Matthew Coleman Dahlberg

11 July 2026 remembrance

John Cleese, an English comedian and movie star you may recall from Monty Python’s Flying Circus or the late-80’s film A Fish Called Wanda, claims that the first nursery-story he can remember his Mother reading to him was Gordon, the Guided Missile.

Gordon sets off on his course sending out signals to discover if he is on course to complete his mission. Signals come back that he is NOT on course. So he changes course and then asks again. Nearly always Gordon is wrong, making mistake after mistake after mistake, leading him off course. Gordon then listens to feedback; corrects his behavior and so on; until he finally completes his mission successfully.

We applaud our little friend Gordon for his skill. If some critic says “Well, he certainly made a lot of mistakes on the way.”,We reply: “Yes, but that didn’t matter, did it it?”

Here I am doing things backwards, delivering the eulogy for my 34 year-old son when this is my 68th year. The general order of things is Sons and Daughters reflecting on the lives of their parents.

Putting myself in Matthew’s shoes, delivering his Son-of-Me eulogy thirty years from now, about what kind of Dad I was . . . I could do worse than to begin with that story about Gordon the Guided Missile, making many mistakes along the way.

So many notes and messages of sympathy, loss, mourning and of love have reached me – thank you for your part in uplifting our family with your remembrances. Among the notes have been praise for Duan Meng and I raising a phenomenal, remarkableson.

Agreed that Matt was an uncommonly promising and gifted young man. But us taking credit for the way Matt blossomed would be a bit like that Colonel from the MASH tv-show, taking credit for having developed Radar O’Reilly. More likely, Radar figured things out for himself, along the way.

Touching on my cut-too-short Father-Son relationship with Matthew, I thought to reflect on insights I believe may be helpful to parents and friends of any age, while interacting across durations of many years in relationships with people we care deeply about.

My first insight – repeating, from John Cleese – is that mistakes made along the way are ok and more or less inevitable. Try our best to keep the mistakes the small-consequence type; try also to check-in often, for feedback and support.

As parents or grandparents, we should coach the practices of listening to feedback, correcting personal behavior and celebrating mistakes-learned-from, along the way. We need to have a tolerant attitude towards mistakes-made and a visibly-positive attitude toward lessons-learned from making them.

My second insight comes from a lesson learned too late, as Matt’s Dad. I will spare all of you my personal growing-up back-story by summarizing: there was no internet when I was in school, including when I was in college . . . no internet; no online gaming . . . until well into my mid-thirties.

I simply say sorry directly - to Matthew – also to Joshua and to Sarah. I got the online gaming-thing wrong as your Dad, kids. Honestly, I still haven’t figured out how to get started truly appreciating the rich experiences from the gaming parts of your lives. That’s something I wish I could have a parenting do-over on.

Many positive influences from society encourage people of all ages to be (more) creative. Creativity turns out to be a thing of high-value, which is pretty cool once you understand that theessence of creativity seems to be “a willingness to play”.

Try it; do it; screw it up; fix it; fail; learn; grow. Lose your inhibitions and contribute spontaneously to what’s happening. Good, solid, career advice; seems like good growing-up adviceabout gaming for teens and young-adults, too.

A bit ironic that Matt – and who knows how many other children of his digital-native generation – was so enthusiastic about flexing his creativity-muscles by playing online games while his clueless Dad tried to limit his video-gaming as though something to be rationed sparingly, like sugar for after-dinner dessert.

Happily for him, Mattthew shrugged off most of his parents’ meddlesome restrictions and forged lifelong friendships through gaming and a creative, learning mindset, in spite of what we tried to prescribe for him.

Summarizing that second insight, when your child – at any age – is exploring out of pure curiosity, get out of the way at least. Or better, indulge their sense of playfulness.

I asked family and friends to share stories about Matthew. Many of those stories involved chatting randomly for long hours into the night; sharing and repeating of inside jokes over many years; plus games of all sorts – board games, card games, roleplaying games - that went on and on and on. The Husband of one of Matt’s cousins describes Matt as “like that with everyone – able to find common ground, despite differences”.

Here are three small examples capturing glimpses of Matt’s friendly, reliable, creative yet grounded personality.

