Olivia Faith Ludwick Dohmen

Olivia Faith Ludwick Dohmen came into this world on April 10, 1991, on a lovely spring day that gave way to a classic stormy night. Perhaps fittingly, Olivia would carry a lifelong love of rainy weather—a small but treasured connection to the very day her remarkable life began.

From her earliest years, Olivia possessed a natural ability to lead, coupled with an equally natural instinct to help others. In grade school and throughout high school, she was routinely chosen to lead study groups, work groups, and activities. People were drawn to Olivia, trusted her, and looked to her for direction—not simply because she was capable, but because she cared deeply about those around her.

Dance became one of Olivia’s earliest passions. Beginning lessons as a young girl, she continued year after year, eventually achieving company dance status. She was chosen as a dance officer and, during her high school years, reached the highest level of leadership in her precision dance squad when she was elected captain.

The role demanded an extraordinary amount from her, including helping create and choreograph several new routines each week. Yet no matter how busy Olivia became, she was the first to stop what she was doing to help someone struggling with a dance or to bring members of the group together. That combination of leadership, talent, patience, and compassion would become one of the defining characteristics of her life.

Olivia was equally gifted academically. She excelled while taking advanced-placement courses and carried that same standard of achievement with her to Southern Methodist University. At SMU, Olivia continued to distinguish herself academically while being routinely selected to lead groups, clubs, projects, and event planning.

Creativity, however, had been part of Olivia long before she entered a university classroom.

As a child, she discovered the computer game SimCity and could spend hours happily creating entire communities, one building at a time. What might have seemed like childhood play offered an early glimpse of something much greater. When Olivia ultimately chose architecture for her graduate studies, it seemed perfectly natural: she had been imagining, creating, arranging, and building beautiful spaces for most of her life.

Her talent for architecture became unmistakable. One of her principal professors once told a room filled with younger students that, in 15 years of teaching, she had encountered only three students who truly understood the concept of architecture. Olivia, she told them, was one of those three.

Olivia possessed an extraordinary ability to understand color, light, proportion, and the way all of those elements could transform a space. Her mother and father frequently turned to her when faced with difficult design decisions involving their vacation homes. Olivia seemed instinctively to know what would work.

That remarkable sense of color was not limited to architecture and interiors. It could be seen in the lovely gardens and arrangements of potted plants she created at family homes over the years. Where Olivia brought her attention, beauty seemed to follow.

But her talents and accomplishments tell only part of her story.

Her middle name, Faith, could not have been more fitting. Olivia’s faith and her love of the Lord were an important and beautiful part of the woman she became.

To her family and friends, she was also affectionately known as “Lily.” It was a tender name that somehow captured her grace, her beauty, and the gentleness she extended to the people around her.

Olivia had a magnetic personality that was a direct reflection of her wildly beautiful heart. She possessed the rare ability to meet someone as a stranger and leave them feeling as though they had known her forever. Again and again throughout her life, people who began as acquaintances became cherished, lifelong friends.

That may ultimately be one of Olivia’s greatest lasting impacts was the extraordinary number of lives she touched simply by being Olivia.

She was a leader without needing to command, an artist who saw possibilities others could not yet see, a creator who brought beauty into the world, a woman of faith, and a friend whose heart always seemed to have room for one more person.

Olivia Faith was deeply loved—not only by her parents, Carol and Philip Dohmen, and her two sisters, Lauren and Angelika, but by the countless others whose lives she touched. The beauty, kindness, creativity, faith, and friendship she gave so freely will live on in the hearts of all those fortunate enough to have known and loved her.

And whenever a lovely spring day gives way to the sound of rain, those who loved Olivia may find themselves thinking of Lily—and remembering the stormy night on which her beautiful life began.