Allie Tease lived every minute of her 23 years – surfing, skateboarding, studying chemistry, reading Dante and fighting forest fires.
Nothing escaped her interest, nothing scared her, and she excelled at everything until she had an accident on a California beach in 2003.
She was skimboarding – using a shortened board that skims the receding tide – when the board slipped from under her. She fell and suffered a debilitating spinal injury that required several surgeries. Nothing relieved the pain. Excruciating headaches followed.
Allie Tease died in Boulder on Jan. 20. The cause of death has not been determined.
A service is planned today at St. Philip and St. James Episcopal Church, 2797 S. Lowell Blvd. Tease was a student at Claremont McKenna College in Santa Barbara, Calif., when the accident happened. She was planning to be a research chemist.
After the accident, she returned to her home in Denver and then began taking one class at a time at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She could walk, but slowly.
“She never lost her love for life,” said her mother, Sue Wilson of Denver. “She was fun-loving and had a wicked sense of humor.”
She was brave and courageous “even after her body was wrecked,” said her sister, Meredith Wilson of Chicago, who called Tease “my best friend. We talked every day.”
Tease began skiing at age 3 “and went straight down the mountain,” her sister said.
Sue Wilson recalled when Tease was 11 and sledding with some boys her age. The boys bragged beforehand about beating her. She said nothing. When the race started, the boys sat down on their sleds. Tease stood up on her sled “and beat them all to the bottom,” Wilson said.
“She was just plain avid about everything but never bragged,” her sister said.
There were accidents sometimes. Once Tease had a skateboarding accident that left her in a full body cast.
It didn’t keep her from future adventures, including surfing, working as a firefighter in Routt County, helping her mom tutor kids, playing drums and sitting for hours with her ailing grandmother, Alice Wilson.
She never gave up, her family said, but she did tell her mother recently, “I’m not afraid to die.”
Allison Noelle Tease was born Sept. 13, 1982, in Denver, and attended Knight Academy and East High School, where she was on an academic team that competed nationally on knowledge of the U.S. Constitution. She graduated from Cate High School in Santa Barbara in 2001. In addition to her mother and sister, she is survived by her father, John Tease of Denver, grandparents Alice and Milo Wilson of Denver and grandfather Samuel Tease of Media, Pa.
Staff writer Virginia Culver can be reached at vculver@denverpost.com or 303-820-1223.
