After deliberating for several weeks, Tom Ochsenbauer of St. Peter in Forest Lake made a bold decision in 2006 to meet Gail Dicus for the first time. He flew to her home in Kansas City with his three young children.
It was a matter of the heart — literally. Moments after opening the door for Ochsenbauer and his children, Dicus grabbed his hand and placed it on her chest so he could feel her heart beating.
This was not the heart she had at birth. It was a heart that once belonged to Ochsenbauer’s wife, Marcia Ochsenbauer, who died on Aug. 2, 2005, at the age of 36, after collapsing two days earlier while waterskiing on Ten Mile Lake in northern Minnesota near Hackensack during a family weekend getaway. After consulting with two priests at St. Peter, Father (now Bishop) Donald DeGrood and Father Troy Przybilla, Tom made the difficult decision to donate Marcia’s heart after doctors told him she would not recover.
Moving quickly, a medical team shipped the heart to St. Luke’s Hospital of Kansas City, where Dicus had been waiting for a transplant after being told she would not survive long-term due to a heart ailment diagnosed in 2001.
Dicus was notified the day after Marcia died that she was a match for Marcia’s heart. As the 20th anniversary of that life-changing transplant approaches, Dicus; her husband, Jim Yarrington; and the entire Ochsenbauer family have learned just what a good match Gail ended up being for the heart of a mother and neonatal intensive care nurse who died fully alive in her faith.
The eldest of the three Ochsenbauer children, Zachary Ochsenbauer, was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis on May 31 at the Cathedral of St. Paul in St. Paul, with Gail and Jim sitting in a pew with the Ochsenbauer family. The day after ordination, Father Ochsenbauer paid tribute to his mother at his Mass of Thanksgiving at St. Peter, again with Gail and Jim in the pews. Gail, who has lived nearly 20 years with Marcia’s heart, could be seen wiping tears from her eyes during the Forest Lake liturgy.
A woman ‘you need to come and meet’
It all started in the mid-1990s, when Tom Ochsenbauer was a flight instructor for Mesaba Airlines. His previous job had been as a flight instructor at Crystal Airport in the western suburbs of Minneapolis. A former student who had gotten a job at the Crystal Airport as a flight instructor reached out to him about a female employee he thought Tom might find attractive.
“He gave me a call, and he said, ‘Hey, there’s a girl down here that you need to come and meet,’” Tom recalled. “She was working behind the counter — the receptionist at the place where I used to be a flight instructor. So, I went down there, and I thought, ‘Wow, she’s kind of cute.’ So, I started hanging out around there, and eventually I asked her out for a date.”
Marcia Ochsenbauer had grown up in nearby New Hope and was a member of St. Raphael in Crystal, the church of her upbringing. Their dating relationship deepened and they married on Dec. 27, 1996, at St. Raphael. Father Zachary Ochsenbauer was born in 1998 while the family was living in Kentucky. In 2003, they moved to Forest Lake and a home on the lake where Tom still lives. It was in that home, with a beautiful view of the lake, where Tom and Father Ochsenbauer recently sat down with The Catholic Spirit to recount the last 20-plus years.
The marriage that almost wasn’t
When Tom and Marcia Ochsenbauer first started dating, she was at that time what he calleda “Christmas-Easter Catholic” in reference to those who only attend Mass twice a year on those two holy days. He invited her to go to Mass with him, and she accepted. He took her to St. Raphael, which seemed a natural choice, given her family history with this church.
That Mass proved to be a spiritual springboard for her. She joined a group at the parish that delved deeper into the Catholic faith. As she continued attending, “her faith took off,” Tom recalled.
That seemed like good news at first — exactly what Tom had hoped for.
Then came the bombshell: As her faith grew, Marcia started exploring religious life, wondering if God was calling her to a religious vocation. Specifically, she began exploring the Carmelites, visiting congregations both in the Twin Cities and in California, where she was living for a time.
As Marcia explored the Carmelites, she felt pulled toward both marriage and religious life. She seemed to be leaning toward marriage, and she said yes when Tom proposed. But four months before their wedding, which was scheduled for October 1997, she hesitated and asked him for more time to discern her vocation. Tom graciously agreed.
