Caroline Stoufer, owner with her husband, Robert, of Buckskin Booksellers in Ouray, Colo., a former board member of the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association and host of a Sunday afternoon music show on KURA, the Ouray School public radio station, died Friday, December 7. She was 53 and had battled cancer for two years.
Until the end, Stoufer "retained to a remarkable degree her positive view of life and her sense of humor," Lisa Knudsen wrote in the MPIBA newsletter. In the past year, Stoufer and local high school students made a film about her life, cancer and plans for her funeral called Just in Case I Die. Some 15 minutes of it was shown last week at a memorial service. (When it is completed, the film will be shown at another memorial service, likely in May.) Knudsen continued: "We cried and then laughed as Caroline declared to the camera, 'I'm way too much of a control freak to let anyone else plan my funeral.' "