“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.” Mary Elizabeth Lindberg (née Bergerson) died at home in Los Alamos, surrounded by her family on Christmas Day, December 25, 2025, following a six-year journey with pancreatic cancer, which she met with her trademark defiance, humor, courage, and indomitable spirit.
Mary did not fit, and never tried to. She was a mother and a wife, yes—but also a contrarian who relished debate and treated disagreement as a form of play (and, often, a form of proof). She traveled. She dreamed. She remained restlessly alert to the world. She could talk to anyone, and in the course of a conversation, make you feel that you had been seen more clearly than you expected. In a life whose era quietly prescribed dinner at six and bridge on Thursdays, Mary made her way instead to the executive floor.
Born April 2, 1941, in Moline, Illinois, Mary’s second birth occurred at Carleton College, where she found the kind of minds that do not soothe curiosity but provoke it—then keep pace. From there, reading became not a pastime but a discipline: wide, exacting, and cumulative. She retained what she learned with an almost mischievous precision, and so it was difficult—often impossible—to “win” an argument with her, especially the ones she staged as entertainment. She came prepared. She came sourced. She came, as it were, footnoted.
After college, Mary married Dr. Peter Lindberg, a man quick enough to meet her stride. She supported him with her work at the American Medical Association as he completed his medical training, and in those Chicago years she also pursued graduate studies at Northwestern while raising two daughters—building a life that required both stamina and an unusual kind of faith: that the day’s practical demands need not diminish the mind’s appetite.
In the 1970s, the family moved to Los Alamos. Mary helped build the YMCA through relentless fundraising, then chose a new challenge: she became the only female insurance agent in New Mexico for State Farm. The company’s nationwide sales force at the time was, by report, approximately 99.9% male; the reception among many colleagues was correspondingly chilly. Los Alamos, however, embraced her. She succeeded wildly—so visibly, so unmistakably, that her success did not merely register as personal triumph but as precedent, clearing space for other women to follow and, in time, to lead.
By the 1980s, Mary became State Farm’s first female district manager. The image of her then—wind-swept, constantly in motion, a jet-setting executive—is not myth but an accurate portrait. Yet it would be a reduction to name only the professional ascent. Mary’s life was crowded—in the best sense—with other devotions: music, poetry, literature, nature, archaeology, sport, cuisine, fashion, and the serious pursuit of adventure. Some belonged to earlier chapters—fencing, basketball, the oboe—disciplines that trained her ear, her focus, her appetite for difficulty, and left their mark long after she’d put the equipment away. Others she carried forward more continuously: she cooked with authority, climbed mountains, and kept moving toward whatever widened the world, all while impeccably attired. “Hobby” is too small a word for the intensity and sincerity with which she entered these realms.
In 1985, she was offered a major promotion—well-earned, and still exceedingly rare for a woman—that would have required relocating to Illinois. The one-month trial run was exhilarating; when her husband declined the move, the disappointment landed hard. Then came the long, narrowing corridor of chronic illness through the 1990s and 2000s. But even then, Mary did not surrender the interior motion that had always driven her. She cultivated adventure in her children, inspiring them to build large lives. She paid for all of her grandchildren to attend college. She carried them into the world, ferrying them across countries and cultures so their sense of possibility would not be provincial. And she remained, for her husband of more than fifty years, a companion vivid enough to challenge him, quick enough to keep him alert, and deep enough to keep him enthralled.
Mary had a hunger for life and took in as much of it as she could. And if Nietzsche’s line names the fierce inner turbulence required to make something luminous, then Mary’s life stands as its answer: the chaos was real, the star unmistakable—dancing, for a long while, on the edge of what the world thought a woman ought to be. She is beloved, and she will be missed.
Predeceased by her husband, Peter J. Lindberg; survived by her daughters, Kirstin and Katherine; her sons-in-law, Tim and Shane; and her grandchildren, Avery, Kiera, and Hawke. The family thanks her wonderful care team, including Darren, Victoria, and Marq.
A graveside service will be held at 11 a.m. on Friday, January 2, 2026, at Guaje Pines, Los Alamos, NM. All are welcome.