Doris Mueller

Doris was born on December 14, 1934, in Akron, Ohio, to Wade and Betty Kerr. In 1956 she was confirmed in the Lutheran faith, and on September 15 of that year she married Russell Paul Mueller, beginning a marriage that would span seventy years. After moving to Florida, Russ and Doris made their home in Longwood for many years, renewed their vows at Ascension Lutheran Church in Casselberry in 1981, and in their eighties moved to Lutheran Haven at St. Luke’s, a community whose life Doris had already spent decades helping to build.

Her faith was not one part of her life; it was the ground the rest of it stood on. She served the Lutheran Women’s Missionary League as zone president, was a founding member of the Lutheran Haven flea market and helped start the Village Shoppe, taught ceramics, and led the Lutheran Haven Auxiliary as president for four years. But her truest congregation was her family. For most of her life, Sunday morning meant three generations in church together and a long breakfast afterward, and she expected every one of them there.

Doris was small, and no one who met her ever mistook that for anything. She had standards and she kept them: in how she dressed, how she kept her home, how she worshiped, and how she raised her family. She asked of others only what she asked of herself first. Those who met her saw the steel; those who loved her knew what it was made of. Her love showed up as work: in the clothes she sewed for her children, in a table that never ran short, in a home that filled with family at every holiday and was dressed for each one, year after year, down to the last detail. Order, in her hands, was a form of care, and everyone gathered inside it knew exactly where they belonged.

She and Russ loved each other in a way people noticed. He adored her for seventy years and never stopped showing it, and when her later years asked more of her than most could bear, she met them with grit, and he met them beside her.

She was preceded in death by her son, Michael Paul Mueller, in 2016, and her daughter, Michelle Jean (Mueller) Jackson, in 2022.

Doris is survived by her husband of seventy years, Russ Mueller of Oviedo, FL; her daughter, Melanie Ann (Mark) Latham of Gainesville, GA; her son, Mark Chapman Mueller of Winter Park, FL; her grandchildren, Michael Stephen Paul (Sarah) Mueller of Mount Pleasant, SC, Chelsea Elizabeth (Philip) Rohlfing of Colorado Springs, CO, and Alex Russell (Ida) Latham of Atlanta, GA; and her great-grandchildren, Benjamin, Sawyer, and Wyatt Mueller, Remy and Michael Rohlfing, and Sasha Latham.

A funeral service will be held at 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, October 24, 2026, at St. Luke’s Lutheran Church in Oviedo, Florida, with a reception to follow in Suites 1 and 2.