Rita Diana Forest

Rita, or Diana as she was more commonly called, was diagnosed with liver and pancreatic cancer on December 18, 2012 and died April 10, 2013. She survived her first two-week cycle of strong chemotherapy but in her second cycle something changed. She became weaker and could no longer eat enough to sustain herself; as a result she was admitted to the Victoria General Hospital on Monday April 8, 2013. Despite wonderful attention from the doctors, nurses, and staff at Victoria Hospital she continued to decline until 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday, April 10, when her breath was taken away from her. Sadly only an hour earlier she had gently encouraged her husband, James Forest, to go home to get some rest so he could look after her the next day. After receiving a call from the doctor, Jim and a friend rushed back to the hospital to visit Diana for a few moments. Today, as he writes these words his chest is quivering with sadness, and tears are falling on his hands. His only solace is that her suffering was short and that, as the doctor stated, she died peacefully.

Besides her husband James, or Jim, Diana is survived by her three sisters, Edna Hunchak and husband Bill, Gladys Webster and Jim (Al Berube deceased), and Isabel Smith and Peter (deceased). As well there are numerous nieces and nephews who were able to enjoy her company.

Diana was born on May 10, 1944 to Sophie and Tom Tomaszeski (both deceased) in Edmonton, Alberta. She spent all of her early years in Calmar, Alberta until she went to work in Edmonton as a secretary; here she quickly learned that her job did not offer her the opportunities she wanted so with the advice and encouragement of her brothers-in-law, her sisters, and the Dean of the Faculty of Pharmacy, she decided to improve her high school grades so as to enter pharmacy.

In late 1962 she was introduced to her future husband by, of all people, her future father-in-law, Joseph Forest. Jim was already attending the University of Alberta in psychology and Diana joined him in September of 1963 in the Faculty of Pharmacy. Her excellent memory and work habits helped her through many tough courses leading to her graduation with a B.Sc. in Pharmacy, the same year Jim graduated with a B.A. in Psychology. During those years they had their spats and on several occasions broke up but Diana’s good looks and intelligence, plus her excellent egg salad sandwiches got them back together. With the lack of insight that goes with being a man, Jim went off to Seattle Washington to graduate school not realizing that Diana had hoped for a wedding ring and an invitation to go along with him.

Their long distance relationship lasted the two years he was gone and when he came back he had the money to buy her a ring, leading to their marriage in August of 1968. Prior to their wedding Diana made a suggestion that changed their lives forever. She proposed that they go to Europe for their honeymoon which they did and which led to a life-long passion for travel.

After their marriage on August 16, 1968 and the honeymoon, Diana became the primary breadwinner for three years as Jim earned his Ph.D. in Psychology. In 1971 he obtained a position in Winnipeg at the University of Manitoba Psychology Department, just before the September start of the academic year. Diana was left in Edmonton to pack up their apartment after which she came to Manitoba.

For four years they lived in apartments until they could afford to buy half of a small side-by-side house which became their home for 11 years. Diana showed her stamina and determination by taking whatever pharmacy jobs she could obtain including one that required her to travel from Winnipeg to Portage La Prairie and back each day by bus, an 80 mile trip. In 1977 they lived for a year in Europe on the sum of $35.00 a day. She enjoyed the excitement of European life, the bars, cafes, clubs and even some of the seedier inns that they had to live in, where, for example, the heat was turned off completely in their hotel in Lourdes, France , and the showers and sinks in the Spanish hotel in Sitges could deliver only untreated salty sea water for washing.

After nine trips to Europe, she and Jim switched to winter vacations in Mexico for three years however a nine day bout of Montezuma’s revenge in Mexico City and Merida caused them to drop Mexico as a travel destination. The island of Oahu became their favourite December destination for 32 years.

Diana sacrificed part of her career and future pension by going with Jim on each of his research leaves throughout the U.S., and in doing so became a highly competent but amateur accountant, travel agent, and activity organizer. They visited numerous U.S. cities and had fond memories of San Antonio, Austin, Albuquerque, San Francisco, St. Petersburg, Las Vegas and many other places.