Just two months later, she told Tom she did, indeed, want to get married. The wedding took place two days after Christmas.
After moving to Forest Lake in 2003, they became regulars at St. Peter. Marcia often came to daily Mass with her three children: Zachary, Michael and Christina Ochsenbauer. Father Przybilla arrived at the parish as a parochial vicar on July 1, 2005, weeks after his ordination to the priesthood. Right away, he noticed Marcia and her kids in the pews during weekday liturgies.
“She loved the Mass; it was obvious,” Father Przybilla said. “When you see a young mother there with kids, that’s pretty impressive.”
Father Przybilla only got to see Marcia at Mass for one month. Bishop DeGrood, meanwhile, had gotten to know the family for about a year, starting when he arrived as pastor of St. Peter in summer 2004. Marcia made a deep impression on him, one that has lasted to this day.
“She was a special soul,” said Bishop DeGrood, who now leads the Diocese of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. “She had a radiance about her, a radiance that magnified the love of God, magnified the goodness of God.”
The day everything changed
Marcia Ochsenbauer enjoyed being active, developing several hobbies that she carried into married life and even motherhood. One of her interests was waterskiing. By the time Christina Ochsenbauer, her youngest child, was born, Marcia was able to go from two skis to one.
Marcia was attempting this advanced maneuver while on a weekend away up north at the cabin of her sister and brother-in-law. She had popped up on two skis and tried three times to drop the second ski.
That moment never came. Tom Ochsenbauer was sitting on the dock watching Marcia, then saw her drop into the water. She had slipped out of consciousness even before falling under the surface, an autopsy later revealed. Marcia’s cousin, who already was in the water after returning a dropped ski to her, swam out to rescue her. Tom jumped in and the two then brought her back to the dock where Tom had been sitting, which was less than 100 yards from where she fell.
After reaching the dock, they gently laid Marcia there, and Tom helped administer CPR. Paramedics soon arrived and arranged to have her airlifted by helicopter to North Memorial Hospital in Robbinsdale. She was unresponsive from the moment she collapsed and remained that way after arriving at the hospital. Doctors there told Tom that within 48 hours
of Marcia’s arrival, either her minimal brain activity would begin to increase and lead to recovery, or all of her brain cells would die.
Tom and the Ochsenbauer children gathered at the hospital and spent time at Marcia’s bedside. As the hours passed with no signs of recovery, they shifted from hoping for a miracle to saying goodbye.
Father Zachary Ochsenbauer, who at the time had been playing inside the cabin when Marcia collapsed in the water, vividly recalls approaching his mother’s bedside to say goodbye. The words of a then-6-year-old were powerful and simple, still etched firmly in his mind today:
“I love you.”
Marcia was pronounced dead on Aug. 2. Bishop DeGrood, at that time the pastor of St. Peter, administered last rites and gave her the apostolic pardon. He also celebrated her funeral Mass at St. Peter three days later, along with Father Przybilla, and chose gold vestments instead of the typical white to “focus on the beauty of Marcia and her faith.”
A painful decision
As the events unfolded at North Memorial, Tom Ochsenbauer leaned on Bishop DeGrood and Father Przybilla, who is now pastor of St. Charles Borromeo in St. Anthony. Both clergymen spent hours with family members at Marcia Ochsenbauer’s bedside. One moment with Bishop DeGrood stands out for Tom, who talked to each priest about letting go of Marcia and exploring organ donation.
“We’re standing at the bed” where Marcia lay, Tom recalled. “We’re holding onto the railing. I look over and he’s smiling. This is the night before we do the organ donation and he’s smiling. It’s like, ‘Hey, why are you smiling?’ He goes, ‘She’s going to a place where I want to go.’”
Tom found Bishop DeGrood’s demeanor reassuring and comforting. It also gave him the strength to move forward with organ donation. He called the loss of his wife and the ensuing grief “very hard,” but he nonetheless resolved to carry out what he believed Marcia would have wanted.
“I thought, well, there’s only one thing to do,” Tom said. “We can bury her (entire body, organs intact) or we can help someone else out.”
The morning after his conversation with Bishop DeGrood, Tom gave doctors permission to look for a match for his wife’s heart.
