Lynn Ellen Stierman

Lynn Stierman, beloved wife, mother, “Nonnie”, and friend, died peacefully on September 28, 2026, after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. She was 74.

For 49 years, Lynn and her husband, Charlie Stierman, shared a beautiful life together. Their marriage was the constant at the center of Lynn’s life — a partnership filled with love, family, laughter, travel, and all of the ordinary moments that, over nearly five decades, become something truly beautiful.

Lynn was born in 1952 in Rochester, New York, to Mary and Larry Guiliani. She and Charlie went on to raise two children, Dan Stierman, married to Sheila, and Leslie Stierman, married to Matthew Pearlson. She was also a loving grandmother to Ben, Evan, and Simon, and a cherished part of Dan and Sheila’s family, including their son, Dosey.

Because Charlie is currently facing his own battle with cancer, the family has decided not to hold an immediate service for Lynn. Instead, they hope to gather for a celebration of her life in the future, when Charlie and the family are able to come together to remember and honor her in the way she deserves.

In the meantime, there is no need to wait for a gathering to remember Lynn. An obituary can tell the facts of a life, but the people who loved Lynn know that the facts only begin to tell her story. What made Lynn Lynn was not simply where she was born, whom she married, or the family she raised, but the particular ways she moved through the world. Her razor sharp sense of humor. Her deeply competitive spirit. Her impeccable style and sense of beauty. The moments that might have seemed ordinary at the time but now feel precious. Her family hopes that, in the absence of an immediate service, this space can serve as a place to share some of those pieces of Lynn — not simply to remember that she lived, but to remember who she was.

For those who knew Lynn well, there was something else that was very much a part of who she was: she could be afraid. Sometimes it was the stories she heard on the news, which she would dutifully warn her children about out of love. Sometimes it was something much more real— like agreeing to follow Charlie on a safari in Africa and sleep next to lions. But Lynn had the great good fortune (or perhaps the occasional misfortune) of marrying an adventurous man and raising children who seemed determined to inherit that particular quality from him. And so, with some regularity, Lynn found herself doing things that were very much outside her comfort zone.

She rafted down the Grand Canyon — a trip she later explained she had agreed to because she wasn't about to be widowed and childless while the whole family was going. She was kicked off a horse nine miles from camp and, after some understandable consideration, got back on. She went ziplining through Costa Rica, including, to her daughter’s enduring amusement, a course that involved zipping through the trees alongside sloths. (Sorry, Mom.)

The remarkable thing about Lynn was not that she wasn't afraid. It was that she did the thing anyway. Fear never got the final say.

That was Lynn's particular kind of courage. She didn't need to feel fearless to be brave. She simply kept going — sometimes because Charlie was going, sometimes because her children were going, sometimes because her grandchildren were waiting for her, and sometimes because she had decided that fear wasn't going to be the thing that kept her from living her life.

That same courage served her through the last decade of her life, as Parkinson's slowly made ordinary things extraordinarily difficult. Walking into a restaurant. Going somewhere unfamiliar. Getting to her grandchildren's school plays and performances. Things that had once been effortless could become intimidating, exhausting, or frightening. But Lynn kept doing them.

So when people say that Lynn fought Parkinson's bravely for years, this is what they mean. Her bravery was never the absence of fear. It was the choice, again and again, to go anyway. And that may be one of the greatest gifts she leaves her family: the reminder that being afraid is not the same thing as being unable to be brave.

It is in that spirit that the family asks that, rather than making a donation in Lynn’s memory, you do something that scares you.

Do it anyway.

Be brave for Lynn. Because, as she learned again and again, there is something worth finding on the other side of fear.