The couple also stood out to Bentley because “they were so in love with each other,” on the same page about everything, which he said is unusual even in partners and spouses with many decades of marriage behind them.
Then, A Turn
When Katie turned 32, two years into their working relationship with Bentley, she experienced a serious recurrence of breast cancer. She brought a life-changing question to a client meeting.
“She was still healthy, but she didn’t know what her future held, and she asked me ‘do you think I should keep working at Target?’” he said. “I asked her what the alternative was, and she said ‘I would like to be a barista for a while.’ If her time was limited, she didn’t want to spend it at Target.”
Realizing that Travis’s income at Target was sufficient enough to be a principal breadwinner, Bentley gave Katie his blessing to leave her career and work as a barista—where “she had the time of her life. She was so personable that everybody who met Katie became her friend, and she made a lot of them while she was a barista. And it gave her some fabulous years at home with her boys.”
A few years later, when her cancer began to metastasize to her lungs and brain, Katie would tell Bentley that the advice to quit her corporate job to become a barista was “the best advice I ever gave her,” he said.
Around age 35, Katie couldn’t work anymore due to the burdens of her chemotherapy treatment and a desire to be a full-time mom to her children.
At age 38, she began planning a new home for the family, often working from her bedside, knowing that she wouldn’t be able to live in the new house. But she still wanted to have her creative spirit as part of the home.
Then, at age 40, Katie died, leaving Travis and their two sons behind.
To The Mountaintop
Bentley still tears up when he talks about Travis's request at that lunch to take Katie to her resting place at Big Sky.
He met with Travis the next day to carefully pack her ashes into his backpack and share a hug before leaving for Montana.