Part 2: My 55-Year-Old Brother Stood Alone At Our Mother’s Funeral With Eight Folding Chairs Behind Him — Then The Church Doors Opened And 50 Bikers Walked In Without Saying A Word
I want to tell you who Magda Lindstrom was.
Our mother was born in Winona, Minnesota, in March of 1942, in the small Norwegian-American neighborhood on the east side of town, the daughter of a millworker at the Bay State Milling Company and a Lutheran church organist who played the pipe organ at First Lutheran on Center Street for forty-six years. Magda grew up in a small white wooden house on East Sanborn Street, three blocks from the Mississippi River, with one older brother named Erik who died in the South Pacific in 1944 at the age of twenty and one younger sister named Greta who passed in 1989 of breast cancer at the age of forty-three.
Magda was an only child in living terms by the age of forty-seven.
She married our father — a man named Lars Lindstrom, a railroad welder for the Burlington Northern — in 1966 at First Lutheran Church on Center Street, the same church she would be buried out of fifty-nine years later. They bought a small two-bedroom house on West Howard Street in Winona in 1967. They had Otto in 1970. They had me in 1973.
She worked as a librarian at Winona Senior High School for thirty-one years.
She read aloud to fourteen hundred ninth-graders, by her own count at her retirement in 2003, over the course of those thirty-one years. She kept, in a small wooden box on her bedside table, a list — handwritten, in the same blue ballpoint pen she used for everything — of the names of every student who had ever come back to her library after graduation to tell her they had finished a book she had handed them and they had liked it. The list had two hundred and seventeen names on it when she passed.
Our father Lars passed in 1996 of a heart attack at fifty-eight. He had been sitting at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning in October with his coffee and the Winona Daily News. He had been there one minute. He had been gone the next.
Magda buried her husband at fifty-four.
She buried her younger son — me — at seventy-seven.
She never remarried. She never moved out of the small two-bedroom house on West Howard Street. She lived alone for twenty-nine years, by the calendar between Lars’s funeral and her own. She had Otto.
Otto came every Wednesday night for dinner from 1996 until 2019.
He came every Wednesday night and every Sunday afternoon for dinner from 2019 until 2021.
When Magda’s congestive heart failure worsened in 2021 and she moved into the Birchwood Manor Assisted Living Apartments on West Sarnia Street, Otto came every Wednesday and every Sunday and most Saturdays. He brought her the Winona Daily News. He brought her a small dish of vanilla ice cream from the dining hall on his way down the hall. He brought her, every Sunday afternoon between three and four o’clock for four years, a chapter of whatever book he was reading that week, which he read out loud to her in her small assisted-living room because her eyes had gone bad in 2022 and she could not read for herself anymore.
He read her one hundred and ninety-three books over those four years.
She had been a librarian.
He had not.
He started reading the day she stopped being able to.
She told her hospice nurse — a forty-six-year-old white woman named Bridget who had been with her for the final six months — Magda told Bridget, on a Wednesday afternoon in January of 2025 when Otto was not there, that her older son was the best son a Norwegian-American woman from Winona could have asked God for, and that he was, in her exact words to Bridget, a good man wearing a leather vest that scared people who did not know him.
Bridget told my brother that sentence at the assisted-living facility on the morning of the day Magda passed.
He nodded. He did not say anything.
He drove home and sat on his back porch.
He picked up his phone at six p.m. to call our charter President Big Sal.
PART 3
I want to tell you what was happening with the charter that week.
The charter had ridden out of Winona on the previous Saturday morning at six a.m. — twenty-three of the twenty-eight patched brothers — bound for Texarkana, Texas, a ride of approximately one thousand and twenty-seven miles, on a trip that had been planned for four months. The funeral they were riding to in Texarkana was for a brother named Roy Halliburton, sixty-eight years old, founding member of a sister charter the Winona brothers had ridden with since 1989. Roy had passed of pancreatic cancer the previous Thursday.
Big Sal — our charter President, sixty-three, twenty-eight years patched, the man who patched Otto in 2004 — Big Sal had told Otto on the Friday before the ride that he was sorry he had to be gone for Roy’s funeral that week. He had not known, on that Friday, that Magda was less than thirty-six hours from her own passing.
Nobody had known.
She passed in her sleep on Sunday morning at three forty-five a.m.
The Birchwood Manor charge nurse called Otto at four-oh-eight a.m.
Otto drove to the facility in the dark.
He sat with our mother’s body for two hours.
He called the funeral home at six-thirty.
He called the pastor at seven.
He called Big Sal at six p.m. that night.
