WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — Soon after Windsor County Deputy State’s Attorney Karen Oelschlaeger was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 2018, the adventurous 34-year-old arranged a meeting with an administrator at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.
She had a trip to Norway planned and she wasn’t going to let cancer stop her. Within months, she was on a boat sailing around the fjords in the cold.
That determination was the way Oelschlaeger approached many things, her family and friends say — from becoming the youngest president of North Carolina’s Asheville-Buncombe County chapter of the League of Women Voters in her twenties to working on behalf of sex-crime and domestic-violence victims as a prosecutor in Windsor County.
“When she got involved in something she just kept pushing until she was pretty much taken over,” her father, Terry Oelschlaeger said Tuesday. “That ability to drop everything and focus on the matter at hand is probably what made her stand out.”
Oelschlaeger died on April 19, 2021, following a terminal diagnosis the previous fall. She was 36. In her obituary, which Oelschlaeger wrote herself, she thanked Vermont lawmakers for passing the “Death with Dignity” law, also known as physician-assisted suicide and medical aid in dying, which allows people to end their life if they are found to have a terminal illness and meet other conditions.
She also wrote one instruction to readers in the obituary that sticks out: “Live your best life now – just in case.”
According to her father, childhood friends and her coworkers, that was a skill Oelschlaeger had in spades.
Growing up in a suburb of Charlotte, N.C., Oelschlaeger started out as a quiet child which initially worried her parents, Linda and Terry – but it didn’t last long.
As she grew up, Oelschlaeger ditched the quiet and learned to exercise her voice as she devoted herself to a multitude of passions and volunteer efforts; fighting to save the environment by joining the Sierra Club and a summer internship in her teens with MoveOn.org. She found a love of the arts, too, and devoted her time in high school to school plays. Each passion she pursued with the same fire, her father said.
“No matter what was going on she could do this transition and be entirely focused on the play, the flute recital, the interview with the governor.”
When it came time to apply to colleges, her father said he wanted Oelschlaeger to go the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, a prestigious school just a few hours from her hometown. Everyone from the area either went to or wanted to go to Chapel Hill, Terry Oelschlaeger explained.
But Karen Oelschlaeger wasn’t like everyone. She shrugged off the idea, instead taking a tour of Wesleyan College, another prestigious school in Connecticut, and immediately fell in love with the lush, New England campus and rigorous studies.
“She was at Wesleyan for two or three hours and said ‘I don’t want to go to any others,’” her father recalled. ‘What if you don’t get in?’ he had asked her.
“I’ll get in,” she answered. Terry Oelschlaeger explained her response was not one of arrogance, but rather determination. “When she found what she wanted, she was focused on it.”
At college Oelschlaeger found a way to put her love of helping people to use when she discovered a passion for psychology. Windsor County State’s Attorney Ward Goodenough, a friend and coworker of Oelschlaeger’s, would later point to her psychology background as a source of her caring, understanding nature when working with victims.
But in addition to psychology, college also gave Oelschlaeger a chance to tap into another love that had long been dormant: adventure. She excelled at Spanish classes and decided to double-major, using her love of the language to arrange a year-long study abroad trip in Spain.
For the year, Oelschlaeger lived with a host mother in Spain, immersing herself in the country, the language – and importantly for a foodie like Oelschlaeger – the meals. Terry Oelschlaeger recalls visiting his daughter for two weeks and being instructed to only eat Spanish foods and avoid anything typically “American.”
“Her idea of a good vacation was where you go and learn the culture out of necessity,” he said, remembering that his daughter would always opt for the cheaper, more authentic kind of travel. “She didn’t stay in 5-star hotels or eat in 5-star restaurants.”
When Oelschlaeger graduated from college she had to find a way to put her passions to good use. A dog-walking business, which she started and grew from the ground-up, satiated the need to help other people and animals for a while. In her early 30s, she also got sober from alcohol and was proud of both her sobriety and the recovery community she joined.
