Amanda Ruiz Keller

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. Amanda was a NICU nurse, and there are children in Grand Rapids today, healthy and loud and growing, who are here because of the nights she sat beside them.

She was born January 12, 1988, in Grand Rapids, the older of Miguel and Teresa Ruiz's two daughters. She decided to become a nurse at nine, the year her baby cousin spent two months in the same NICU where she would one day work, and she never once wavered from it. She put herself through nursing school waiting tables, married Danny Keller the summer she graduated, and took a job in the neonatal intensive care unit at the children's hospital in Grand Rapids, where she stayed for the rest of her working life because, she said, there was nowhere harder and nowhere she was more useful.

A NICU nurse does the hardest quiet work there is. For fifteen years Amanda measured her days in ounces and grams, sat the long night shifts beside babies who fit in two cupped hands, and taught terrified nineteen-year-old mothers and gray-faced fathers that they were allowed to touch, to hold, to hope. She celebrated the graduations — the day a baby finally goes home — as if each were her own, and she grieved the ones who didn't, privately and completely, and went back in the next night anyway. She kept a wall of photographs at home of her 'grads,' some of them teenagers now. She could find a vein no one else could find and a calm no one else could find, both at once, at three in the morning.

At home she was warm and quick and a little bit bossy in the way of oldest daughters, a fierce and funny mother, a keeper of her grandmother's flan recipe and her own steady faith. She sang in Spanish to her babies, both the ones at the hospital and the two at home. When the diagnosis came she met it as a nurse and a mother at once — clear-eyed about the medicine, unwilling to waste a single good afternoon — and she kept working as long as her body allowed, because the unit was short-staffed and those were somebody's babies too.

Her own children are young. She knew it, and she spent her last months making sure they would know her: recording their bedtime books in her own voice, writing the letters, teaching Sofia the flan. She asked that people not be too sad in front of the children, and that every baby she ever nursed grow up knowing they were wanted from their very first ounce. They were. So was she.

She is survived by her husband, Danny Keller; their children, Sofia, 7, and Mateo, 4; her parents, Miguel and Teresa Ruiz of Grand Rapids; her sister, Gabriela Ruiz; her grandmother, Rosa, whose flan recipe now lives in three more hands; and the nurses of the night shift, her second family, who covered her patients so she could get home to her first.

She was preceded in death by her grandfather, Emilio Ruiz, who called her mija la enfermera — my daughter the nurse — from the time she was nine years old.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks for gifts to the Sofia and Mateo Keller Education Fund, or to the NICU Family Support Fund at the children's hospital in Grand Rapids, which helps the parents Amanda cared for stay close to their babies — a meal, a night's lodging, a tank of gas — through the longest weeks of their lives.