About Mark Loesch

Mark Loesch lived in South Minneapolis with his wife and four children. Last September, he was killed while taking a bike ride a few blocks from his home. One week after his death, hundreds of friends and neighbors gathered to honor and remember Mark with a bike ride and walk that retraced the path of his last ride.

Mark’s friend Joe Rydholm delivered this remembrance of him at his funeral:


My name is Joe Rydholm and Mark was my friend for 25 years.

Samantha asked me to give a brief look at Mark’s life for those of you who weren’t lucky enough to have known him for as long as I did.

Mark was born in Winona on Valentine’s Day in 1966. How appropriate for someone who poured out so much love and got so much back!

He and his family — his mom Pat, his dad John, and his sisters Amy and Carrie — lived in New Mexico and Nebraska for a time before settling in Minnetonka. He went to Hopkins High School and later to the University of Minnesota.

When he hit working age, Mark followed in his dad’s footsteps and sold life and health insurance for a while. Mark was a sincere and helpful person, so I think that aspect of insurance – how it can provide comfort and security during difficult times – was something he enjoyed.

It was while working at one of the insurance companies in 1993 that he began contemplating getting out of sales and into software programming. I was talking with Samantha about this yesterday, because I couldn’t remember how he made the jump and she told me that Mark basically got his first software job by relentlessly badgering the head of the department to hire him, even though he had no professional experience up to that point!

I always thought it was so appropriate that a lot of his work focused on the jobs of writing, testing, tweaking and launching huge masses of interconnected software programs, because Mark had all of the necessary qualities. He was really adept at analyzing and explaining complex problems. He had an obsessive work ethic. And above all, he was a caretaker. If I had a major project to complete, I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have in charge of it.

Working with computers was what Mark did for a living, but it wasn’t what he did for his life. His family was the most important thing in the world to him.

I was with him the night that he first met Samantha in 1988. She was clearly the love of his life. I still remember how excited he was on the night that he told me they were engaged.

Mark and Sam married in 1991 and welcomed Chloe into their lives in 1992, Max in 1994, Annabel in 1997 and Eve in 2004.

Mark had a number of passions over the years that I knew him – he was an accomplished drummer, a skilled artist and a diligent explorer of the world’s religions, to name just a few. But I never saw him as excited about any of those things as he was about his children. He was absolutely crazy about them.

I know it’s a cliché but he really was just a big kid himself. A lot of parents might content themselves with getting their kids interested in something, like a game or a toy, and then going on about their business. But Mark wanted to BE the game or the toy or help the kids to make up their own.

The last time I saw him was in August when he and Samantha and all the kids came over to our house for my daughter Jia’s second birthday party. Beyond being overjoyed at having the whole Loesch crew in our backyard, I had so much fun just standing with Mark and the kids as we went off on a series of comic tangents, each of us tossing out our own “wouldn’t it be funny if” scenarios.

As I think back on that day, while I am filled with a deep sadness, I am also elated to know that though Mark is no longer here physically, his sense of humor, which is one of the things that I loved most about him, lives on in his children.

Samantha also asked me to share some of my own thoughts about Mark, and why I loved him so much.

I first met Mark in 1982, when he was 16 and I was 20, through my friend Steve Hughes and his brother Roger. Roger and Mark were the best of friends and Steve and Roger’s family owned an apartment complex in Fridley. Mr and Mrs Hughes recruited Mark and I to join Roger and Steve as a four-man work crew at the apartment complex that summer to do painting and landscaping and things like that.

I can’t remember when it dawned on me how great Mark was. It just sort of happened. As we unfurled the dropcloths in a vacant apartment to prep it for painting, we’d get to talking about movies or music or I would make some inane joke which Mark would pick up on and start adding his own hilarious permutations.

What started out as a summer job eventually became the best job I ever had, or at least the most fun I ever had on a job. And Roger and Mark and Steve and I all ended up working there for several more springs and summers and falls.

