CALGARY, Alberta — As a small town South Dakota girl, growing up 40 miles from the Minnesota border, the Twins were a part of life for Kelsie Snow from April to September (and sometimes October) every year. Warm evenings were often spent by the television watching the action from the Metrodome, or with John Gordon calling the action on a radio somewhere in the background.
With a penchant for writing and a dream, the teenage Kelsie Smith told her father and grandfather that one day, she would move beyond the no-stoplight town of Arlington, S.D., (population 915) and cover the Twins as a professional sportswriter.
Flash forward to the late 2000s, and that notable time in the history of the franchise when the “M&M Boys” Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau had the Twins in playoff contention each year. Those trips to the postseason would never last very long, as they prepared for the transition from the Metrodome to Target Field in 2010. Snow was there, covering the Twins for the Pioneer Press and TwinCities.com for three seasons, fulfilling the vow she had made a decade or so earlier.
In 2011, former Pioneer Press sports reporter Kelsie Snow, nee Smith, was given a Twins jersey by the team on her day game covering the Twins at Target Field. (Courtesy Kelsie Snow)
“For me, that was always my end goal job. I was going to cover the Twins, and my dad was going to read everything I write,” she said, sipping coffee at a neighborhood cafe in Calgary on a snowy November morning. “And that was my first real job out of college. So I did it, and then I was like, ‘Yeah, I did that thing.’ ”
Vows and a voyage
She made her way to a press box in Minneapolis via journalism school at the University of Kansas, then major newspaper internships on both coasts, in Los Angeles and Boston. While in Massachusetts, she and the Boston Globe’s Red Sox beat writer, Chris Snow, began spending time together, and when he got a chance to leave journalism for a front office job with the Minnesota Wild — a team that Chris had covered for the Minneapolis newspaper for a few years — Kelsie moved back to the northland with him and wedding plans were made.
They exchanged vows on a frigid December day in the Twin Cities, and took smiling wedding photos in Rice Park, doing their best to ignore the 14 below temps that day. Chris worked for the Wild under original general manager Doug Risebrough. Kelsie covered the Twins — along with some Vikings, some Gophers sports and other duties as assigned — for the readers in the East Metro.
Risebrough was fired in 2009, and Chris’ run with the Wild ended roughly a year later. But about the time that their first child was due to arrive, the Calgary Flames decided that Chris’ penchant for video analysis and analytics could help and hired him in April 2011. In September of that year, Kelsie packed up their five-week-old son Cohen and headed for a new life in a new country. She admits, it was a challenge.
“People talk about post-partum depression. I’m pretty sure I had every kind of depression. It’s already an isolating time in your life to have a new baby. Then to be in a new place, new everything,” she said. “Most Minnesotans have been to Canada, but it’s just different enough to let you know you’re in a strange place.
“I don’t notice the differences now, but at first it was just different enough, when you try to order a half-pound of turkey at the deli counter and they sell it by grams. I figured 100 grams was a lot of turkey, and it was about three slices. So, those things were hard.”
For much of the 2010s, life was good. Chris worked in the NHL. Kelsie wrote, mostly from home, while raising Cohen and their daughter Willa, who was born in Calgary. They would visit family in New Hampshire and in South Dakota. Friends would come to town and trips to see the majestic Canadian Rockies were commonplace. But their life was not without tragedy.
Chris’ mother died by suicide in 2012. Kelsie had a stroke that left her hospitalized for a time. In 2019, Chris’ father Bob, a well-known NHL writer, was diagnosed with ALS, a rare but incurable neurological disease. It had affected several in the Snow family, including two of Chris’ late uncles. Bob died nine months later.
Battling a monster
Less than a year after his father was laid to rest, Chris began feeling numbness and tingling in one hand. Such sensations are not uncommon in someone who uses a keyboard for a living, and doctors figured at first that a pinched nerve was the problem. A seemingly endless array of ultrasounds and MRIs and CT scans followed, and in 2019 Chris was diagnosed with ALS.
