Angela Joy Lastine

Angela Joy Lastine, known to those who loved her simply as Angel, passed away at her father's property in Pipestone, Minnesota on May 27th, 2026. She was the oldest of five children born to Michael Lastine and Jennifer Nuss, beloved eldest sister to Jody, Katie, Wendy, and Leif.

Angel's early years included home education alongside her sisters, deep involvement in her home church, and a devotion to working with horses. She attended Maplewood Academy in Hutchinson before graduating from Pipestone High School - a transition that suited her singular spirit better than the environment she left behind. That particular religious community, however well-meaning, left a mark on her life that is not easy to understand. She briefly attended Union College before transitioning to the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, where she later completed a bachelor's degree in psychology.

As the eldest, Angel inhabited the firstborn role with real capability and drive - she always performed, achieved, and often set the bar. That pressure shapes a person, and it was woven into her intensity, her high standards, and perhaps some of the weight she carried throughout her life.

Angel was called sweet and pretty by so many peers and friends in her youth, but those who knew her longer saw something deeper: she was a compassionate soul drawn to animals, to outcasts, to the people the world tended to overlook. She had a natural gift for peacemaking among friends, an instinct for standing in the space between people and holding them together.

For approximately fifteen years, she worked at a Chamberlin Edmonds in Minneapolis MN, where she excelled in serving clients from all walks of life - including those navigating significant hardship and instability. It was there that her particular fondness for the overlooked found a kind of vocation. Her colleagues and supervisors valued her so highly that even her chronic lateness was met with grace. She quietly collected stories about the people she served, told with warmth from an observer's eye.

At heart, Angel truly enjoyed nature, homesteading and unconventional handcrafting- frequently turning her talents into gifts for others instead of profit. She was a devoted reader, a lover of music across every form, and a profoundly deep and intellectual thinker. Her apartment off Lake Street in Minneapolis - affectionately nicknamed the Vortex by her younger siblings Leif and Wendy, who visited and stayed there often - was a place where the ordinary laws of time, space, and tidiness seemed to bend. Stacked with books, layered with clothes, filled with music, and presided over by her neurotic cat Twain, it was a place utterly her own, and utterly Angel.

For twelve years, Angel shared her life with Nils Richards, a man of great intellect who carried the Midwest persona well and matched her depth and curiosity. His passing within the last several years left a wound she never quite healed from. Those who knew her say she carried the loss of him quietly and heavily for the rest of her life.

Angel rarely left Minnesota, but she loved what she glimpsed of the wider world - particularly the West Coast, where she traveled to meet Nils's family, and the Black Hills of South Dakota, whose wild and ancient beauty seemed to reflect something true about who she was: untamed, bold, deeply alive. She was largely unafraid of the world. Her opinions were her own and she held them fiercely, but she rarely pressed them on others - her little brother remembers instead how she would simply open a door, expose him to a broader way of seeing, and let him walk through on his own terms. Her laugh, when it came, was loud and completely unguarded.

Angel also carried real pain. She struggled with significant depression from a young age and through much of her life, a battle that ran quietly beneath the surface of her warmth and humor and strength.

She is survived by her parents, Michael Lastine and Jennifer Nuss; her sisters Jody, Katie and Wendy; and her brother Leif. She is preceded in death by her beloved partner, Nils Richards.

In keeping with her spirit, her family will release her ashes in the Black Hills - that she may always be remembered as the free and beautiful soul she was.