Obituary of Heidi Miller Heinz

My beautiful friend and wife, Heidi Miller Heinz, died on April 10, 2020. She put up a valiant and tireless stand against her metastatic breast cancer for the last ten years. She has been very tired dealing with her disease and with the challenges of cancer treatment for the last two years and I trust she is now in a more peaceful place, at her ease. Heidi was born November 30, 1960 to Howard and Ruth Jantzi Miller in Jefferson, North Carolina and grew up in the Mennonite community of Lowville, in rural northern New York, which shaped her life-long.She acquired a lasting love of the country life, with pleasure from animals and getting her hands in the earth tending perennial flowers and vegetable gardens. She graduated from D'Youville Nursing School in Buffalo, New York and made her way to Hanover, New Hampshire where she worked at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. We met their while I was doing my General Surgery residency, and married May 30, 1989. Work and training carried her to Duke University and to Louisville, Kentucky where twin daughters, Marta and Gabrielle, were born in 1993. Further journeys carried her to Alabama and, ultimately, to Colorado, where she managed our Plastic Surgery practice until 2018. She enjoyed being with her close friends, traveling all over the world, skiing, cycling and gardening, cross-stitch and puzzling. Scrabble and drawing her family genealogy were recent favorites. Heidi will be remembered for her full and bold enjoyment of life, with a hearty laugh and steadfast loyalty to her close friends and family. She is survived by her mother, Ruth Jantzi Miller; daughters, Marta and Gabrielle Heinz; husband, Tad Heinz MD; and her siblings, Carmelita Beidler, Sven Miller and Howard Miller.