In 1986 they moved into a newly build house in Lindenwoods that became her pride and joy. She recognized the need for maintenance and repair in a way that Jim could not; she could shovel snow for an hour, prune trees and shrubbery for six hours, and paint garage floors five times over five years in a war she eventually lost to the power of weather erosion. Upon returning home from a short or long trip Diana would become quite anxious about her house but when she rounded the corner of the street to see her home still standing a smile would appear on her face.

She worked as a full time pharmacist whenever she and Jim weren’t travelling and by treating their combined salary as the profits of a small business they managed to provide for their retirement, travel extensively, and enjoy the Winnipeg nightlife. Diana’s jobs were highly stressful so it was agreed that she should retire first which she did in 2002. She retired from pharmacy without incident because she was honest, competent, and unwilling to compromise the health of her patient’s. Indeed she was let go from a pharmacy position because she refused to speed up the rate at which she filled prescriptions. She nearly died when an armed man shot a bullet that passed by her left ear as he robbed the pharmacy. A manager with a national retail chain learned a hard lesson because he failed to heed Diana’s advice that lawyers cannot manipulate pharmaceutical laws. She did fail to convince one drugstore owner that it was dangerous to smoke in a storage room full of canisters containing pure oxygen. There never was an explosion but Diana had many tense moments when the owner disappeared for a smoke. When asked if she would ever go back to work as a pharmacist Diana said she would rather wash floors for a living although her love of plants made her think that a career in botany was a possibility

After Jim retired in 2007, he and she made many trips to Las Vegas, Minneapolis and Honolulu. They were packing for Hawaii the very day she received news of her cancer diagnosis.

Throughout her life Diana came to love a broad range of music including hard rock, jazz, celtic, rap, folk, country, and tejano. She was a physically active woman too; she played tennis, squash, and racquetball, took part in strenuous exercise classes, jogged, and loved to dance. Diana knew how to play chess, Go, cribbage, backgammon, and a variety of card games. She was a news junkie, a lover of comedy shows, and much better at handling horror movies than her husband. She wanted her food delivered to her table hot and cooked to her specifications, otherwise the chef would hear about it. Friends said she had a great laugh when she was teased. Her husband loved the way she talked with him on their many coffee outings. She distinctly disliked Canada geese that messed up walking paths, rabbits that insisted on living under her deck, and dogs along with their owners who thought that her front lawn was their special potty. As for internet banking well that was a sure-fire way to have scammers steal all of your saving.

She had her bad habits of course; often she would interrupt people as they talked. Sometimes she overestimated her ability to know what people were thinking or likely to do. She could be grumpy too especially when people didn’t do what she thought was appropriate in a situation, and people got her advice whether they asked for it or not.

Jim often wondered if or why Diana loved him but she would quell his concerns frequently by sitting or lying beside him and say, “I love you so much; I bet you didn’t expect to be kissed on all 2000 body parts.” So maybe Jim wasn’t the incompetent husband he often felt he was.

“Lots of hugs and kisses Diana, I love you too.” Jim.

A Memorial Service to celebrate Diana’s life was held at 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, April 20, 2013 at Thomson “In the Park” Funeral Home, 1291 McGillivray Blvd. In lieu of flowers please donate to the charity of your choice.

EULOGY FOR RITA DIANA FOREST

Born May 10, 1944 in Edmonton, Alberta

Died April 10, 2013 in Winnipeg, Manitoba

From cancer

By

James Forest

Husband

Date of Eulogy – Saturday

April 20, 2013

5:00 pm

I’m very glad that the funeral home could leave the pictures of Diana up on the screen because ultimately this is for Diana. My words are secondary.

Diana told me she thought no one would come to her funeral. I told her I thought people would come. So, by attending this eulogy and reception all of you have helped me to win one last argument with Diana; she was wrong and I was right.

I want to thank everyone who helped or offered to help me get through this crisis.

I also want to thank Caitlin and Gerhard of Thomson In the Park funeral homes for helping me through this process. They listened to my stories about Diana, they didn’t rush me through my choices, and they had many good suggestions on how to do things.

Today I am going to talk about Diana’s personality, her interests, and her motivations. There is a much longer obituary on the funeral home website which gives a time line view of her life. So please look at it for more information about Diana’s life.