1 – “He used to narrate his actions with (then 3 year-old) Ari, using a hilarious Russian alter ego, bringing so much color and perspective into our lives.”

2 – “One of my earliest memories of Matthew was on a blue-square ski-run. The visibility was limited and I was very nervous to ski down. Matt was the voice of comfort and reason that encouraged me to take it slowly, saying there was really nowhere else to go but down and that he will be with me throughout. He stayed true to his word and we made it down to the base uneventfully.”

3 – Matt had 974 games in his Steam online-games distribution-library, representing many (many!) thousand hours of content. One of his gaming friends shared that Matt had more than two-thousand hours invested into Crusader King’s 3 - more than a year’s worth of a full-time job – just one of his 974 games.

The mountains of Kellogg, Idaho are pretty far from flat, humid, tropical, tiny, crowded Singapore. Nearly 10 copies of Singapore would fit inside Shoshone County. Keep in mind that Singaporeincludes a population of 5.6 million people, compared to roughly thirteen-thousand people in Shoshone County.

I could explain how different the two places are, one from another: 15 or 16 hours time difference; crowded living conditions; climate extremes; how Singapore has 4 official languages, of which English is only one-of-four; how Singapore is multi-ethnic and multi-religious with just 16 per cent of Singaporeans self-identifying as Christian.

Of course, there are also many unbelievably delicious types of foods in Singapore from all sorts of cultures, to encourage adventure and experimentation. Singapore food has so many special flavors – probably the thing Matthew missed most about where he grew up.

Singapore has only ever had one Government – the same political-party has ruled for the past 60-plus years, since independence from being a British Colony, in the 1960’s. The Government plans decades ahead with many things optimized. Given more than 5 million people living on land barely a tenth the size of Shoshone County, Singapore is about as competitive a place as you might expect.

Matthew got caught up in a lot of that – some of the competitive-pressure coming from wrong parenting decisions,like me insisting on piano-lessons extending for too long past the point of burn-out.

You might not know that one of Matt’s skills is as a talented, capable pianist. Grade-6-level piano player, about which we can say “Sophisticated physical control and advanced musical expression”. Think good enough to play piano for money at a bar or restaurant happy-hour.

Another bit of parental wrong-headedness was coercing Matt into an unwelcome by him exercise habit that suited me a lot better than it did him. Matt’s high-school was Anglo-Chinese Independent (ACS); a rugby powerhouse in Singapore. Matt played on the forward line – a bit like being an offensive line-man on an American-football team.

I used to drag Matt out running with me, or to the gym to lift weights, beyond his rugby workouts. Rather than leaving him to make up his own mind about how much and what type of exercise would be fun, I sorta evidently – with benefit of hindsight – tormented him with several years more pressure to exercise than a more clued-in Dad might have done. Back to all those Gordon Guided-Missile mistakes along the way – recounted ruefully.

Many call ACS – where Matt went to high school - one of the best schools in Singapore. And it really is a pretty good school. But to keep up with the other students, Matt – and his siblings – asked for and took “extra” tuition, above and beyond school, across a range of subjects: Chinese, Chemistry, Math, Physics, Economics, even English.

I want to be clear here - this wasn’t we parents bullying our kids into taking “extra” lessons, along the lines of me with the too-many-years of piano-torture. This was our kids telling US that we needed to be paying hundreds of dollars per week for supplementary coaching so that they will be able to keep up with their classmates.

I’m describing a high-school-age Matthew to you – attending a good school in a good neighborhood; many close friends from school and church and extra-curricular activities ? Step outside my eulogy for a moment and ask yourself . . . do you suppose that Matt was happy ?

Let’s rewind the clock, 20 years back. The year is 2006; Matt is 14; his brother and sister are 12 and 10. Matt’s Mother has a big job and I was working perhaps 70 or 80 hours a week. The hardest job I had of course – much higher-stakes than whatever happened in the office – was being Dad to two sons and a daughter.

I had joined a Men’s group, a few years before that – a group that helped me think through how to be a better Father, Husband, Son, Friend and Role-model. We met at 6 am on Monday mornings for 90 minutes of guided video-lessons, plus small-group discussion of assigned reading we had done the previous week.

