cloud.
Dean Okerlund
1997 – 2026 · 28 · Maple Bend
Dean Okerlund, 28, of Maple Bend, died Saturday, June 13, 2026, in an accident on M-37 north of Newaygo.
Services were held June 20 at Solemn Oaks Funeral Home — Gathering Room, Maple Bend.
Roger Carmody
1959 – 2026 · 66 · Newaygo
Roger Carmody, 66, of Newaygo, died Saturday, June 13, 2026, at home, of a heart attack, with the summer he loved best just getting started.
Services were held June 17 at Oak Hill Cemetery, White Cloud.
Gerald Tanis
1947 – 2026 · 78 · Maple Bend
Gerald Tanis, 78, of Maple Bend, died Wednesday, June 10, 2026, at Corewell Health Gerber Memorial in Fremont, in the same county where he was born and, it is fair to say, where he had personally kept a great many machines running.
Services were held June 12 at Solemn Oaks Funeral Home, Maple Bend.
Jason Tibbe
1992 – 2026 · 34 · White Cloud
Jason Tibbe, 34, of White Cloud, died unexpectedly at home on Monday, June 8, 2026.
Services were held June 13 at Solemn Oaks Funeral Home — Gathering Room, Maple Bend.
Patricia Alvarez Boone
1968 – 2026 · 58 · Maple Bend
Patricia Alvarez Boone, 58, of Maple Bend, died at home on Sunday, June 7, 2026, of heart failure, with her husband beside her.
Services were held June 12 at Saint Brigid Catholic Church, Maple Bend.
Carl Heffron
1936 – 2026 · 89 · Fremont
Carl Heffron, 89, of Fremont, died at home on Friday, June 5, 2026, with a harmonica on the nightstand where another man would have kept his glasses.
Services were held June 10 at First Christian Reformed Church, Fremont.
Dorothy Ann Plummer
1941 – 2026 · 84 · White Cloud
Dorothy Ann Plummer, 84, of White Cloud, died Wednesday, June 3, 2026, at the hospice residence in Fremont, having spent the better part of her life feeding people who did not yet know they were hungry for more than breakfast.
Services were held June 6 at Solemn Oaks Funeral Home — Gathering Room, Maple Bend.
Amanda Ruiz Keller
1988 – 2026 · 38 · Fremont
Amanda Ruiz Keller, 38, of Fremont, died at home on Monday, June 1, 2026, of breast cancer, with her husband, Danny, and their two small children close by — held, at the last, the way she had spent fifteen years teaching frightened new parents to hold the smallest babies in Michigan.
Services were held June 5 at Saint Brigid Catholic Church, Maple Bend.
May 2026
Daniel Vredeveld
1954 – 2026 · 71 · Fremont
Daniel Vredeveld, 71, of Fremont, died Sunday, May 31, 2026, at Corewell Health Gerber Memorial Hospital, in the town where he had spent his whole life turning careful people into careful scientists.
Services were held June 5 at First Christian Reformed Church, Fremont.
Rev. Arthur McPhail
1944 – 2026 · 81 · Newaygo
The Reverend Arthur McPhail, 81, of Newaygo, died on Friday, May 29, 2026, at Gerber Memorial in Fremont, in the county he served for forty years from the pulpit of Newaygo United Methodist Church — a county he had, by his own rough accounting, married about half of and buried about the other half, and loved without much regard to which.
Services were held June 2 at Newaygo United Methodist Church, Newaygo.
Walter "Walt" Koopman
1926 – 2026 · 99 · Fremont
Walter "Walt" Koopman, 99, of Fremont, died Tuesday, May 26, 2026, at home, four months short of the hundred years he had been quietly aiming at.
Services were held May 29 at First Christian Reformed Church, Fremont.
Sandra Jean Mercer
1962 – 2026 · 63 · Maple Bend
Sandra Jean Mercer, 63, of Maple Bend, died Sunday, May 24, 2026, at Emmanuel Hospice in Grand Rapids, after a long illness she carried the way she carried everything else — quietly, and without letting it get between a child and a hot meal.
Services were held May 28 at Saint Brigid Catholic Church, Maple Bend.
Pearl Hasenbank
1929 – 2026 · 96 · Maple Bend
Pearl Hasenbank, 96, of Maple Bend, died at home on Saturday, May 23, 2026, ninety-six years and five months after she arrived on a Christmas Eve in the same township — a present, her father liked to say, that nobody had budgeted for and nobody sent back.
Services were held May 26 at Riverside Cemetery, Maple Bend.
Ruth Dykhouse
1934 – 2026 · 91 · Maple Bend
Ruth Dykhouse, 91, of Maple Bend, died at home on Thursday, May 21, 2026, with the Psalter open on the nightstand to a page she had long since stopped needing.
Services were held May 23 at Maple Bend Reformed Church, Maple Bend.
Kevin Brandsma
1979 – 2026 · 47 · Maple Bend
Kevin Brandsma, 47, of Maple Bend, died Wednesday, May 20, 2026, in a fall while working a power line in Newaygo County, doing the job he had done for twenty-four years.
Services were held May 23 at Maple Bend Reformed Church, Maple Bend.
Dale Rademaker
1955 – 2026 · 71 · Grant
Dale Rademaker, 71, of Grant, died Saturday, May 9, 2026, at a hospital in Grand Rapids, after managing the grain elevator that fed the county's farms for the better part of forty years and umpiring its softball for just as long — a man, it was widely held, worth arguing with and impossible to distrust.