There will be a reception after this eulogy. I would appreciate it if you could come. I would like you to have a laugh about life because that is the way Diana would have wanted it.

Now, this eulogy is like any one. It’s a perspective. It’s only mine. You saw her in many ways that I didn’t. You are individuals who came to see Diana from your own standards, from your own values. You probably saw things in her that I would have missed some good, some bad. What you are going to get here is my perspective and I hope I can surprise you with some of the stories about what she was like. I’m sure you’re going to realize that there is no way I can present Diana’s life in 30 minutes or so and there is no way I can show her life in 60 pictures but they are important minutes and important pictures to me. There is no way that I think I knew Diana in all her aspects I don’t know whether I knew 20% or her or 60% of her. We are all very complex individuals. Some things she probably never told me; some things she might never have known about herself; some things I will never know about her because we never saw that aspect of life. We never had children so I never saw her as a mother and so on. I expect she would have been good but I would have learned a lot about her if I had seen her in that aspect of life.

First a little bit about how Diana looked or how I looked at her. Diana was five foot two inches tall. She lost an inch or so as she aged. And one of the things she wanted to be was taller. She envied women who were taller, what size I do not know but she thought there was more beauty in a tall woman than a short one and that is what she wanted to be. For some reason or other she disliked her legs. She thought her legs were chunky. There is a picture up there of her it shows her holding her skirt out like this. She said, “As a kid I had chunky legs and even as an adult I have them too.”

“One of the things that I liked very much about Diana was that she had long hair and she kept it long for me. That was just my preference. But she liked to change her hairstyle like a lot of women she would get bored with it and she would want to try something new and she would do it. One time in Fargo she went to a hairdresser and got her hair changed. She came walking across the parking a lot to me. I looked at her and I said, “I know that must be Diana because she because she’s coming to see me at the right time.” And when she spoke it was the right voice but it didn’t look like her. It shook me up.

As she got sick her practicality came out and she knew she was going to have to get her hair cut and she did so and she also knew that I liked it long but I accepted the fact had to be cut for the convenience. Now what happened in this case is it got really nicely done. I had to tell her that. As she got sicker she had to get her hair cut shorter once again. I’m going to have to go back to compliment the hair dresser because she did a really nice job but Diana looked like a punker. She didn’t like that and she was always trying to pat it down, trying to put water on. I said, “Leave it. It looks really good.” She had her standards though and sometimes they matched up with mine

Diana weighed between 110 and 130 pounds during her life. The sad part of course and the reason why I am glad that some of you didn’t see her is that she lost about 25 pounds or so and was down to about 94 or 95 pounds when she died.

You are going to get some of these stories. She was a well-endowed young lady for her size. And that was a pleasant benefit for me and I hope I showed her that I appreciated her in that regard.

One of the pictures up here you’re going to see her leaning back against the wall in our house in #9 Peppertree Place. She has a scarf holding her hair back. She has the most wonderful complexion in that picture. If there was any picture I would save of her I think it would be that one. I think as young adults we don’t appreciate our looks and how we are going to change as we age but that was a picture of her I loved

As she aged she commented that she began to look a bit like her mother she had lines down the side of her face and she would try these anti-aging creams, knowing full well most of them aren’t going to do anything she wanted to try them anyway. So, I kind of liked her for her willingness to try new things and yet realize that there was a lot of advertising in it and only a little effect.

She was very physically fit. We played a lot of sports together. We played a lot of tennis together. She took actually took part in a few tennis tournaments around Manitoba when I was doing the same thing. We played squash together, racquet ball, went jogging, did weight lifting, lots of exercises were taken by her at Shapes gym. She was very aerobically fit. We were out on a beach in Hawaii one time where they had some aerobic exercise classes so we went there and I tried it but couldn’t last as long as her.

She was very concerned about staying healthy. She would do anything under her control to avoid things like diabetes or skin aging and so on. Very concerned with her teeth she had some diagnoses that she was going to have problems with them.

She had a nose like a bloodhound. I told her she could work for the police she was so good. I could open the fridge while she was sitting in the front room and if there was something that smelled bad she knew it. I could walk up the stairs with a tee-shirt that was clean in one hand and a worn one in the other and she could tell the difference.