Big Sal was, at the time of the call, parked at a Pilot truck stop off Interstate 30 in Hope, Arkansas, ninety minutes south of Texarkana. He answered on the first ring. Otto said, in a voice that did not crack but that Big Sal told me later sounded like a man on the other side of a wall I could not get to:
“Sal. Ma passed this morning. Tuesday at ten. Center Street Lutheran. Don’t come back. Stay for Roy. I’m asking you. Roy was your brother for forty years. I’m gonna handle Tuesday. I got the five who stayed. We’re good.”
Big Sal said: “Brother. Tell me what you need.”
Otto said: “Sal. I told you. Stay for Roy. That is what I need.”
Big Sal said: “Otto. I hear you.”
He hung up.
I want to tell you what Big Sal did in the next three hours.
He walked into the diner attached to the Pilot truck stop where the brothers were having dinner. He sat down across from Hutch and Reverend. He did not eat. He told them what Otto had told him.
He told them what Otto had told him not to do.
Then he said, in his own words, three sentences.
He said: “Brothers. We are gonna do Roy’s funeral tomorrow morning at ten. We are gonna pay our respects. We are gonna leave Texarkana at two p.m. tomorrow. We are gonna ride straight north for sixteen hours. We are gonna be at Center Street Lutheran in Winona by six a.m. Tuesday morning. We are gonna leave Otto alone until ten oh five. We are gonna walk in at ten oh six.”
Hutch said: “Sal. The weather. The storm coming through Minnesota.”
Big Sal said: “Hutch. That is the situation, brother. We ride into it.”
Reverend said: “Sal. How many?”
Big Sal said: “Brother. I’m calling Council Bluffs. I’m calling Eau Claire. I’m calling Madison. I’m calling La Crosse. Otto’s mother gets fifty riders or I’m not going to be able to look at my own face in a mirror for the rest of the time I have on this earth.”
He made the four phone calls from the parking lot of the truck stop between eight-thirty p.m. and nine forty-five p.m. on a Sunday night in February.
Every charter said yes.
Eleven from Council Bluffs.
Nine from Eau Claire.
Eight from Madison.
Seven from La Crosse.
Plus the twenty-three Winona brothers riding back from Texarkana.
Minus three the Winona had left at home who would meet them at the church Tuesday morning.
Plus two more from a small independent charter in Rochester that Hutch had thought to call at ten-fifteen.
Total at the church Tuesday morning at ten-oh-six: fifty-seven.
But Otto, by everybody’s careful count at the front of the church when he turned around — Otto only counted to fifty.
He stopped counting at fifty because he could not, by his own quiet admission to me later, count any higher than that.
PART 4
I want to tell you what happened in the church at ten-oh-six.
Pastor Larson had begun the service at ten o’clock. He had read the opening hymn responsively, alone, to two elderly cousins and a road captain in a borrowed black suit with a folded leather cut over his right forearm. He had read the opening prayer. He had begun reading the first scripture passage — from the Book of Lamentations, chapter three — when the heavy oak double doors at the back of the church opened from the outside.
Otto did not turn around at first.
He thought, by his own account later, that one of our mother’s neighbors had finally arrived through the snow. He kept his eyes on the casket.
The first sound he heard was the small wet sound of boots on the church mat at the back of the sanctuary.
The second sound was the small soft creak of leather as fifty cuts moved together up the aisle.
The third sound was Pastor Larson’s voice stopping mid-sentence at the front of the church.
Otto turned around.
I want you to picture what he saw.
Fifty patched brothers in worn black leather cuts walking down the long center aisle of First Lutheran Church on Center Street in Winona, Minnesota, in three-by-three formation, in absolute reverent silence, with snow still melting in their beards and on their bald heads and on the collars of their cuts. Big Sal was in the front of the procession, with Hutch on his right and Reverend on his left. Behind them came the eleven brothers from Council Bluffs in their charter colors, then the nine from Eau Claire, then the eight from Madison, then the seven from La Crosse, then the twenty-three Winona brothers from Texarkana with eighteen hours of road dust under the snow on their cuts, then the five Winona brothers who had been holding station at home, then the two from Rochester.
Each of the fifty brothers in the front procession was carrying, in his gloved right hand, a single fresh long-stemmed white lily.
Big Sal had stopped at the Winona Hy-Vee floral department on the way through town at five forty-five a.m. and bought the entire white-lily inventory the store had on hand. The clerk — a twenty-three-year-old woman named Allie working the opening shift — had taken one look at the fifty bikers in the parking lot under the fluorescent lights of the Hy-Vee at five-fifty a.m. and had given Big Sal the lilies for two hundred and seventy-three dollars, which was the cost. She did not charge the markup. She did not charge sales tax. She did not, as Big Sal told me later, ask a single question.