It wasn’t until a few years after college when Oelschlaeger interned at a law firm that provides support for immigrants in North Carolina that she found her real love in the law.
“She goes into the courtroom and thinks ‘this is a great big stage and I’m not one of the players’” Terry Oelschlaeger said. Soon after her internship, Oelschlaeger called her father with a message: “I’m going to law school.”
Windsor County Victim’s Advocate Meghan Place remembers the moment in 2016 when she met Oelschlaeger, who would quickly become one of her best friends. Fresh out of a two-year program at Vermont Law School and aiming for a job at the Windsor County State’s Attorney’s Office, Oelschlaeger met Place and other employees with the office for an interview.
“She sort of had this air about her that was initially intimidating to me,” Place said. “It was very clear to me that she was incredibly poised, intelligent and thoughtful.”
Oelschlaeger found her footing quickly at the office, and developed interests in domestic violence, sex crime and juvenile cases. Place said Oelschlaeger was also particularly good working with victims, often offering book recommendations to younger victims, or spending long stretches of time chatting with them about topics far outside the bounds of their case – life, law, and their future.
“She had a way of validating what they were saying. The system can be unfriendly to people and there are feelings of judgment they experience,” Place said. “She was incredible at seeing people and understanding their challenges in a way that a lot of attorneys kind of miss.”
When Oelschlaeger was diagnosed with stomach cancer three years ago, her friends say she approached the news the same way she did many things.
“There was a straightforwardness and it kind of manifested itself as bravery,” Goodenough said. “The way she could talk about her own mortality was very direct… She was a very confident advocate for herself and what she was experiencing.”
Part of that self-advocacy manifested as a determination to not let the disease that would eventually kill her, steal her love of life.
Terry Oelschlaeger estimates his daughter went to over 10 countries following her diagnosis. Belgium and Norway – where she saw the Northern Lights for the first time – were favorites.
“When she got cancer and got better she decided she needed to do all the travel she could while she could,” he said.
But her self-advocacy also came out in smaller ways. Oelschlaeger loved where she lived, on Prospect Street in Montpelier, and she loved the outdoors. Even after her diagnosis she would frequently spend her days walking in Hubbard Park or soaking up sun on the Statehouse lawn.
Even near the very end of her life, Oelschlaeger insisted on being outside, Place said, recalling how she would frequently visit her friend in the hospital. After a bout of difficult surgery, when Oelschlaeger was still hooked up to tubes in a hospital bed, she turned to Place and said, “I want to get outside.”
As often the case with Oelschlaeger, if she set her mind to something, she did it. Place recalls how they pulled a 40-pound piece of medical equipment that Oelschlaeger was hooked up to, out of the hospital room and to a patio area outside. Oelschlaeger was determined to get to the top of a 15-foot hill and sit on a bench up there, so the two women grabbed the equipment and hoisted it up the gravel path until they reached the top, Place said.
“I hate to focus on when she was sick,” Place said, but added, “She was so alive, even when she was sick.”
Terry Oelschlaeger recalls the same about his daughter, calling her approach to the disease a kind of “mental toughness.”
He said one of the biggest tragedies about his daughter’s death is knowing what she could have done, if given more time. Terry Oelschlaeger said he could see his daughter – ever the activist – getting into politics in the future.
But family and friends do take some solace in knowing that, even though her sickness was difficult and brutal, Oelschlaeger still loved the last few years, especially traveling, working as a prosecutor, and enjoying the outdoors of Vermont.
“I’ve never seen anybody endure the level of pain and suffering she did for the number of years it took place and be able to focus somehow on living as normal a life as possible,” said Terry Oelschlaeger. But he added that strangely enough, his daughter’s determination to ‘live her best life now’ made the few years before her death some of the “happiest years she had.”
“Sometimes you do what you have to do,” he said. “The will to live is the strongest drive you have in your body.”
Anna Merriman can be reached at amerriman@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.