Services were held May 13 at Grant Bible Church, Grant.
Shirley Antrim
1931 – 2026 · 95 · Maple Bend
Shirley Antrim, 95, of Maple Bend, died Sunday, May 3, 2026, having spent her working life at the beginning of everyone else's — first as a country midwife and then as a labor-and-delivery nurse, catching, by the reckoning of a town that has tried to count, something near a thousand of this county's babies.
Services were held May 7 at Maple Bend Reformed Church, Maple Bend.
April 2026
Albert Vandenbrink
1943 – 2026 · 83 · Fremont
Albert Vandenbrink, 83, of Fremont, died Wednesday, April 29, 2026, at home, having run the label press at the Gerber plant for thirty-nine years and, in the basement of the house on Cherry Street, a railroad of his own for nearly seventy.
Services were held May 2 at First Christian Reformed Church, Fremont.
Dianne Whitcomb
1968 – 2026 · 58 · Newaygo
Dianne Whitcomb, 58, of Newaygo, died Friday, April 24, 2026, of a stroke, at the bait shop she had opened every morning for twenty years — which was, everyone agreed, exactly where she would have chosen to be.
Services were held May 2 at Solemn Oaks Funeral Home — Gathering Room, Maple Bend.
Wendell Schuit
1935 – 2026 · 91 · White Cloud
Wendell Schuit, 91, of White Cloud, died Sunday, April 19, 2026, at home, on the farm his grandfather cleared, where he milked cows for the first half of his life and grew Christmas trees for the second, and sold every one of those trees the only way he knew how — with a handshake.
Services were held April 23 at White Cloud Wesleyan Church, White Cloud.
Carmen Ferris
1964 – 2026 · 62 · Maple Bend
Carmen Ferris, 62, of Maple Bend, died Tuesday, April 14, 2026, at home, of the cancer she had spent a year meeting the way she taught so many others to meet it — plainly, and without pretending it was anything but what it was.
Services were held April 17 at Saint Brigid Catholic Church, Maple Bend.
Stanley Gruber
1950 – 2026 · 76 · Maple Bend
Stanley Gruber, 76, of Maple Bend, died Thursday, April 9, 2026, at Trinity Health in Grand Rapids, after a short illness he insisted on calling an inconvenience, having spent thirty-eight years seeing to it that the boilers at the Gerber plant in Fremont never once went cold on a winter night.
Services were held April 13 at Maple Bend Reformed Church, Maple Bend.
Rosemary Pell
1938 – 2026 · 88 · Fremont
Rosemary Pell, 88, of Fremont, died Saturday, April 4, 2026, at home, in the front room where for sixty years she taught the children of Fremont — and then their children, and then theirs — to sit up straight and find middle C.
Services were held April 8 at First Christian Reformed Church, Fremont.
March 2026
Harvey Dault
1941 – 2026 · 84 · Hesperia
Harvey Dault, 84, of Hesperia, died Tuesday, March 24, 2026, at home.
Services were held March 28 at Solemn Oaks Funeral Home — Gathering Room, Maple Bend.
June Kowalski
1952 – 2026 · 73 · Maple Bend
June Kowalski, 73, of Maple Bend, died Thursday, March 12, 2026, at home after a short illness, borne with the same brisk practicality she brought to a Friday fish fry.
Services were held March 16 at Maple Bend Reformed Church, Maple Bend.
Gordon Ackerman
1946 – 2026 · 79 · Newaygo
Gordon Ackerman, 79, of Newaygo, died Tuesday, March 3, 2026, at home.
Services were held March 6 at Newaygo United Methodist Church, Newaygo.
February 2026
Betty Culp
1939 – 2026 · 86 · White Cloud
Betty Culp, 86, of White Cloud, died Saturday, February 21, 2026, at home.
Services were held February 26 at Solemn Oaks Funeral Home — Gathering Room, Maple Bend.
Victor Reyes
1970 – 2026 · 55 · Grant
Victor Reyes, 55, of Grant, died Tuesday, February 17, 2026, in the orchard where he had worked for thirty years, felled by a heart attack in the middle of the pruning, among the trees and the crews he had given his working life to.
Services were held February 20 at Saint Isidore Catholic Church, Grant.
Irene Ostrander
1925 – 2026 · 100 · Maple Bend
Irene Ostrander, 100, of Maple Bend, died Thursday, February 12, 2026, at home, in the house she had lived in for seventy years.
Services were held February 16 at Riverside Cemetery, Maple Bend.
Russell Boersma
1958 – 2026 · 67 · Maple Bend
Russell Boersma, 67, of Maple Bend, died unexpectedly at home on Saturday, February 7, 2026, sooner than anyone was ready for.
Services were held February 12 at Maple Bend Reformed Church, Maple Bend.
Florence Timmer
1935 – 2026 · 90 · Fremont
Florence Timmer, 90, of Fremont, died Tuesday, February 3, 2026, at Corewell Health Gerber Memorial Hospital.
Services were held February 6 at First Christian Reformed Church, Fremont.
January 2026
Eleanor Rose Calloway
1942 – 2026 · 83 · Fremont
Eleanor Rose Calloway, 83, of Fremont, died at home on Friday, January 9, 2026, in the town where she was born, with the snow coming down off the lake.
Services were held January 17 at First Christian Reformed Church, Fremont.