Bill Nelems: April 26, 1939 - March 31, 2017
Bill Nelems's daughter Sarah was joking with him recently about planning his final exit on his 100th birthday, in another 22 years. They agreed that going out like Tolkien's hobbit Bilbo Baggins wouldn't be so bad: setting sail from Middle Earth toward whatever new adventure awaited. Things didn't turn out that way. But by all accounts, Dr. Nelems would have been content that his sudden death from cardiac failure on March 31 took place in his family's beloved cabin at Coldstream, B.C., to which he regularly cycled from his home in Kelowna, 80 kilometres away. A man of many enthusiasms, he'd recently developed a passion for bird-watching, and loved the wild and marshy property. "The thing I loved about my dad was that he was always reinventing himself," recalls Sarah Nelems, the oldest of Dr. Nelems's four daughters. "He had so many interests, from his athletic endeavours to his charity in Zambia to his five grandchildren, whom he was compl...