That led to the final step in the process. Tom took his three children from the hospital to nearby St. Raphael, where members of a women’s religious community were praying, and told the kids:
“Mom’s not coming home.”
Heart recipient
As the Ochsenbauers said their goodbyes to Marcia, a realtor in Kansas City wondered whether she would ever get the heart she needed to stay alive. Gail Dicus was diagnosed with a serious heart condition in 2000 that progressed to the point where doctors said her heart would not last. She had been infected with a virus that damaged her heart. In 2005, she was finally put on the transplant list.
“I didn’t want to do it,” she said. “I wanted to have the heart I was born with. But we couldn’t save it.”
For almost five months, Dicus remained hospitalized. Finally, on the morning of Aug. 2, 2005, a nurse walked into her room at 5 a.m. to notify her that a match had been found. Her transplant coordinator put it this way:
“I think you’re going to be queen of the day today.”
Within an hour, Dicus called the pastor of her United Methodist church in Leawood, a Kansas City suburb. The pastor, Adam Hamilton, came right away and found her as she was being rolled on a gurney into an elevator. He prayed with her, then found out where the heart was located and went there. He stood over the container and said some short prayers before surgery commenced. He waited more than six hours and came to Dicus’ bedside after the transplant was completed.
Dicus’ husband, Jim Yarrington, and the couple’s four children celebrated the gift that gave Gail a new outlook on life. But she had conflicting emotions.
“I was sad when I first got my heart because I knew that somebody else’s lives were devastated,” Gail recalled. “And here I was — and our family — happy as a clam because I was going to survive. It was really hard to match (both) in my mind.”
Making contact
As Gail Dicus began to ease back into her normal life, she felt a desire to contact the family who gave her the gift of a new heart. She wrote letters to an organization called Midwest Transplant Network, which, according to its website, “facilitates communication between donor families and their loved one’s recipients.”
Donor families are kept anonymous unless they agree to make contact with organ recipients. In this case, the many notes Dicus wrote were forwarded to the Ochsenbauer family. Eventually, Marcia Ochsenbauer’s mother, JoAnn Gunia, wrote back. A few weeks later, Tom Ochsenbauer sent a letter. Then, more letters came, telling Dicus about themselves and about Marcia.
“It was pretty overwhelming,” Dicus said. “I have every one of those (letters) framed.”
Finally, Dicus and Tom talked on the phone. Emotions poured out. Each told the other stories about their lives. And during the call, Tom told Dicus more about Marcia.
“We kept talking, talking, talking,” Dicus said. “Then Tom said, ‘The kids want to meet you.’”
In the summer of 2006, Tom and his three children flew down to Kansas City to meet the woman who had received Marcia’s heart.
“It was very emotional,” Tom said.
It was the same for Dicus.
“I think Tom and I cried quite a bit,” she said. “Jim took the kids downstairs and played games with them. And then Tom and I sat by ourselves in a room. And I said, ‘Tom, would you share with me everything about Marcy?’ (Sometimes, Marcia was called Marcy by family members and friends.) And he did, and (he) told me what happened and how she passed away and how devastating it was.”
Tom’s job as a pilot gave him the opportunity to fly down to Kansas City regularly to visit Dicus. But he wanted her to come to Minnesota to meet his extended family. She accepted the invitation and remembers that first meeting.
“There were tons of them (Ochsenbauer relatives),” she recalled. “Like 25 or something. I had everybody come into a room and I just turned the other way and everyone got to put their head, their ear, on Marcy’s heart so they could hear her heart beating.”
This was not awkward for Dicus. Far from it.
“You know what? I was honored, actually,” she said. “Because I just feel like she’s part of me and I’m part of her.”
Dicus said she also felt “a huge responsibility” to take good care of a heart that came from a “superstar of a woman. … I went home to my church (after the first visit to Minnesota) and I said, ‘Am I worthy enough to have her heart?’”
Visits to and from Kansas City have continued since then, usually every year or two. Dicus has come to Minnesota for many family events, including Father Ochsenbauer’s first
Communion and his high school graduation. In 2024, she came for his transitional deacon ordination Mass at the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis. That day, she found out that his priest ordination Mass would be the following May.