There are two lessons from that Men’s group that I will like to share today. The first lesson is that all parents want to raise their children using love and discipline. Love, to show our children how much they mean to us and how much we care for them. Discipline, so that our children will be well-behaving and well-performing members of our communities.

But here is the thing. It’s easy – and common – to get the balance wrong between raising and teaching with love versus teaching through discipline. We Dad’s nearly always put too much emphasis on discipline. Mom’s are somehow often better at showing our children how much they are loved.

My key take away was that both of you – the Father and Mother together – are much more likely to love your children, than is the universe written large. While the universe will eventually teach lessons about discipline to our children, whether we do a good job of that or not.

If you can choose the sorts of mistakes you make as a parent, love your children too much and discipline them not so much. They will blossom from the love you show them.

The other lesson from my Men’s group is similar. All our children – male and female – crave hearing three things, that we parents say too seldom. “I’m proud of you.” “I love you.” and“You did a good job.”

Let’s come back to those three things we parents don’t say often enough. In fact, let’s close on that point.

First though, I want to pivot to a lesson about leadership that we suppose Matt learned some time in his tweens or early-teens. The lesson is that you become a leader – at any age or with whatever responsibilities – when you decide to lead your own life.

While our children were in school in Singapore, I organized my travel-schedule around parent-teacher meetings held 4 times a year, so that I could meet and speak briefly with all our children’s teachers on a regular basis.

With benefit of hindsight, two long-ago video-game milestones proved momentous in the history of the Singapore Dahlbergs family. When Matt was 11, the Steam digital-distribution platform for online gaming was released. When he was 12, Blizzard released their first World of Warcraft which of course became a cultural phenomenon.

Around that same time . . . let’s call it 6th or 7th grade . . . Matt’s teachers began reporting that he occasionally slept in class and sometimes didn’t turn in required course-work. That Matt was“smart but lazy”. Hmmm . . .

Looking back, it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to conclude that Matt was anything BUT lazy. Radar O’Reilly junior was more likely staying up all hours, leading a second-life as a Tank, Healer or Damage-Dealer in an online multi-player role-playing simulation – a behavior that Matt continued from middle-school through to now, on a rich range of online landscapes.

This was early Radar – Matt using his innate cleverness to triage the demands of the adults in his life, while investing many hours in his own amusements - pretty much the definition of leading your own life.

Later-stage “Matt-doing-a-Radar-impression” evolved after high-school, during the two compulsory years of Army service that all Singapore men must complete before university. Here I digress to say that Singapore’s compulsory national service is an interesting phenomenon. It throws young men from all of Singapore’s racial, religious and cultural backgrounds into a common, wearing-uniforms, melting-pot for 2 years of shared experience.

One thing to understand about Singapore is that – while English is pretty much universally spoken by everyone in Singapore – “English as a first language” is only spoken in a minority of homes.

Singapore has four official, Government-languages – English, Mandarin, Tamil and Malay - with another five separate dialects of Chinese spoken widely in homes as a preference, beyond the four official languages.

With so many mutually-unintelligible languages widely-spokenacross Singapore, it makes sense that English is often a communications-bridge between people who speak completely different languages to their parents at home and for whom English is not their first or most comfortable language to read or write in.

Enter multi-lingual, excellent-writing-skills, helpful Lance Corporal Matthew Dahlberg.

In theory, Matt’s Army-job following basic-training, was warehouse-supervisor for a monkey-infested munitions-base along aptly-named Rifle-Range Road, within the Bukit Timah Forest in central Singapore.

Matt was a certified forklift operator, just for instance. In actual practice, Matt quickly became a favorite memo-drafter for nonfluent-in-English Sergeants and Officers at the Rifle-Range base.

You can probably see why Matt made a great HUC or Health Unit Coordinator for the ER here in Idaho, as well?

Let’s drill down a bit more into Matt’s leadership lesson about leading your own life. People deciding to lead their own lives doesn’t always happen. Somehow there are still people – lots of people, it seems - who more or less go along with living someone ELSE’s life . . . a life that parents or in-laws; spouses or society have mapped out for them.