One aspect that she had in conjunction with her sisters was that she had a very good memory. You can slice and dice memory in many ways to look at it. One is called retrospective memory, which is memory for the past and one is prospective memory, which memory for the future. She had a very good memory for the past and a very good memory for the future. So, she pulled up lots and lots of information and we had lots of great conversations over coffee because she remembered her past well or our past well. And then when we had to do things, she always remembered that in 20 minutes we had to go someplace and in 2 weeks we had to do something. So her prospective memory was very good. She had a good location memory, she knew where things, sometimes I would just skip searching for things I would just say “Where is it?” I would skip running up and down the stairs. She’d tell me where it was.

I avoided making social mistakes because she had a good memory for the conversations we’d had with other people. So if it turned out that we’d talked to somebody and they had said, “Well we’re going to northern Manitoba. We’re going to Vancouver in two weeks.” I’d phone the person and want to talk to them and Diana would say, “Listen why are you calling them? They’re not going to be here. They’re in Vancouver.” She remembered details whereas I was just blindly calling people.

In contrast to me Diana’s memories didn’t seem to be fading. I am sad to say my memories of many of the events of my life are slowly fading. Fortunately I was smart enough to keep a diary which will allow me to relive my life with her. Even 10 years after retiring from pharmacy her recall of drug names, their uses, and their interactions and problems was phenomenal and it helped us when she was healthy and it helped us with the cancer treatments and I felt a little out of place when we would go to a doctor about cancer treatment and she and he would be speaking medical speak so she would say “You want me to take that PID.” And he would say yes and I didn’t know what PID meant. It may mean although I’m not sure, either, take as directed or take every 4 hours. I can’t tell you which but she understood it all.

I want you to understand something very important, I lost 50 percent of my life with the memories that I lost with her death. She’s taken them and I can’t get those back. I’ll give you an example. I bought winter tires this March and Diana and I were driving around and she said “Do you remember that when we lived on Peppertree you bought winter tires and you were too lazy to change them when the summer came so you wore out them prematurely,” I did not but as soon as she told me I remembered it That’s gone from my life and I really regret that.

She was a smart woman. She took a BSc in pharmacy. I asked her if she wanted to go on to graduate school. We vaguely talked about an MSc in pharmacy but she was sick and tired of the study of pharmacy and she said no. Many people got her to go into university, her brothers-in-law, the encouragement of her sisters, the support of her parents, the dean of the faculty of pharmacy. And as it turns out fortunately I said something which I did not remember which added a little bit into it, I’m not saying it was the changing memory or anything because too many people helped her. Apparently when we were dating in 1962-63 we were talking about something and I said, “I like smart, intelligent, independent women.” She was probably that way before I met her and she was certainly that way in our marriage. And if she was standing up here talking to you she would be the same way. She said it helped her to make those decisions about going to university.

Her intelligence showed up in terms of what I call a practical intelligence. There is that abstract intelligence, calculate this area of this square which is 4 inches by 3 inches. Then there is looking at a toilet that isn’t working, looking a car you have to fix the door that is falling apart because it is rusted out. And she went at those things with enthusiasm and solved them. I don’t want to make her out to be a saint what I want to say is she did these things much better than I did. And so those things stick in my mind. She would look at a problem I’d say “Give Up. Junk the car.” And she’d say, “No, no I can get that to stick together.” And she would succeed. I learned a lot from her.

She had a logical reasoning style that I also liked in a sense in which she could marshal arguments against somebody who was telling her that something couldn’t be done so when it came to booking rooms in hotels, which we did a lot, she did it all, when it came to service people coming to our door, she was the one who handled it, because they would come in and say, “I’m sorry we can’t put that door in there.“, “We can’t take those strips out of that door. “, “It won’t fit.“ and she had argument after argument saying here’s why it would work. And she won a lot of times. What impressed me even more was that she was sometimes wrong in what she said to these individuals. She would say some statement like “And I know you can do it for 30 dollars, I’ve seen it in home depot.” Well the guy said, “Look we’ve been there we know it can’t be done for less than 45 dollars.” It never stopped her when she was wrong she just rolled on. She had a score card in her head. This was a hockey game, her against the doctor or the tradesman, the score was 7 to 1 the tradesman wasn’t going to win this game. I got a lot of benefits because we got service beyond what other individuals got I think.

