Cynthia Siemens Willman

Cynthia Siemens Willman, age 63, passed away on July 10, 2025 while partaking in one of her favorite hobbies, hiking, in one of her favorite places on this Earth, central Arizona. Although this was an unexpected and devastating event for her family and friends, we rest in the knowledge that she was greeted joyfully by her Savior and by those she loved who have gone before her.

Always willing to help someone in need, she became involved in charity work and was a good neighbor and friend. She always saw the good in every person and the world and served as a clear model for bringing people together and community building. Most of all, she was a proud and devoted mother to her daughter, Hadley.

Cynthia was born in Los Angeles, California on November 11, 1961, to William Lee and Carol Ann (Doneilo) Siemens. As a young child, Cynthia was precocious and witty. During grade school, she was an active member of 4-H and Girl Scouts. As the daughter of a pastor, she was involved in church activities from an early age. After she accepted Christ as her Savior, she was eager to show others how to do the same. In junior high and high school, she was an excellent student, and she participated in many extracurricular activities, including band, cheerleading, chorus, dance, drill team, and track (hurdles).

Cynthia’s father was a professor and minister whose calling took the family to different places around the country in her early years, so there were quite a few places she knew as home, and she loved them all. From the Los Angeles area, the Siemens family moved to Massachusetts, then to Fresno, and on to Kansas and Virginia... and finally, in her junior high and high school years, to Morgantown, West Virginia, where her mother still resides. She graduated from Morgantown High School in 1979, then returned to California, where she earned a B.A. in Psychology from Fresno Pacific College and an M.A. in Community/Clinical Psychology from Pepperdine University. After college, she remained in southern California and lived in such locations as Ventura, Orange County, Eagle Rock, and, the town she so loved in the last seven years of her life, Lake Arrowhead.

Although she was a natural counselor and a compassionate listener, Cynthia’s people skills and her talent for writing led to new career opportunities in the emerging tech world during the early ‘90s. When Hadley was born in 2000, Cynthia took time away from the outside workforce to focus on being a mother, while establishing an ambitious home-based business of her own, BookBaskets-dot-net. This business mostly served as a one-woman assembly line, and for many years, her dining room table on a bucolic street in Eagle Rock could be found overflowing with her beautiful, one-of-a-kind baskets. After years away from the corporate world, she wondered how difficult it would be to jump back in — but this turned out to not be an issue, as her skills and natural charm allowed her to pick up where she had left off nearly a decade before, taking on new executive roles. She worked in several capacities in the business world over the years, taking on roles like Head of Global Communications for global companies that included Checkmarx, Cylance, and Cisco.

No one who encountered her in her professional life could doubt the zeal she had for the executive roles she took on, especially the ones she found in the last 15 years that made tremendous use of her abilities and fit her like a glove. Yet neither could anyone doubt that these jobs were a means to an end for a woman who was not nearly a careerist as much as someone with a vast array of interests as well as a deep and abiding love for family and community.

In her spare time, Cynthia enjoyed many hobbies, including the performing arts (participating in ballet and theater in her younger years); hiking and exploring Native American ruins; and travel. An avid reader, she especially enjoyed reading books and learning about archaeology, architecture, England, ufology, ancient cultures, and genealogy.

Imagining what her ancestors went through was a source of endless fascination to Cynthia. Through her extensive genealogical research, she discovered that her family had ancestors from the Mayflower through her mother Carol’s side. Perhaps because of that, of all the places her family lived over the years, she maintained the greatest affinity for Massachusetts. From a family visit to the area when Hadley was a child to the present day, Hadley could expect to be (as Cynthia put it in a recent social media post) “regaled with the story of how our ancestor took her children and ran from the raiders and hid in a cave, now on the property of the Deerfield Academy." She had as much fondness for other areas in that historical part of the country. And, indeed, Hadley was partly named after the town where Cynthia’s grandparents lived, Hadley, Massachusetts. (The other inspiration being the name of Ernest Hemingway’s first wife.)

After Hadley left the nest, Cynthia had more liberty to pursue some passions that took her on short and immensely rewarding field trips. On volunteer archaeological digs, she helped uncover artifacts that expanded regional knowledge of cultures long past. Her greatest physical love was found exploring natural sites, including the trails around southern California and central Arizona.

In Lake Arrowhead, where she lived the last seven years of her life, she was deeply involved in two communities that brought her great joy — St Richard's Episcopal Church and in the Mountain Sunrise Rotary Club of Lake Arrowhead. She helped both the church and the club with communications, public relations, and social media, and she never missed an opportunity to volunteer for a new role or task when needed. Despite being a relative newcomer to Lake Arrowhead, the church, and the Rotary Club, she immediately became a core member of these communities.

But most of all, she adored her family — immediate, and distant, it made no difference. She was as maternal as any woman who ever walked the earth, and she was fond of the saying (attributed to writer Elizabeth Stone): “Making the decision to have a child — it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” Cynthia bravely let her heart live a few hours away from her body when Hadley went to attend Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and then subsequently settled in the Bay area. But she would regularly hop in the car to make a five- or eight-hour drive to visit the daughter of whom she was so proud. She trained up

Hadley well to become known for the same traits that she herself was known for — most especially, leadership and compassion.

Many members of her extended family will hold precious the last moments they got to spend with Cynthia in June, when she attended a Siemens family reunion along the California coast. She posted a message about what a glorious experience that was for her, from the homegrown food offerings to the chance to catch up with first and second cousins, and she summed it all up with the exclamation: “Heaven!”

Cynthia had a highly developed sense of what an earthly heaven was. We now celebrate her experiencing a real heaven that surpasses all our understandings, knowing she is enjoying the ultimate family reunion, where we will one day see her again.

Cynthia is survived by her daughter Hadley Willman; parents Carol Permar and Bill Siemens; brother Richard Siemens; sisters Karen Warrick (Greg) and Julie Bailey (Perry); ex-husband and close friend Chris Willman; nieces Heather, Laurie, Madeleine (Wesley), and Susannah; and nephews Justin, David, Matthew, and Jack. Also left to mourn her passing are many dear friends, extended family, and the many communities she blessed by once calling home.

“No eye has seen, no ear has heard, and no mind has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him.” (1 Cor 2:9, NLT)