“We had it on our calendar for a year,” Dicus said. “Then, he (Father Ochsenbauer) sent me his own little invitation. He said, ‘I need you here.’ I said, ‘Of course, we wouldn’t miss it for the world.’”
The only major event Dicus has missed was the funeral of Marcia Ochsenbauer’s father, who died during the COVID-19 pandemic when in-person gatherings like funerals were restricted. Dicus said he used to call her “my other little Marcy.”
In some ways, Dicus feels like not only the heart but the spirit of Marcia lives inside of her.
“I feel a lot of things that she feels,” Dicus said. “I can feel her thoughts, I can feel her presence often.”
It happened during the priest ordination Mass while Dicus was sitting in the pew with her husband and taking it all in.
“Jim leaned over to me and said, ‘You know you’re crying,’” she said. “And I said, ‘I think she (Marcia) is crying.’ Then I started crying on top of her. And it took me a while to stop.”
The Ochsenbauers also have felt the presence of Marcia through Dicus. “She brings part of Mom (Marcia) with her every time she comes and sees us,” Tom Ochsenbauer said. “We don’t just have the memory. We have someone walking around with Mom’s heart right here with us. So, it’s special having her (Dicus) with us during all the big events in our lives.”
But even as Marcia’s heart lives inside the body of Dicus, the Ochsenbauer family will always remember and cherish the original owner of that heart. Despite being only 6 when his mother died, Father Ochsenbauer credits her for helping him begin his journey to the priesthood.
“I remember going to Mass with her as a kid, going to adoration together,” he said. “She first inspired a life of prayer in me, and that was the gateway for my vocation to the priesthood.”
Communion of saints
Father Przybilla got to witness the story coming full circle when he attended a reception immediately following Father Ochsenbauer’s Mass of Thanksgiving on June 1. The event gave Father Przybilla a chance to reflect on the meaning of both the tragedy of Marcia Ochsenbauer’s death and the faith-inspired gift of her heart to Gail Dicus. He found parallels to some of the foundational truths of the Catholic faith.
“If I were to preach a homily on this, I think I just would look at the heart, the symbolism of the heart that’s so rich in Scripture,” Father Przybilla said. “We talk about the Sacred Heart (of Jesus) and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.” The donation of Marcia’s heart to Dicus “almost has a sense of the communion of saints … how that physical heart established even a greater connection between these two people who share Christian faith and are bonded with that.”
Father Przybilla noted that in some instances of Eucharistic miracles, scientific testing has revealed actual human flesh contained in the consecrated host, and he said this flesh is “always from the heart muscle.”
“It’s the heart muscle that gives life to the body and pumps the blood,” Father Przybilla said. “So, that idea of God sharing his heart with us to give us life is like Marcy sharing her heart with somebody else — or the family sharing that heart with somebody else — to give them life.”
As Bishop DeGrood, who has stayed in touch with the Ochsenbauer family, reflects on the last 20 years, one Bible verse comes to his mind.
“What strikes me is a beautiful passage from Scripture: ‘All things work (together) for the good for those who love him (Rom 8:28),’” he said. “It really should be a reminder for us that with every hardship and every tragedy, even those that are as significant as this, there are amazing things God does bring out of it for those who love him.”
It’s a lesson for all Catholics, Bishop DeGrood said. “We need to lean into God in our times of hardship (and) tragedy. And God brings about something even more beautiful and good than we could even imagine.”
In the years to come, Father Ochsenbauer will bring his story and the faith of his mother to Masses and gatherings in parishes of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. There will be times when he gives comfort to families in the way Bishop DeGrood and Father Przybilla did to his. In a spiritual way, his mother will be there, too.
“It’s quite simple,” Father Ochsenbauer said. “She loved God with her whole heart and passed that on to me, and the priesthood is the way I’m going to love God with my whole heart.”
Dicus thinks that this love, coming from a heart she now carries, will take Father Ochsenbauer far, maybe all the way to Rome.
“He’s such an amazing young man,” she said. “I already told everybody he’s going to be the next pope, and I believe it a hundred percent. I know it in my heart. I hope I’m still alive to see it.”
