A recording of the service will be available on 8/18/2026 at www.mtmsales.net/thomas

Sandra Ann "Sandy" Blanes, 72, of Butte, North Dakota, died on July 18, 2026.

Sandy did not merely take part in life. She entered it with her whole self. She was everything, everywhere, all at once.

Born Sandra Ann Evenrud on May 3, 1954, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, she was the fifth child in a large Norwegian American family and the first girl after four boys. Her father's work on the Minuteman Missile Project kept the family moving, and every new town meant finding her place again. That adaptability carried her through the rest of her life.

She first traveled to Brazil as a young wife expecting her first child, and what began as a visit became one of the defining chapters of her life. She learned Portuguese through immersion, raised her children between cultures, and grew comfortable beginning again. In Santos she taught English wherever her students needed her, and that work became Sandy's American English, a school of her own with a library built from her books and her mother's. She knew the frustration of being surrounded by words that were not yet yours, and the freedom that came when they finally were.

At the center of Sandy’s life were her eight children: Michael, Matthew, Nathan, Carla, Jennifer, Lurian, Betty, and Nelly. She raised them across two countries, often amid change and new beginnings. In the stories she later wrote about them, each child emerged as unmistakably themselves.

The death of her youngest daughter, Nelly Fran, at the age of three changed Sandy forever. "Does the pain ever go away?" she asked in a remembrance written three years later. She did not leave that grief untouched. Soon after, she arrived at the Federation for Children with Special Needs in Boston, in a friend's words, "ready, willing and able to volunteer," and built a community for Portuguese-speaking parents of children with disabilities. She gave those families someone who knew that behind every form and meeting was a child. Her work there was later recognized with an award from the Federation's founders.

Her work later brought her to Cambridge College, where she helped adults cross another kind of border, into higher education and back toward professions they had left behind.

Sandy was fiercely competitive. Her personal best bowling was 269, and in Scrabble she was legendary. She did not believe in letting children or grandchildren win. As she explained, "If they win, it's because they beat me." She could also sit down at any piano and fill a room. One of her granddaughters sometimes wondered 'if Grandma had a superpower where pianos would just magically appear everywhere she went.

In her later years, Sandy and her husband, Manny, made their home in Butte. She grew gardens, opened a gift shop, wrote for the local newspaper, and played piano at church. She also turned her childhood as one of the “Missile Kids” into books for young readers, finding yet another way to preserve a story and teach from it.

Sandy is survived by her husband, Manny; her children Michael, Matthew, Nathan, Carla, Jennifer, Lurian, and Betty; her ten grandchildren; stepmother: Vera Evenrud (Curtis) Gruber and her siblings Daniel, David, Sheri, Philip, Karen, Jonathan, Amy, Michael Paulo, Angela, Evelyn, and Marilyn. She was preceded in death by her daughter Nelly Fran; her parents, Edwin and Betty Jean Evenrud; and her brothers Larry and Paul.

To her husband, she was simple to describe: "She was my one and only. There will never be another."

Near the end of a short biography, she wrote about herself, Sandy wondered how many more things she could do and how many more places she could travel before she could not anymore.

Her answer was one word: “Endless.”

Celebration of the Life of Sandra Blanes: August 17, 2026 at 1:00 p.m. in the Butte American Legion Hall. A recording of the service will be available on 8/18/2026 at www.mtmsales.net/thomas

Visitation will be one hour prior to the service.

In lieu of plants and flowers memorials are preferred.