The End: Obituaries by Jody

British Columbia political columnist Jim Hume took much pride in having never missed a deadline in 70 years. He missed his first one April 9 when admitted to hospital in Victoria, where he died four days later at age 98. “Jim always said he wanted to die with a pen in his hand,” recalls Joan Sawicki, who knew Mr. Hume first in the mid-1960s when she was a young server in a Victoria pub and much later when she was a politician. They met as Mr. Hume was beginning his decades-long reign as a political columnist at the Victoria Times and its successor, the Times Colonist. Ms. Sawicki jokes that he gave her the same advice as a server and, 27 years later, a new MLA. “He’d give me little lectures about how I deserved better than to be slinging beer in a pub. He was such a good influence,” Ms. Sawicki says. “When we next met after I was elected to the legislature in 1991, he told me the same thing. Jim Hume is one of my favourite people.” James Hume – no middle name, a family tradition he fol...

Roman Catholic Bishop Remi Joseph De Roo considered himself a pilgrim. Those who knew and loved him consider him a prophet as well, and some believe he will ultimately be remembered as one of history’s greatest Catholic bishops for his lifelong commitment to modernizing the Church. Bishop De Roo died in Victoria on Feb. 1, three weeks before his 98th birthday. While his time as the charismatic and controversial bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Victoria had come to an end long before, he continued to lecture and minister right up until the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. “During the pandemic, he spent a lot of time reflecting – for all of us, it has been a time to reimagine what we want to be, what will come next,” says Pearl Gervais, a lifelong friend and co-worker who first met Bishop De Roo when he was a young chaplain for a Winnipeg youth group she belonged to. Ms. Gervais provided a suite in her Nanaimo, B.C., home for Bishop De Roo after he retired from the diocese in 1999. He...

Cherry Lynne Kingsley knew too well that the ghosts of a brutal, broken childhood are never truly vanquished. The illustrious list of people who admired Ms. Kingsley included Canadian senators, political leaders, a decorated lieutenant-general and people around the world moved by her passionate work on behalf of Indigenous and sexually exploited children and youth. But no amount of love and support was enough whenever those ghosts came for her. “Sometimes people have the impression there was a transformation, like a cloak, and I just took it off. ‘You’ve overcome so much,’ ” Ms. Kingsley said in the 2002 film Recognizing the Person, which documented her journey from a violent childhood to international renown as a brilliant and charismatic young leader changing thinking and attitudes around the sexual exploitation of children. “I don’t know if I overcame any of it, to be honest. I think I live with it every single day. There is no destination that you get to when you’re healed and that...

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...