She had good spatial arrangement ability. Spatial arrangement being three boxes in a row, 25 objects, fit them in so they all fit in. Why do I use this example? Well think of dishwasher. Now when I fit dishes in “plop, plop, plop,” sure there are 3 dishes still in the sink. But I don’t care. Diana would look at this when I went upstairs and I would hear, “clink, clink, clink,” the dishes were coming out, going into the sink and they were all put back in when I came back down and the sink was clean. We had a few spats about that. I would tell her, “We are wasting my time.” But she was good at that.

She liked a lot of knowledge, she read a lot. After she got over being sick and tired of reading about pharmacy, she was reading papers, she was reading health books she wanted to avoid any types of scams. We watched American Greed (TV program) a lot trying to keep on top of the idea that there are a lot of people out there who will make promises to you they can’t deliver on. And she was well aware of those things. A lot of people helped her learn and in ways they didn’t realize it, her parents, her brothers-in-law, her sisters and so on. So Diana learned because people gave her advice and she had a good memory for what they told her. She also watched people and whether she knew it or not she was learning by modelling their behaviour. So she saw her sisters dealing their husbands, solving the practical problems around their homes, traveling and so on. And she picked that up. Made her a smart woman I will give you an example, about something that stuck with both of us. We were in a restaurant in Edmonton before we were coming here to my first job at the University of Manitoba. And we were in a restaurant and we could see a couple. They were about my age now, and they were not talking, they were eating their meal but they weren’t talking. I want to point out this couple looked sad to me but they may have had a great marriage. But what we saw was sadness and apartness. And Diana said let’s not do that and we never did. She was great to talk to.

Diana said one of her favourite songs was ‘Lady in Red’ and when it came on she always said she wanted to be my lady in red. And, she made it. On the other hand, she liked the weird songs like “Who let the dogs out.” and “I’m too sexy for my shirt, I’m too sexy for car.” and a large number of other songs. Not my sexiness. I didn’t quite say this to her, I said “Do you know what we’ve partied around Canada, the U.S., and Europe to songs from Billy Halley and the Comets to Lady Gaga.” And, we had done that and we had a lot of good times.

She told me I was important to her. She said she wanted me around a lot. And I tell you that not for the emphasis on me but to tell about the type of person she was. I am sure she could have succeeded being married to a large number of men but I was lucky enough to get her. When we went shopping we’d park for an hour or two hours, we always got back together to have a coffee, sometimes we’d park for another two hours, shop and she would window shop, she unfortunately would not spend as much money on herself as I would like, we’d have a another coffee, and by the time we had the third coffee I had the coffee shakes and coffee anxiety. It probably wasn’t very safe for her to ride home with me when I was driving

She said she always wanted to tell me how much she loved me so she would have no regrets if she died or I died.

She could kiss and she loved to be kissed. I was going to tell you that literally she could lay a 100 kisses on me in 3 minutes I then calculated it out in a scientific fashion and it’s not very likely but she could do 50 and I am lying in bed I’m on my side and she’s facing my back and the morning has come, it’s a day we have free, and I can feel these kisses all over my back and shoulders and she says “I love kissing.” She was dating at the time I met her which would have been about September 1962 and she would have been 18 and she was dating someone at the time. I got the impression he was a nice guy but she said I had the advantage because I could kiss better. I believe her actual description was that he had a wooden kiss. To my advantage I might point out.

She loved to be hugged and she loved to be touched. At the beginning of our marriage I was like any single young man I had been sleeping alone for so long the bed was mine, hands on one side hands on the other side and feet spread apart. She would get in and because she was independent there would be a shove, a nudge, a push, a comment and I got onto my half the bed and at which point I got lots of hugs from her and I very soon learned that it was a nice activity

One of her favourite stores was Victoria’s Secret and she would drag me in there not unwilling. To show me what she was thinking of buying and what she thought was weird. And, I only started to think about this when I was writing this eulogy up I sometimes wondered if she was testing my interests to see if they would match up with something she wanted to do.

