Kathie Fernelius arrived for her first chemotherapy session a year and a half ago with her toenails painted orange, matching her sandals and the frames of her glasses. With spiky red hair and an unmistakable Minnesota accent, Kathie beamed life, but she wanted to talk about death.

No one else really did, though. Kathie’s friends and family wanted her to fight, to beat breast cancer, to continue making them laugh, leaving ornery messages on their phones, showing up in her loud, embellished sweaters and giving them stories to tell again and again.

“‘Why fight so hard if the next step is here and I’m ready?’” friend Marcia Rippe remembers Kathie asking.

Kathie did undergo chemotherapy and radiation. But in January of last year, she told her daughter her treatment was complete. It wasn’t. But, like always, Kathie did things her way.

Kathleen Renae Fernelius, 55, died Jan. 16 from a brain tumor.

She was born in Willmar, Minn., and moved to St. Joseph in 1984. She was an advocate for the elderly, Ms. Rippe says, working for InterServ as a nutritional manager and Saxton Care Center as an activities director. She was a member of Hyde Valley United Methodist Church, had two children, Allison Smothers and Robert Fernelius, and two grandchildren, Wyatt and Grace.

And everywhere she went, Kathie seemed to leave people with stories.

Last week, friends and family gathered and shared some of those stories at her memorial service. A few days later, Kathie’s daughter, Allison, had a pile of them on notebook pages at home. They told of Kathie flapping her arms and clucking during an exercise video she’d play for people at UCP of Northwest Missouri, of the man she found living in the car wash, whom she helped reconcile with his family, of shopping trips and hamming it up in an Elvira wig for the elderly residents at Saxton.

“She gave me homemade breads and jelly ...,” Enola Kerns wrote. “I gave her pickles and she never wanted to open them because she just liked to look at them.”

“When Kathie would sit and watch the movie ‘Fargo,’ ... her Minnesota accent came back so much more ...,” wrote Curtis and Lena Walker.

“Boy, she could play that piano! When my dad had his stroke, she stepped right in and played for our church,” wrote Rose King. “When he died, she came again and played.”

On Wednesday, Allison went by her mom’s house. Hanging on the post of Kathie’s bed was a bright orange sweatshirt from a Minnesota park. Allison picked it up. She smelled it — just like her mom, a mix of Nivea cream lotion and a bright, floral perfume called Paradise.

She took it with her and pulled it on and wore it as she shared the stories.

Next week, Allison and her family will travel back to Minnesota with those memories and collect more from friends and family. And then, Allison will put them all in a book that tells of a woman who knew she was dying but kept right on living anyway.