It was devastating news for a young family filled with so much life. Immediately, they chose to fight.
For the next four years, their lives became trips to Miami and to Toronto for research studies and moon-shot techniques to try to slow the progression of the disease, and hopefully one day find a cure. For nine months, Chris’ disease progression stopped entirely. But ALS is relentless and, to date, undefeated, and changes could be seen over time as the Snows made the decision to fight this monster in public, offering their story on social media and giving regular updates to reporters who would inquire.
“We were very conscious about being public with our story, with Chris’ illness and our journey as a family. Part of that was I wanted my kids to see this, when they’re older and look back,” Kelsie said. “They’re going to have this grief forever, and they’re going to have more grief. The cost of living and loving is losing. I hope that they look back on all the things we did and all the stories that were written and the fundraising and all of it. And I hope they’re proud that we handed this and we did our best with it.
“We didn’t just sit and retreat, but that would’ve been OK, too. Grief is grief, and you do what you have to do. And this is what felt right for us.”
Chris, per his nature, found hope in everyday challenges the disease threw their way, even when life got progressively harder and he lost simple things like the ability to flash his ever-present smile.
“The day he learned that he was losing the ability to swallow and would need a feeding tube, it was awful. When I learned his tongue was inactive, well you can’t talk without your tongue. So I thought he would lose his voice and I was having a horrible day,” Kelsie recalled. “I was doing something downstairs and he was upstairs putting the kids to bed, and he yelled, ‘Kelce, you’ve got to look at the sunset. It’s so beautiful.’ And that was Chris.”
Like all other ALS stories so far, Chris’ tale did not have a happy ending. He died suddenly of cardiac arrest in September 2023, at age 42. Per his wishes, his body was donated for further medical study, as the hunt for a cure continues. While his father had succumbed to ALS in nine months, and one of his uncles held on for 18 months, Chris got more than four years with Kelsie and their children after his diagnosis.
“In lieu of a magic bullet, in lieu of a cure, all any family with anybody who’s sick wants is more time,” Kelsie said. “Our kids were 7 and 4 when Chris was diagnosed, and I remember thinking that Willa was only going to remember her dad in photographs. That’s an important thing for her now, to have her own memories of her dad.”
Living with joy and grief
It has been more than a year now without Chris, and the Snows are getting by. Kelsie hosts a podcast about dealing with grief and loss, called “Sorry, I’m Sad” and she writes often about their new, harsh reality. The challenge of raising two children without their father is hard, and also a blessing, in those moments where life offers “pockets of distraction” like making lunch for the kids, driving them to hockey practice, taking them to horseback riding lessons or other moments that provide a chance to think about something other than loss.
The Flames have been like family to the Snows, and even though their extended family is mostly in New England and South Dakota, Calgary feels like their forever home. And Kelsie has found that two seemingly competing emotions coexist alongside one another.
“Joy and grief sharpen each other,” she said, having seen the struggles Cohen and Willa face. “In happy moments, that’s when the grief can really stab you, and it’s such a sharp, acute pain. We talk about holding those two feelings at once, because they live together. The duality of emotions is a reality for them, at 13 and 10, that most adults haven’t learned yet.”
Her writing and her podcast are opportunities for Kelsie, now 41, to be a journalist of sorts again. She savors the chances to tell Chris’ story, and allow others in the valley of grief and loss to share their stories. Her ever-present smile that was so well-known in the Metrodome’s baseball pressbox flashes now and then, when a funny moment with Chris comes to mind. Although in a story like his, she admits that an optimistic ending is not available.
“The thing I was best at in journalism was the kicker. I was good at the end of a story,” she said. “There’s no kicker here. There’s no way to wrap it up with a pretty bow. That’s the story of life. It’s beautiful and it’s hard and that’s what Chris taught us.”
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