She was a very fastidious person very clean when she went to a doctor for example she wanted to be washed and dressed so as to make his job easier. I was a smidgen jealous because she would put on Victoria’s Secret lingerie to go to the doctor.

She liked well-formed butts on men. She would comment when we were watching a football game the guys would go into the huddle and bend over, she would look at the butts and say “I like those butts.” She liked nudity; she didn’t want me to wear pyjamas and I didn’t. If we were up and she was sitting someplace and I was walking around going to the bathroom, because I used a separate bathroom to comb my hair and stuff like that. If I walked by and she saw me she would say “I like that, do it again, walk by me again.” So I’d walk by again and she would clap her hands and make a little comment. Diana liked her sex. Diana said she married for sex and it was the right decision. Someone rightfully said when I talking to him on the phone, he said “Are you sure you want to say that? It sounds like you’re bragging.” I said, ‘In one sense it does but in another sense you can read it very differently.” And the sense in which I would like you to read it is that Diana was tolerant, she was liberal, she had an outgoing personality, she had the body to enjoy things in life such as playing sports or sex and the credit for her enjoyment lies with her not me. I hope you will see it that way. That is she was very lucky, the fact that she grew with an attitude that allowed her to deal with people from different nationalities to see life with the sexual part and the non-sexual part and that’s the point I want to make here, not me but her, just like with the pictures. You will notice that there are no pictures of sex up here. I was very clear that I was going to avoid that. I actually, jokingly, one time regarding sex, asked her if she was interested in quantity or quality. She gave me an answer I didn’t expect. She said, “Quantity.”

Diana learned something clearly, she said it was her Polish background but I think it was something she learned from her sisters and her parents. She was a very hard worker. And she couldn’t stop working. For jobs she worked at many different ones. And she had a lot of good work habits. Things that she had learned for example from seeing her sisters work hard to save money to get their families going. And she had those attitudes. She worked for Costco, Zellers, Supervalu, Westwood Pharmacy, Transcona pharmacy and many other places and I liked her because she was concerned for the health of her patients or her clients. She was very conscientious in that regard and she did it for many motivations as we all do things for many motivations. She did it because she had that higher concern for people’s health, she also did it because she wanted to protect her reputation and I think that if she had lost her job because she had done something stupid she would have felt she had failed me and our success in life. So she had many motivations. She was so conscientious that there were days when the pharmacy closed at 9:30 pm, she didn’t get home until 12:30 am, she didn’t take her uniform off she sat at the kitchen table with a pharmacy book and she would be reading through that pharmacy book to check what the doctors had prescribed for people. I liked her for her honesty, when you have joint accounts with someone honesty in your spouse is absolutely essential or you are going to suffer. She was honest with other people’s things, with the stores she worked at, with the stores she bought at. I could sleep at night because when her income taxes came back we weren’t going to get a letter from the tax bureau saying there was a problem.

A multitasker that shook me to the core, she could work for 4 hours doing finances at the same time that she was running up and down the stairs putting stuff in the laundry while at the same time she had several calls out to doctors or trades people. One of the good things about our travel and we did that a lot was that was the time that she relaxed; she couldn’t do housework so she really relaxed. She retired earlier than I did, she retired five years earlier in 2002 because her job was much more stressful than mine and I’m glad she took that chance. She worked so hard she said “I’m no longer bringing money into this relationship I feel like I’m letting you down unless I’m cooking meals and keeping this house clean and stuff like that.” I never was able to convince her to relax at home the way I thought she should but when she travelled she really did and she had a good time.

She became the financial expert and took over our accounts in the 1990s and the reason she did was I was going on these research leaves trying to collect data around the United States. I had a grant in lieu of salary which meant if I spent money on legitimate expenses for research I wouldn’t have to pay taxes on that money so we would have a little extra money to spend. And our accountant turned around to her and said okay because she took over all the non-academic things that were involved so I could get 35-40 hours of work in a week and she would run all the things like hotel reservations. So he taught her how to do this she set up this big log book covering all of the expenses we encountered and so on. Then she made the most obvious generalization, if this worked this well for my research leaves then it would work well for our personal life and so she spread that book out into an account book of about 40 pages that covers all of our investments and utilities and of course in the last 6 months when she knew she was diagnosed she did a whole bunch of things to teach me what I was going to have to look after because it was so detailed I didn’t realize it.