Matt was friendly and funny; generous and kindhearted, all of which made him an easy child to feel proud of. Not forgetting, he was intelligent and strong-willed too, which helped him to confidently walk his own cadence.

Returning to my question of was he happy 20 years ago, in the scenario I sketched of a 14 year-old Matt; putting up with whatever parent or teacher-imposed boundaries he couldn’t skirt around, while max-ing on enjoying himself ?

I think Matt pretty clearly WAS happy both during school and during his two years as a soldier in Singapore’s Army, because he (mostly) led the life he chose to and his choices made sense to him.

I don’t mean to paint a picture of a life without struggles and drama. Dark times came for Matt, both during university and several of the early years after. Watching from outside as his loving and supportive, but mostly clueless parents, we drew the impression that some of Matt’s struggles during those years resulted from trying to live a life that he imagined he shouldhave; a life that discouraged him as meaningless, rather than a life he felt personally would make a difference.

Duan Meng and I were blessed to spend two weeks in mid-May,traveling with Matthew in Hokkaido, Japan – just the three of us. He didn’t give an “It’s a Wonderful Life” speech or anything like that. Still, he gave the impression of feeling happy and motivated; comfortable in his own skin; enjoying and finding meaning in his working and social relationships; thriving with his nursing-school classes.

A blessing and now a sudden tragedy for so many, that Matt’spersonal path to happiness lay through being useful andprofessionally competent; helpful, kind and comforting – leading his own life, in a way that made such a positive difference to those who crossed his path in the Emergency Room, each shift.

Matthew’s own life, built on a foundation of service to others.

Most people who knew Matthew remarked on his vocabulary; his impressive memory; or the many obscure details he knew about all sorts of random things. Also Matt’s jokes – ah, the jokes.

We had rules in our house when our children were younger. No phone use at the table, for instance. Also, children sit at the table until everyone has finished their food.

By his early teens, Matt added a rule of his own, along the lines of preventing what he felt to be cruel and unusual parental-punishment. Matt’s rule was that if I told a joke so lame it could legit be labeled a Dad-joke, then dinner was over for the children.

One of many things I left undone this year on Father’s Day, was circulate a small list of Dad jokes to make our kids groan, or at least roll their eyes.

Closing this eulogy with three Dad jokes of the sort that Matt would absolutely have ended dinner over, here we go:

1) Why do they build fences around cemeteries ? Because people are dying to get into them.

2) What do you call a dog with no legs ? It doesn’t matter what you call it; it won’t come anyway.

3) What’s the difference between a Dad joke and a bad joke ? It’s apparent!

Matthew Dahlberg is gone now after just 34 years on this earth. He leaves holes in the hearts of the colleagues, friends and family he leaves behind – especially in Singapore, in Chicago and here in north Idaho. We will miss him and treasure our memories of him.

Thank God for the life of the man we are so proud to call our Son. What a remarkable human being Matt grew up to become: gentle, reassuring, gracious, empathetic, knowledgeable, with warm words for those who crossed his path and a willing attitude.

We loved you Matthew. We were so proud of you. You did a good job, Son!

Brother-in-law Matt Cassel:

I’m Matt Cassel, Sarah’s husband; father to Pierce; son in law to Duan Meng and John; and brother-in-law to Matthew and Joshua

I’m speaking today for Matthew and for my wife, his sister Sarah and my son and his nephew Pierce who fortunately is too young to have to feel such a painful event

First I’d like to say our hearts go out to John and Duan Meng. Sarah, Pierce and I love you

As a recent father I’ve been thinking about the tragedy since it happened. How do you make sense of it, i can’t imagine it, and will not imagine it, it is just too painful.

We can’t change the past and what has already happened, we can only move forward with intention and do our best to honor his memory in our daily lives, but I’ve been ruminating on what exactly does that mean.

The memory of Matthew lives on through everyone in this room, and the question I have been thinking about is how do you choose to honor his memory not just today at this celebration of his life, but across future generations as well. Let me share with you some of the ways we intend to preserve his memory for the next generation.

He spent his last years caring for both his grandparents, putting their needs well ahead of his own, selflessly. Commitment to family is a trait we want and need to instill in our son as well.