Each brother in the procession also had something else.
Big Sal had brought from Texarkana, in a small leather pouch tucked under his cut, a folded square of black cloth on which had been embroidered, by his wife Caroline back home in Winona who had spent the previous twenty-eight hours sewing while the brothers rode, the following four words in white thread:
MAGDA LINDSTROM. OUR MOTHER.
It was a small embroidered patch, three inches by three inches, that Big Sal had asked Caroline to make at one a.m. on the previous Monday morning when he had called her from a motel parking lot in Memphis to ask her to please drive to the Hobby Lobby in Winona that morning and buy white embroidery thread and a square of black cloth and please, by Tuesday morning at six a.m., sew the four words.
Caroline had finished the patch at four forty-two a.m. Tuesday morning.
Big Sal had taken it out of his cut at the front of the church.
He had walked the last twenty feet to my brother alone.
He had stopped in front of Otto.
He had put one enormous calloused tattooed hand on Otto’s shoulder.
He had said three sentences.
He had said: “Brother. You thought we forgot? I called four other charters. We rode all night through the storm. Your mother is our mother.”
He had handed Otto the patch.
Then Big Sal had bent at the waist toward the casket, in a slow deliberate bow he had practiced exactly once in his life before — at his own mother’s funeral in 2012 — and he had laid the first white lily on the lid of my mother’s casket.
Then Hutch.
Then Reverend.
Then the eleven from Council Bluffs.
Then the nine from Eau Claire.
Then the eight from Madison.
Then the seven from La Crosse.
Then the twenty-three from Texarkana.
Then the five from Winona.
Then the two from Rochester.
Fifty white lilies on the pale ash gray lid of an eighty-two-year-old Norwegian-American librarian’s casket.
Plus seven extras, because the count had been wrong by seven.
Fifty-seven white lilies.
By the time the last brother — a twenty-eight-year-old Black American man named Levon Wallace from the Council Bluffs charter, prospect, two months into his patch process — by the time Levon laid his white lily on the casket, my brother Otto was sitting on the cold hardwood floor of the church at the foot of his mother’s casket with his enormous tattooed hands pressed against his face and his shoulders heaving in the way no biker brother has ever, in forty years of riding with our charter, seen Otto Lindstrom’s shoulders heave.
He was crying.
I want to be honest about that.
My brother Otto had not cried in front of another human being since 1985, when he was fifteen years old and our father had taken him out behind the rail-yard fence to tell him a thing I am not going to put in writing. He had not cried at our father’s funeral in 1996. He had not cried at my funeral in 2019. He had not cried at his own divorce in 2014.
He cried on the floor of First Lutheran Church on Center Street in Winona, Minnesota, at ten-eleven a.m. on a Tuesday morning in February, in front of fifty-seven patched brothers in black leather cuts and white lilies and snow still on their beards.
Big Sal got down on the floor with him.
Big Sal did not say anything for about a minute.
Then Big Sal said, in a voice so quiet only Otto and Pastor Larson could hear it: “Brother. You’re not alone anymore.”
PART 5
I want to back up to the patch.
The small three-by-three-inch black cloth patch with the white embroidered thread reading MAGDA LINDSTROM. OUR MOTHER. — Caroline Halversen had not sewn that patch only for Otto.
She had sewn fifty-eight of them.
She had sewn them in batches between one a.m. Monday morning when Big Sal called her from the Memphis motel parking lot and four forty-two a.m. Tuesday morning when she finished the last one. She had not slept. She had drunk eleven cups of coffee. She had sewn at her kitchen table under a desk lamp with her reading glasses on the end of her nose.
She had finished fifty-eight patches.
She had given fifty-seven to Big Sal at the front door of her house at five-fifteen a.m. when the procession of bikes came through Winona to pick up the lilies at the Hy-Vee.
Big Sal had handed out fifty-six of those fifty-seven to the brothers in the Hy-Vee parking lot at six a.m.
He had kept one in his cut, for Otto.
He had given the fifty-eighth — the one Caroline had kept back — to Otto separately, in the small folded leather pouch, the only one with a small extra detail Caroline had sewn into the corner that none of the others had.
The small extra detail on the fifty-eighth patch was a tiny embroidered open book in white thread, in the lower right corner, the way the spine sits when the book is open flat on a table.
Caroline had sewn the open book because she had known.
She had been a substitute librarian at Winona Senior High School from 1991 to 1994.
She had been one of the two hundred and seventeen names on Magda Lindstrom’s handwritten list.