Diana loved cooking, she loved plants; she said if she ever had another career it would be as a botanist. Travel was important to her, her friends were important, she liked their stories, she really enjoyed what they were able to tell us about a life we might never see She sang in a choir in her teens, they made a record, she occasionally sang around the house and it was a talent she wished she’d fostered to see how far she could go with it. She taught me many, many things. There is no doubt that after 6 years of dating her and 45 years of marriage she taught me many, many things. I hope I taught her a lot too. To give an example, she taught me you don’t have to sit at a slot machine to enjoy gambling all you have to do is sit beside somebody and watch them spent their money. Because when they win you get excited and when they lose you feel bad for them. So we would gamble at the slot machines, generally because it didn’t require too many brains to do it. I would play 4 or 5 dollars maybe have a win or two. I would turn it over to her. She would sit and I would watch her and I would get the enjoyment of her wins and losses, and also the free beer. There are so many ways that I got things out of her that I didn’t realize, in the same way that she learned from her parents and her sisters, and she didn’t realize it that her good habits came from watching others do things and succeed.

I’m going to tell you about just one aspect of her experiences and I’m going to name the many cities that she got to see because even though you and I are sad that she isn’t around, she only had 68 years she had the advantages that many people in the world don’t have. She got to live in Canada, she got the opportunity to make progress and was able to do it, she had a big house, she had warm clothing, and she had so many things other people don’t get around the world. And I feel sorry for those individuals and Diana did too. She got to see life and in many of these cities we spent 3 days, 2 weeks, sometimes 3 months. So she got to see London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris many times, Perpignan (a large city just north of Spain), Cahors (where she gave me a leg rub because I had leg cramps from a 3 ½ tennis match and we got to watch Bastille Day when the French soldiers marched through the town), Orleans Madrid, Seville where we got robbed twice, Granada, Toledo, Valencia, Lloret de Mar and Benidorm two small places where we met many British people who were vacationing in Spain, Barcelona, Alicante, San Sebastian where the Basques set off a bomb across the street from our hotel apparently because they were annoyed by the French consulate there, Estoril, Lisbon, Rome, Florence, Venice, Zurich and many other cities you’d recognize if I was to tell you. We even got to see 3 or 4 places in Mexico City, Merida, Mazatlan and the only reason we didn’t visit more was that we spent 9 days with Montezuma’s revenge on our last trip and we just decided we were not going to take a chance on that any more.

We travelled a lot in the United States and in each and every one of these cities she got us into a good hotel, saved us money, that came back to be savings. Kansas city, Oklahoma city, Wichita, Dallas, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, New Orleans, Tallahassee , Tampa, Saint Petersburg, San Francisco, Albuquerque, Santa Fe a city I would recommend to anyone a wonderful place. Many times we visited Las Vegas, Honolulu; we have friends there, wonderful memories of those places. I think many of the pictures here are part of that. One of the things that I didn’t realize she had done when she went along with me, because she would quit her job and whether it was a six month research leave or a year research leave she would then have to come back and find another job. And in writing this up I suddenly realized that she had taken a great risk by doing that, she had literally cut down her life time earnings, lost on her CPP if she was to take that, and she had lost some amount to contribute to a self-directed RRSP, in other words if she divorced she was putting herself in a poor situation. She had given up a lot and taken a risk, fortunately it didn’t happen to her. She contributed so much to this marriage I would have had no problem if we had gotten a divorce of giving her 50% the problem with divorces is that they are usually acrimonious and you don’t want to give something to somebody that they might rightfully deserve. Fortunately that never happened and I certainly thought we had a good marriage.

