The End: Obituaries by Jody

Ken Lyotier was living down and out in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside when the revelation came to him that would lay the foundation for the next four decades of his life. It was the late 1970s, and Mr. Lyotier was one of many broken men living in a neighbourhood marked by poverty and hardship. A friend had taken him for his first soup-kitchen visit, which he recalled years later in a CBC Ideas episode as a grim, shoulder-to-shoulder experience of eating soup out of repurposed plastic margarine containers amid the poorest people he had ever encountered. “It was a very uncomfortable experience to be that close,” Mr. Lyotier remembered in the 2005 episode. “But as I was chewing on a crust of bread, I started to get high. It was like a psychedelic experience. Maybe for the first time in my adult life, I felt like I had a place where I belonged. “God, I was so hungry for that. It’s probably what real communion is like – here we all were, eating together, just people being people.” That sense...

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...

Arthur Manuel was born into Indigenous activism. Working with the seeds his father, George, first sowed in the 1970s in the early days of Canada's Indigenous rights movement, the tireless B.C. aboriginal leader was on the front lines of the international fight for aboriginal title and self-determination right up until he drew his last breath. "Art went into hospital on Jan. 5 and went from talking about organizing his next meeting to being on a respirator," said his spouse, Nicole Schabus, a law professor at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C. "He was sending people messages about the February meeting on the very day he went into the intensive care unit. He had been in North Dakota at Standing Rock just a couple weeks before that. He didn't know how sick he was." Those who have worked alongside Mr. Manuel during a lifetime of Indigenous activism were in awe of his commitment, strategic thinking and persistence, says Indigenous policy analyst and lon...