Steve Evans

Steven "Steve" Kent Evans
December 13, 1949 – July 20, 2026

Steve Evans died at home on July 20, 2026, surrounded by the family who loved him. He was 76, and he filled those years to the brim — husband, father, grandfather, marathoner, torchbearer, builder of a lake cabin and of lifelong friendships. For forty-two of those years he lived with Parkinson's disease, and for forty-two years he refused to let it decide what his life would be.

Steve was born December 13, 1949, in Logan, Utah, to John Evans and Lou Jean Cardon, the fourth of seven children. The family moved west through Twin Falls and Yakima before settling in Spokane in 1962, when Steve was thirteen. A few years later, out at Deer Lake, sixteen-year-old Steve met Sue Ann Johnson and was smitten from the start; he always said she was simply the cutest girl he'd ever seen. He married her on August 21, 1971, and together they had three children: Craig, Brent, and Amy. Brent died shortly after birth, and was carried in their hearts ever after. Steve and Sue Ann raised Craig and Amy in Colbert, Washington. Sue Ann preceded him in death on August 1, 2009, just twenty days shy of their thirty-eighth wedding anniversary. Theirs was a deep and abiding love — the kind that begins at sixteen and never lets go — and after seventeen years apart, they are together again.

Steve spent most of his working life in the furniture business, with long chapters at Northwest Bedding and Burgan's Furniture, before retiring in 2000 as Parkinson's pressed harder. The diagnosis had come in 1984, when he was just thirty-four — a young father with two kids and a whole life ahead of him. What he did with that news defined the four decades that followed. He stayed deep in the latest research, kept his body moving, and made a quiet decision he kept every day for the rest of his life: the disease could take a great deal from him, but it would never have the things that made him Steve — his joy, his light, his sense of adventure and mischief. He remained, always, quick with a joke and a smile — including about the disease itself. In later years the family's running punchline, delivered with a grin by everyone right down to his wife Sue, was an exasperated "F#$#ing Parkinson's!" It was never bitterness. It was a whole family refusing, right alongside him, to give the disease more reverence than it deserved. Steve never let anyone feel sorry for him — he was too busy living. People walked away from time with him inspired, whether they meant to or not.

Spokane saw for itself what that spirit looked like. On January 24, 2002, eighteen years after his diagnosis, Steve carried the Olympic torch through the city, flame held high. That May he underwent one of the earliest deep brain stimulation surgeries, and ten months later he

crossed the finish line of the Los Angeles Marathon — his first, at fifty-three. In 2004 he was given the honor of starting Spokane's Bloomsday Race. Steve never asked what the odds were. He just quietly went out and beat them.

Ask how Steve loved to spend his time, and the answers came easily. The lake, first and always — early years with the family trailer at Deer Lake, and later at Diamond Lake, where he bought a burned-down cabin and rebuilt it, board by board, into the place where family and friends gathered for summers of laughter and rest. There was something fitting in that: Steve had a way of making good things out of hard ones. Beyond the water, it was the slopes and the fairways — skiing when his body allowed, and golf whenever he could get it, ideally with the boys and an ice-cold Corona with lime close at hand. The family's Evans Green Jacket Tournament brought his two favorite things together, golf and family, and though he won it more than once, what he treasured was the gathering itself. Wherever Steve went, he made friends and kept them — the loyal, lifelong kind, built over decades of showing up and laughing hard.

Steve is survived by his son Craig and wife Jennifer, and their children Jamie, Joshua, Jacob, and Jillian; his daughter Amy, her fiancé Jim, and her children Brogan and Oliver. To all six grandkids he was "Papa Steve" — or, by the title he truly earned, "Funpa." He is also survived by his sisters Dianne, Jenny, and Nancy (Stella), and was preceded in death by his beloved wife Sue Ann, his infant son Brent, and several of his siblings.

A graveside service will be held at Holy Cross Cemetery on Friday, July 31, 2026, at 10:30 a.m., with a celebration of life immediately following at 11:00 a.m. at Mama Mia's restaurant (420 W Francis Ave Spokane WA 99205), for lunch, memories, and the laughter Steve would have insisted on. The family asks for no flowers and no gifts. Bring instead your favorite story of Steve. That is the memorial he would have wanted.