The End: Obituaries by Jody

Early admirers of Helen Lucas’s art could scarcely have imagined that her sombre charcoal drawings would one day give way to joyful, giant flower paintings awash in colour. Her son-in-law Frank Simonetti didn’t even know she’d had a charcoal period until two York University PhD students staged a retrospective of Ms. Lucas’s works five years ago. That long-ago dramatic change in her art style marked the end of sorrow and the beginning of joy for her, according to her sister Mary Geatros. “Helen’s early works give you her sadness. She struggled to find her true self, and there were a lot of heartaches along the way,” Ms. Geatros says. “But her floral paintings of later years give the viewer the experience of being alive. She never, ever painted for the sake of painting. It was always personal for her.” Helen Billie Geatros was born Aug. 25, 1931, in Weyburn, Sask., the first of three girls born to Greek immigrants Eftihia and William Geatros. The family moved to Saskatoon weeks later, wh...

Haida Elder Jiixa Gladys Vandal was renowned on Haida Gwai’i and beyond, first for her bark and root weaving and then for her commitment to documenting her dialect while first-language speakers like her were still alive. But her much bigger gift to the world was her lifelong enthusiasm for sharing her knowledge and skills with anyone who wanted to learn from her, says Haida Elder Diane Brown (GwaaGanad). Ms. Brown was reminded of that recently while looking at a 1978 photo of Haida people in ceremony, in which only one of them wore a traditional hat of woven cedar bark. “Now, everyone’s got one,” Ms. Brown says. “That’s because of   Jiixa. Anyone who wanted to learn how to weave, all you had to do was bring your own bark and Jiixa would teach you. And she taught the Haida language to so many people.” She was born Gladys Minnie Hans on May 19, 1938 on Haida Gwai’i, to Kathleen and Isaac Hans. The youngest of 10 children, she grew up in Skidegate feeling pampered and loved, says dau...

The photo that sums up Edith McGeer best for son Rick is one of her holding a throw cushion in front of her face to foil the shot. She was never one for the spotlight. “My mother was a great woman, and one that you would never look at twice if you saw her out and about,” Rick McGeer says. “And by the way, she liked it that way.” But the spotlight found his mother anyway, through seven decades of groundbreaking brain research that brought a new understanding of and treatments for complex conditions including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. “It’s difficult for the rest of us to understand her work in terms of how impactful it was in that world, because medical science is not something that’s commonly known to people,” says Jane Burnes, a long-time family friend whom Dr. McGeer considered an adopted daughter. “What she contributed is absolutely remarkable.” Dr. McGeer and her late husband and research partner, Dr. Patrick McGeer, were once dubbed “citation s...

She was already a rising star on B.C.’s most popular TV news channel on that momentous day in 1985, though still using her first husband’s surname and not yet the one that she would make famous. She and her camera crew were in the car coming back from reporting on a news story. She needed a date for a posh banquet in Vancouver that night being hosted by the Chinese government, and was running out of options. Having already been turned down by the cameraman in the front seat, Deb van der Gracht turned to the shy young cameraman in the back seat and asked without much interest if he wanted to come with her. Roger Hope said yes. The rest was history, Mr. Hope says. They were a couple virtually from that night on for more than three decades of Deb Hope’s reign as one of B.C.’s best-known and most beloved TV news anchors. And then they were a couple through a much harder decade as Ms. Hope developed early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. The first signs began to emerge around the time of her 2014...

Lucy Landon Carter Mackenzie Pearson. The name alone conjures a woman of pedigree and influence, the kind of woman who would count no less than four former Canadian prime ministers among the friends calling in on Zoom a couple of years ago to wish her a happy 90th birthday. Landon Pearson was all of that, said her long-time friend and fan Sandra Griffin. But she was equally a humble student of the world, an attentive and generous friend, and truly unstoppable in her efforts to improve the lives of children and youth, Ms. Griffin added. “She made everybody feel important. If you were committed to working with children, then she was committed to you.” Ms. Pearson died Jan. 28 in Ottawa after a winter cold she’d caught led to pneumonia. She was 92. The former Canadian senator – daughter-in-law of Lester B. Pearson, Canada’s Nobel Prize-winning prime minister – is remembered by friends, family and work colleagues as a tireless advocate for children’s rights, who capitalized on her position...

Sarah Doherty’s life was forever changed one evening in 1973 when a drunk driver slammed into her while she was cycling to a friend’s house in her hometown of Taunton, Mass. The near-fatal impact tore off her right leg and shattered her pelvis. But while no one could have known it then, the horrific crash would ultimately benefit thousands of people. The accident launched Ms. Doherty on a lifelong quest for better crutches and mobility aids for active amputees – work that has improved the quality of life of amputees and people with spinal cord injuries around the world. The grateful beneficiaries of her life’s passion poured their thanks out on social media last month as word spread of Ms. Doherty’s sudden death on Jan. 11 at age 62 from a suspected brain aneurysm. “I never met her but she changed my life. Because of her, I have a life in the outdoors. I am so, so grateful for her and her contribution to the disability community,” wrote one person on the Facebook page for SideStix Vent...

Dr . Mary-Wynne Ashford was never a person for half-measures. Nola-Kate Seymoar recalls her older sister rising to the top of whatever she set out to do, whether that was dazzling her grade-school teachers, becoming a physician after raising three children, or influencing world leaders and several generations of Canadians as an internationally respected anti-nuclear activist. “Plunge, immerse, master. That was her,” Ms. Seymoar said. “When I heard about her accident, I thought, ‘This is not how it’s supposed to end.’” Dr. Ashford died Nov. 19 in hospital from complications of a head injury incurred after she fell Halloween night while out walking her labradoodle, Suzy, near her Victoria home. She was 83, and at the time of her death still very much the engaged and passionate peace activist she had been for nearly 40 years. “We had plans for next year to roll out a curriculum to high schools throughout B.C.,” said Dr. Jonathan Down, president of International Physicians for the Preventi...