She had told Big Sal — at her kitchen table at five a.m. that morning, with her hands raw and her eyes red — Sal. I want Otto’s patch to have a book on it. Just his. The other brothers’ patches don’t need it. Otto’s needs the book. Magda was a librarian. She was my librarian when I was sixteen. She gave me To Kill a Mockingbird in 1992. I went on to a master’s in library science because of that book. Otto’s patch needs the book.
Big Sal had said: “Caroline. Okay.”
He had put the fifty-eighth patch in his cut alone.
When he handed it to Otto on the church floor at ten-eleven, Otto did not see the book yet. His hands were over his face. Big Sal pressed the patch into Otto’s right hand without saying anything about the book.
Otto did not look at the patch for the rest of the service.
He looked at it that night, alone in his kitchen, at nine-thirty p.m.
He saw the small white-thread open book in the lower right corner.
He sat at his kitchen table and read the embroidery for about a minute.
Then he stood up, walked into his small back office, opened the small wooden box on top of the bookshelf where he kept his mother’s reading list — the handwritten list of two hundred and seventeen names that Magda had given him in 2021 when she moved to Birchwood Manor and had told him Otto. You hold onto this. I’m done with it. It belongs to whoever knows what to do with it.
He opened the list.
He found Caroline’s name. Page three. Caroline Halversen, class of 1993, To Kill a Mockingbird, finished and returned with note that said it changed her mind about what she was going to do with her life.
Otto closed the list.
He went out to his back porch.
He stood in the snow.
He did not say anything.
PART 6
The funeral procession to Greenwood Cemetery on the west side of Winona was, by Pastor Larson’s count after the service, fifty-seven bikes and one black hearse.
The bikes rode in three-by-three formation behind the hearse for the entire two-and-a-half mile route up West Howard Street, past the small white two-bedroom house where Magda had raised my brother and me, and around the gentle bend toward the cemetery. The temperature was eleven degrees Fahrenheit. There was four inches of fresh snow on the ground. The wind chill was minus six.
Every Harley in the procession ran for the entire two and a half miles.
Every cylinder fired in the cold.
At the cemetery, the brothers carried the casket from the hearse to the graveside.
Otto was one of the eight pallbearers. Big Sal was on his right. Hutch was on his left.
The six other pallbearers were brothers who had ridden in from Council Bluffs, Eau Claire, Madison, and La Crosse — men who had never met my mother and who had ridden through a blizzard for sixteen hours to be there to carry her.
Pastor Larson read the committal at the graveside.
The fifty-seven brothers stood around the grave in a loose ring with their cuts buttoned up against the wind and their breath visible in the cold.
At the moment Pastor Larson said ashes to ashes, dust to dust, every single one of the fifty-seven brothers — by Big Sal’s hand signal — raised his right gloved hand to his chest, palm flat, in the small private brother’s salute that our charter uses at the graveside of one of our own.
Magda Lindstrom — Norwegian-American librarian, mother of two, widow of one, friend of approximately seventeen people in the city of Winona at the time of her passing — got the brother’s salute at her own funeral from fifty-seven men she had never met.
Big Sal said one sentence at the graveside, after Pastor Larson finished.
He said: “Magda. You’re with our mothers now.”
That was the whole eulogy.
The bikes rolled out at one-fifteen p.m.
PART 7
Otto keeps the patch in his cut.
Caroline’s patch, with the small embroidered open book in the lower right corner.
He had it sewn into the inside front panel over his heart by a leather shop in Winona three days after the funeral. It sits there now, where no stranger will ever see it.
He still rides every Saturday morning. He still goes to the clubhouse on Tuesday nights. He still works at the gravel quarry. He still lives alone in the small two-bedroom house on West Howard Street.
But on the third Sunday of every month, since March of 2025, Otto rides to fifty-six other houses across four states — Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois — over the course of the year. He visits one brother a month, on the third Sunday, in the order Big Sal handed out the patches that morning in the Hy-Vee parking lot.
He drinks coffee with the brother’s wife. He sits at the brother’s kitchen table.
Sometimes the brother’s mother is there. Most of the time she is not.
When she is, he asks her about her son. He asks her what she read to him when he was little. He listens.
He writes the names down in a small leather notebook he keeps in his cut.
He is, by Big Sal’s count, currently on month fourteen of the rotation.
He has eight more to go.
When he finishes the cycle in November he is, by his own quiet plan, going to start it over.
He has fifty-six mothers now.
He intends to know all of them.
Follow the page for more stories about the bikers America thinks it knows — and the fifty-seven white lilies they put on a librarian’s casket in a Minnesota blizzard.
