Carol Lee (née Moeser) Steiger

She was a wife of 58 years, a mother, a grandmother, and a teacher with a gift for making people feel welcomed exactly as they were.

She was born on June 21, 1946, in St. Louis, Missouri, and grew up alongside her sister, Mary, in a home built on faith and warmth. Her love of language and reading showed early. She studied education at Valparaiso University in Indiana and, in 1990, earned a master’s degree in reading specialization from the University of Texas at Austin, by then already well into a teaching career that had shaped many young lives.

Carol taught from 1969 until she retired in 2012. Her happiest work happened in the drop-in learning center she ran at Westridge. Any struggling student could walk in mid-day, from any subject, and find her ready to help. She believed in every child who came through that door and taught them how to learn.

For 58 years she followed her husband, Larry, through his military career: England, Okinawa, South Carolina, Arizona, Virginia, Illinois, and Texas. Carol treated every posting as a new start, using each one to create a home and branch out to see another part of the world.

Her Lutheran faith was the center of who she was, deeply felt and the source of her strength. It carried her through and past breast cancer in her fifties. She celebrated the Christian calendar with real joy: she baked a birthday cake for Jesus, delighted in the Resurrection, and every year sent her sons a card on the anniversary of their Confirmation. Most of all, her faith showed in how she loved people.

To her grandchildren, Evan and Avery, she gave everything she had. She collected them from school with a cooler already packed: hot roll-ups wrapped in foil and tucked into dish towels to hold the heat, a cold Gatorade alongside, as though twenty minutes in the car were a journey no child should make unfed. She lent her granddaughter her real diamond earrings before church the way other grandmothers hand over a hair tie. And when Evan took up tennis, Carol took up tennis. Every lesson, every match, she was there, parked under a tree in hundred-degree heat, cheering him through the long ones. She never missed a thing that mattered to him.

Carol is survived by her husband, Larry Steiger; her sons, Carl Steiger and Mark Steiger; her daughter-in-law, Stacey Steiger, and son-in-law, Tristan Cliff; her grandchildren, Evan and Avery Steiger; her sister, Mary Elliott and her husband Russ; her niece, Beth Adams, and her husband, Tom; her nephew, John Dennis, and his wife, Dana; and many cherished great-nieces and great-nephews.

The family is deeply grateful to the staff at Belmont, whose tenderness in Carol’s final months brought real comfort to her and to all who loved her.

A visitation will be held on Thursday, June 11, from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m., at Cook-Walden Funeral Home in Oak Hill, Austin, Texas. The service will be held at Bethany Lutheran Church in Austin, TX at 11am on Friday, June 12.

Carol was the quiet center of this family. For almost 60 years she set its tone, kept everyone's history, and made sure no one went unfed or unloved. The family she built outlives her, and everything she gave us lives on in how we love each other.

Now may she rest in the peace of Christ.