Compared to many of the other people here, I didn’t have as much time with him, but his intellectual intensity is a trait he definitely gets from both John’s side and Duan Meng’s side and to me feels like one of his defining traits. And I’d say this was clear to anyone who got crushed by him in scrabble, or chess as we witnessed when visiting grandma Lois in 2024.

His love of reading fiction came through as well, when you visit the home in Singapore, we stay in his childhood bedroom and I’d always see his collection of books, sci-fi, fantasy amongst others. This appreciation for reading, and the creativity it inspires is also something we’d like to share with his nephew our son Pierce

Hopefully these actions from us helps carry a living memory of Matthew forward across time and generations. And I would encourage everyone here to hold onto their loved ones and to live for them with Dahlberg intensity

Sending our love again to John and Duan Meng. Thank you all for attending and honoring Matthew’s memory

My sister Marah put it eloquently a couple days ago when she said that your cousins are your first friends, and that could not be more so the case than it was with Matthew and I. I was born in January and he was born in March - instant playmates. The next year my sister Marah was born in August and Matthew’s brother Josh was born in December. They naturally paired off. Then we followed up with my sister Bekka and Matthew’s sister Sarah, the third pair. Mom, Dad, John, Duan Meng - good planning, excellent execution.

I have known two different Matthews during my life - the first Matthew has about a million memories, it totaled about twelve pages single spaced front and back. I forgot those at home so you are stuck with the memory that stood out the most. I had the privilege of spending every Christmas vacation and roughly every other summer vacation with my cousins, my first friends. It was chaotic but a good chaos. Matthew and later Joshua, had more energy than any one I have every seen in my life. Now that I am a mom myself, I can say its “little boy energy” IYKYK - but Matthew took it to a whole different level. There were days where our Aunt Nancy would sit on him for a minute, mostly so the entire house could have one minute of calm in a day of good chaos. He always brought excitement into everyone’s life, and upon further reflection, pushed us to be better versions of ourselves.

Matthew was a phenomenal skier. Allegedly John stuck Matthew between his legs at age 4 and his biggest complaint was “faster Dad”. There was one Christmas vacation when we were in middle school where the constellations aligned and all ofthe cousins ended up on the ski hill on the same day. We made the mistake of letting Matthew lead the way and one by one the cousins attrited, citing wanting “easier runs” or to “go warm up in the lodge”. Finally, Matthew and I were the last ones standing and he laid out his plan to accomplish a “power hour” - which meant trying to get as many vertical feet as possible skied in an hour. It was brutal. He chose four very steep runs and offered me no sympathy for sore legs or bruises from falling. At the end of the fourth run I was so excited to go back to the lodge but he looked me in the eye and said “we have an opportunity to set a personal record. The hour isn’t over”. I refused but he ended up convincing me in a way that only Matthew could do. The kid was persistent. He ended up choosing the longest (and steepest) run on the mountain and sure enough we set our own record. I think he had to drag me on my rear end back to the lodge after we got off the chairlift. He then went back to our grandmashouse and wreaked havoc until he was sent to bed. Surviving his energy was basically a holiday tradition. As a kid he pushed boundaries and truly added excitement into everyone’s. His chaos had a way of pushing us to be better versions of ourselves.

The Matthew I knew as an adult was very different. He had much less energy, he knew something about everything, and would often answer rhetorical questions with long and scientifically accurate explanations. We did not get to spend nearly as much time together as adults but the time we got was something I will always hold onto. Last year when we visited, my son was three and Matthew came over to my parents house to hang out. He build lego structures only for my son to smash them into the ground. They did this for three hours until my son finally tired out - a feat we didn’t think was possible. Matthew achieved what we were never able to do with him as a little boy- and gave my husband and I a few hours of reprieve from little boy energy. He showed my son the kind of patience, respect, and kindness that he showed his patients. All of you that showed up to pay respect to his memory are a testament to the impact he made in his short time working in healthcare. He continued the legacy of care that my grandparents started in the Silver Valleyand I can only imagine what he would have been capable of with more time. Looking back, it was a privilege to know both versions of Matthew, my first friend and the man he became.