CAROL HENRIETTA LINDBERG HUNTER

Carol Henrietta Hunter was born on December 9th, 1950, in Little Falls, Minnesota. She was number twelve of thirteen dirty little kids. Not the type of dirty little kids that came home with lice, but the type of dirty little kids that brought lice to school.

Carol’s parents were both teensy folk; her no-good runaway dad—a Norwegian immigrant with crabs and an untreated case of the drip—stood five-foot-six when he wore his thickest socks. Some say he reached five-eight before the shame he bore on his shoulders compressed his spine, and the payload of lukewarm shit he kept in his pants wore his knees flatter than his personality. Carol’s mother, on the other hand, was a charming little doll (often mistaken for the youngest child), stood only four-foot-three and wore a size one boot that fit up anyone’s ass. Carol would fall in between, topping out at four-foot-nine, tall enough to bonk her head on your elbow, yet too short to reach the gas pedal without taping a brick to her shoe.

The only thing shorter than Carol was her childhood. When she learned that Elvis was perving on tweens, Carol held out hope. She passed on several promising suitors, two of whom were cousins, one of whom was a twenty-one-year-old high school freshman named Bad Brad, a dreamboat who wore underwear on the outside of his pants and pulled his pud in the library. But when Elvis went another direction, she settled on Larry Hunter, the other hunk a hunk of burning love.

In 1967, Larry and Elvis shared one thing in common: statutory rape. Unlike Elvis’s ten-year age gap with Priscilla, Larry and Carol’s was only three and change—a difference that, from the stone age up until 1975, was A-OK and considered groovy amongst the rich and famous, Mormons, therapists, swim coaches, dance instructors, math tutors, gym teachers, and college dropouts who ran bible study.

Carol will be remembered for her giant personality. She spoke to everyone, dope fiends, down-on-their-luck vacuum salesmen, and orphans with dirt mustaches, gingivitis, scurvy, and receding hairlines. When she wasn’t raving about herself or complaining about Larry, she often bored them with Elvis, watermelon, and Outlander (a tale about a horny guy who couldn’t keep it in his kilt or keep from getting his schnozz stuck in a honeypot—like Winnie the Pooh).  

Once on a visit to Graceland, Carol spoke to other Elvis fans, all three of them (each barred from the premises), and came home convinced he was still alive. Delighted by the good news, she took to humming and singing the King’s tunes in her prize-winning gardens, and her plants thrived—unlike her kids, who were born with ears and deprived of their share of water and sunlight.

Every year, she split her plants, put them in ice cream buckets (she kept a lot of ice cream buckets), and gave them to friends and strangers. Sometimes, people went home with a watermelon, round and heavy as a bowling ball, flesh vibrant as a rose, and sweet as a first kiss—unless that first kiss was like Carol’s with the sixth-grade bully: the one hooked on Lucky Strikes, a deviated septum that whistled when he held teachers upside down and shook them for change, and a mustache no bigger than a postage stamp, like his idol’s—Hitler, and Carol’s deadbeat dad.

Over the years, Carol’s love for Elvis and Larry waned when she discovered the television series, Outlander. There was no bigger fan than Carol. Like her watermelon, the lead character (Jamie Fraser) made her crave his sweet, red, fleshy parts.

In her dying days, Carol had only one wish: to live long enough to see the final season. She did. And boy was she disappointed. What a stinker. While she was okay with the first seven seasons of characters passing back and forth through time and rock, she found the eighth and final season unbelievable, disgusting, and a waste of her last few breaths.

When she wasn’t gardening or dreaming about a moonlit night with Elvis and Jamie, Carol loved reading books with a weak plot, going on carnival rides that made her pee just a little, catching bigger fish than Larry, and winning at cards and trivia. It was always better to let Carol win at cards and trivia. If you didn’t, you’d be called a nasty cheat, or worse—sucker lips (the unflattering downturned organ of a bottom-feeding sucker fish, not to be confused with its other downturned organ that spits out shit).

To her family, Carol will always be remembered as a terrific cook and baker—everything she made was from scratch. Family was always greeted and treated to the best coffee cake, cinnamon rolls, frybread, donuts, ice cream, ice cream sandwiches, homemade hamburger buns, and hamburger hotdish—which always tasted better before her middle child, the joker that wrote this cringy obit, the lush who lapped up all her liquor and stewed about alien conspiracies, 911 cover-ups, left-leaning talk show pukes who couldn’t land a joke on autopilot, and pedophiles who volunteered to lead "messy games" at religious retreats that left vulnerable kids shaken, confused, and with blood in their shorts.

After 2015, family dinners were never the same. Russ ate it at work… heart attack. Carol was devastated. No more calls from Arizona, no more stories about the things he dreamed of buying: the 17th-century blunderbuss from a shady arms dealer, a crossbow from the kid fresh out of juvie, a WWII Panzer VI tank from some Nazi on Craigslist, a second pair of nunchucks and throwing stars from the blind girl he met while speed dating, and the Chinese finger traps he saw at the novelty store where he bought his Pokémon cards.

Things got heavier for Carol between 2016 and 2020, when she became the sole caregiver of Larry as he wrestled with dementia and anyone who got in his way. She worked herself sick (C-diff, heart attack, brain tumor) while keeping Larry from wandering naked onto the highway, bringing his guns to bed, combing his hair with her fork, serving grandchildren soupy ice cream out of his bare hands, pissing in the heater vents, and sharing mini-wieners with Lollypop—his imaginary horse.

Carol passed on May 26th, 2026, on her fifty-ninth wedding anniversary. She is preceded in death by Larry; parents Olaf and Molly Lindberg; brothers Orville, Gene, Henry, Joe, Donald, and Richard; sisters Shirley and Ellen; and son Russ. She will long be remembered as a devoted wife, mother, loving grandmother, great-grandmother, friend, and fan of Outlander,  She leaves behind a formidable and tasteless collection of Elvis thingies, key chains, buttons, blankets, t-shirts, bottle openers, Moody Blue vinyl record, statues filled with colored water because Larry drained them of  booze, and a phone she never answered, a daughter, Holly; son Larry Lee and his wife, Kristine; grandson Drake; granddaughter Hailey and her husband, Kurtis; great-grandchildren Bo and Miley; and four sisters: Donna, Helen, Mary, and the youngest of thirteen—Irene.