Denise Rosen, wife of Minnesota sports announcer Mark Rosen, dies of cancer

Denise Rosen, the wife of former sports anchor Mark Rosen, has died after a long battle with brain cancer.

The former WCCO-TV personality shared the news Monday afternoon on Twitter.

"My beautiful wife, Denise, passed peacefully from glioblastoma," he wrote. "She didn't 'lose' her battle with brain cancer. She lived her life to the fullest for the past three years."

Mark Rosen stepped away from his TV duties for a month in 2017 to help his wife recuperate from surgery that removed a tumor. He made the departure permanent the following year, in large part so he could spend more time with his spouse of more than 40 years.

"We'd be watching these shows together on the couch on a Tuesday night and I'd think, 'Is this what it's like? Is this what normal people do?' " Rosen told the Star Tribune in 2018. "It just felt right. Home is where my energies need to be right now. I mean, I've never been home at night in my whole adult life."

Rosen met Denise in the mid-1970s, when she was hired by WCCO as a courthouse artist. After a courtship that included dinners at Rudolph's Bar-B-Que and hanging out at the lakes, the two were married in 1977. They have two children. Their daughter, Chloe, is a WCCO assignment editor, and their son, Nicholas, is a film and video editor in San Francisco.

In May, Star Tribune sports columnist Patrick Reusse wrote a tribute to Denise in which her husband declared that she was the toughest non-athlete he has ever known.

"There is no link to heredity, no reason it happens to you, but I can tell you this: Never once have I heard Denise say, 'Why me?' " Mark Rosen told Reusse.

He paused, smiled slightly, and said: "OK, once. We were at the farmers market one afternoon not long after the diagnosis and there was someone acting like a complete idiot. And Denise said, 'Why do I have brain cancer and he doesn't?' "