Alyssa Tsagong

Often people would confess that she was “the most joyful person they had ever met,” and that is because she cultivated joy and purposefully looked for it everywhere. She took time to notice things—say, a ring of moss on a stone, or the shade under a copse of cedars—and she slowed down enough to actually drink in the beauty of it. She would remind others to notice, too. 

She was also blessed with a clarity of purpose and a buoyant self-belief which led her to seek adventures and take risks. When she was a teenager and wanted to work in a summer camp way across the country (even though she was more than a year shy of the legal age to do so), she printed and filled out the paperwork and delivered the application to her parents with a pen, ready to sign. “I’ve taken care of everything,” she said, “I just need your signatures.” When she wanted to go to art school in Baltimore, or study abroad in Nepal, she just thought through the details, prepared the forms, and made her choices look so effortless they might be mistaken for flights of fancy. They were not. She had a fast-calculating intuition that guided her steps, and a sharp intellect for the way that the world worked that made her understand how to achieve her purpose.

She was also adept at following her joy. It was her compass, and it led her to interesting places. When Alyssa was 21 years old, she followed something that made her heart sing: Buddhism. This took her all the way across the globe, to India and Nepal. Along the way, she found something else that made her heart sing: Dhondup. The connection was fast. Like most things for Alyssa, when she knew, she knew. “I had to go all the way across the world to find a man like Dhondup.” she would often say. The next big love, baby Tenzin, came soon after. Alyssa and Dhondup flew to America to raise a family. 

Wisconsin became home to the Tsagongs. They bought a house and settled down close to the Kobrigers (her dad’s family) and the Wibergs (her mom’s). The large Catholic families and their tightly connected systems of support offered a solid place to grow. A few years later Dorje arrived, and the boys got into sweet little childhood mischief, playing in mud piles and covering the sidewalks with paint. 

In these early parenting years, Alyssa got up to a lot of creative mischief herself. She made art, launched a card line, wrote a cookbook, and started her career in the non-profit sector. She did many things over the course of her career, including wrangling volunteers, running events, making maniacally complex spreadsheets, managing teams, and giving speeches—and she always made sure she had enough berth to do things in her own whimsical way. When she was working at PBS Wisconsin, her creativity and pluck inspired the organization to task her with assembling a brand new department. She launched and grew PBS Wisconsin Education, making “learning powered by curiosity” an ethos that many wanted to get behind. Alyssa loved her work, but she retired early, at the age of 43. 

Alyssa was diagnosed with cancer twice, once in 2019 and then, after successful treatment, with a recurrence at stage 4 in 2021. Though this diagnosis changed the course of her life, she approached this change in a characteristic Alyssa way: “though this news is devastating—what can I create from even this rocky soil?” Alyssa did what Alyssa does, and she started connecting people. She became an active participant in support groups, served as a mentor for women newly diagnosed, and she co-led a peer to peer Metastatic Breast Cancer gathering in southeastern Wisconsin. She became an advocate, writing to legislators about the importance of funding cancer research, and enrolled in clinical trials. 

In 2024, Alyssa co-founded a non-profit with her long-time best friend Megan Monday. Temple of Kinship embodied Alyssa’s life long desire to demonstrate care for others through her actions. She fundraised and organized to give a respite space for women navigating a terminal diagnosis, like herself, and she even brought along care for the ones who ride close beside them. Alyssa organized her life around giving to others the whole way through. 

Alyssa is held in a ‘big bubble of love’ by her spouse Dhondup Tsagong, her sons, Tenzin and Dorje Tsagong, her parents, Richard and Michelle Kobriger, her brother Adam Kobriger, her loving extended family—from the Midwest all the way to Nepal and across the United States—and by the many friends collected throughout her life. In her last days she said, “Let everyone know: I won at life. I had such a great one, and I have no regrets.” May her life inspire us to connect, to deepen our connections, and to keep wonder alive.