I don’t have a litany of great Mark stories. I think anytime I got to be with him was like a thousand great Mark stories all rolled into one. No matter what we were doing, from hanging out at First Avenue to making a Labor Day weekend road trip to Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, I always looked forward to seeing him.

I wouldn’t say that I felt incomplete when I wasn’t around him; maybe just more whole when I was with him.

Along with sharing a sense of humor, we loved the same music. Bands like New Order, the Blue Nile, the Cure, the Suburbs and Kraftwerk provided the soundtrack to countless memorable days and nights.

Eventually we began playing music together. Mark was already a talented drummer at that point and he tolerated my rudimentary guitar and keyboard playing to go along with his skilled drumming.

We played a lot over the years. We had a practice space downtown for quite awhile in a drafty, unheated old warehouse. I remember trying to work on songs together on cold winter nights and having our crummy little space heaters going at full blast to avoid freezing our butts off.

It was pretty miserable but it was also pretty great.

Nothing concrete ever came of all of our jamming, except for some treasured tapes that I have. I

think it was the act of playing together, of relishing the great bits that the other would come up with, that was most important.

Mark went on to be in a few local bands and I remember going to their gigs and cheering like a fool after every song. People probably thought I was crazy but I was just so happy to see Mark up on stage doing something he loved.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention how important Roger was to Mark. Roger passed away unexpectedly two years ago and if anyone would have had great Mark stories, it would have been him. They had suffered through high school together and I think they always had a special bond. I am eternally glad that Roger let me horn in on their friendship.

I didn’t see enough of Mark in the past several years as both of us got more busy with important things like family. But we would e-mail all the time. I’d be at work and some dumb bit of dialogue from a movie we both loved like Fast Times At Ridgemont High would pop into my head and I would fire off a short note to Mark. He would shoot back with a few more lines and off we’d go. Eventually we’d make a date to catch up over dinner or meet for a quick cup of coffee.

I will miss countless things about not having him here, but not being able to talk to him about fatherhood is one of the biggest ones. I only became a dad last year, when my wife Jane and I adopted Jia from China. Mark was a dad for so long and, seeing him with his kids, and seeing how much his kids clearly loved him, I knew that the guy was a storehouse of valuable information. I regret that I won’t have the chance to constantly bug him with questions as Jia gets older.

Typical of Mark, he always showed so much confidence in me when I would talk about my impending parenthood. As the process of adopting from China dragged on and on and I grew more and more nervous about how I would handle my new duties, Mark would constantly reassure me. “You’re going to be a great dad, Joe.”

Coming from him, those words meant the world to me.

I have been privileged to be with Mark for a number of milestones in his life: the night he met his wife-to-be, the day of his wedding. He stood by my side on the day that I married my lovely wife Jane and also did me the honor of sitting in on drums with the wedding band for a memorable version of Brick House. I can still see him smiling behind the drum kit, laying down a funky, steady beat.

And now, today, here I am with him on the day of his funeral.

I don’t know what to make of his death, how to assign any meaning to it. I can’t make sense of it, I know that much.

Mark was all about friendship and love and giving time to the people you love. You always knew that Mark cared about you and loved you, even if the words weren’t spoken. Though with Mark, they usually were.

If you want a way to celebrate Mark’s life, or keep some of his spirit alive with us, in addition to laughing as much as you can, I guess I would urge all of you to tell the people you love how much you love them, and tell them early and often.

In closing, I can’t really find the best way to express what it was like to be with Mark, but it kind of reminds me of the interplay that I’ve seen between jazz musicians. Two of them will be trading solos, going back and forth, having a blast. One of them will play a riff and the other will play the same thing, but a little different. Then they’ll look at each other across the stage and share a knowing, joy-filled smile.

That’s kind of how I felt whenever I was with Mark.

I loved him dearly and will miss him terribly.

Thank you.

A memorial fund has been set up for the Loesch family. Please send contributions to:

Mark Loesch Memorial Fund
Associated Bank
C/O Mary Cisewski
5353 Wayzata Blvd
St Louis Park, MN 55416