Outspoken PFAS Critic Amara Strande Dies From Cancer

By Deena Winter, Minnesota Reformer:

The photos displayed in Guardian Angels Catholic church in Oakdale showed Amara Strande as a baby, Amara singing, Amara helping with a food drive.

But the first poster board Amara’s mourners saw when they walked in the church for her recent memorial service highlighted her work lobbying. She spent her final months urging lawmakers to more strictly regulate chemicals made by 3M, whose massive global headquarters is less than four miles to the west.

Many of the mourners attended Tartan High School with Amara, where cancer was so common that students joked about avoiding drinking from the water fountains.

Amara Strande, 20, died on April 14 of cancer.

Amara and her friends and family wonder if the water contamination caused by 3M dumping toxic chemical waste in the East Metro for decades contributed to the cancer diagnosis of her and so many of her friends and neighbors.

Among the grieving is Jesse Flanagan. She went to Tartan High School for awhile, and became good friends with Amara following an incident with Jesse’s brother Jacob Flanagan. After some students teased Jacob Flanagan as he gave a presentation, Amara came home feeling guilty because she didn’t come to Jacob’s defense.

She asked her parents how she could make it right. Dana and Michael Strande told her to ask Jacob to forgive her. After that, the two became friends, and Amara eventually befriended his sisters Jesse and Katie, too.

Flanagan said Amara was the only one who stood up for Jacob.

“Amara kind of was someone who looked out for the underdog,” Dana Strande said.
Amara picked out the shoes Jesse Flanagan was to wear at the funeral, calling them “badass bitch” high heels.

Jesse Flanagan wrote out what she wanted to say at the memorial service, but struggled to get through it.

“I am not OK,” she said at one point. “We are not OK.”

‘How do you cry when you lose your tears?’

In frizzy hair and a flowery skirt, Amara Strande took to the stage at Tartan High School, sat down at a piano and began playing and singing.

It was a 2021 awards ceremony for seniors, but Amara had bigger things on her mind. She sang a song she wrote called “I am the Strange.” The first verse was “How do you cry when you lose your tears?”

While her classmates dealt with tests and dating and acne, at age 15 Amara began getting headaches, nausea, nosebleeds and stomach pain.

Read more at Minnesota Reformer.