She liked her food hot, her bananas firm, and her fridge spotless. She wanted to be independent. She didn’t want to rely on me until she had tried to solve a problem. There is a sad example of that the very day she died, so she was willing to take people’s advice she would phone people and talk to them and find out what she should be doing but she wanted to accomplish it on her own. And the sad story is she is lying in bed the day she was to die which was April 10th and she knew that she was supposed to keep a mask on her face so that she didn’t get an infection because her immune system had been compromised. So, I tried to hold her head up tie the thing at the back and I couldn’t get it done up but she wanted it on and she’s very weak and she’s shaking and her connection to consciousness is pretty low. She’s got that mask in her hand and she’s trying to put it on her face, she tried for 5 to 10 minutes and I couldn’t look at her.

I liked Diana because she was tolerant, I’m sure she had her prejudices as I have my prejudices I liked her because for many, many people whether they were gay, lesbian or from different culture she didn’t care. We went to a gay parade in Las Vegas and she only had two criticisms of it. It was 40 degrees centigrade at 9 pm at night we’d been standing for an hour and a half and the parade was poorly organized. It was my first chance to see “Dykes on Bikes,” an interesting group of people. She pointed out the funny costumes people wore but it was a big group, a kind of party atmosphere and that’s what you’re going to see with a big group of people.

She liked change, she tolerated my bagpipe music, she loved different foods. I could eat the same food four or five days in a row, but not her, and I ate better because of it. Her taste in movies was comedies, action films and mysteries; her voting behaviour was very cyclic, liberal, conservative, liberal conservative, liberal, conservative, after five years she was ticked off with the government in power. She was raised a catholic and I think she always identified as a catholic. She had very high expectation of people who came to her house or people she went to for service, whether it was a doctor, a semi-professional or a tradesperson it didn’t make any difference. She wanted the foursome; she wanted good service, high quality of work, no mess at the end, and a good price.

She was quite willing to save money so we clipped coupons, we asked for discounts at hotels; she used loyalty cards and saved us 1000s and 1000s of dollars along the way. I point out this all she had to do was walk in and be told the room was 130 and she would knock them down to 100, get a long term rate for 10 days and we would save 300 dollars which would be in our bank account when we came home and she started working again. Although in our last 10 or 20 years she hated the Winnipeg cold weather she used to be an avid downhill and cross-country skier.

One of the things that bothered me was that she was a perfectionist in an imperfect world and she was very hard on herself. So she would make many decisions about financial issues and she would tell me about them. Sometimes they didn’t work out correctly. Unfortunately what she would say was, “How could I be so stupid? Why didn’t I see that coming? I’m so dumb.” And no matter how hard I tried to convince her otherwise she never really changed that attitude. She was very hard on herself if she made a choice under uncertainty and it didn’t work out.

Diana was glad to be born in Canada with its advantages. She was happy with all the things her parents tried to help her with, she was thankful for all the things she learned from her sisters and brothers-in-law. She said she was thankful she married me and when I look back on it I realize that what Diana got was what my parents taught me. If she should have thanked anyone she should have thanked my parents for teaching me ways of getting along with people that I would not have picked out otherwise.

So to end this I have a few things that I want to say. I have very much become Diana. It started when we were dating and it picked up speed when we got married. She changed me in many ways and now that she is gone I’ve taken over her duties and I do most of them in the way she did them I wanted to tell her sisters that if they ever want to talk to Diana give me a call and I’ll be Diana for 20 minutes or an hour . I don’t deserve any sympathy because I had Diana for 51 years and they were really good years. Here’s what I lost and don’t think about my loss but think about as something she would have brought to any relation, to anyone she married. So I lost a caregiver, a guardian, a treasure holder of my memories, a bed warmer, a joker, an entertainer, a business consultant, a lover, and most importantly an alternative view of life. We would walk down the street together and I would be pumping along trying to get the exercise and she would say “Look at that door, look at that plant, look at that window, look at that grass look at that damn rabbit, “ for example. I would turn and I would look and lo and behold it was an interesting object that I had missed.

I have to tell you that life doesn’t interest me anymore. My interests in things have dropped 75-85%, people tell me I will get it back and I’ve seen it in others and I will. To my mind everything that interested me is trivial. I have had lots of help from everybody. I hope you realize that I can’t thank you enough for all the support. I want to make one small point. There was a nice, interesting phrase that came out of the Victoria Hospital information that they gave me when I was there and they were trying to help me both with practical information and emotional information. At the bottom of a page of information was the phrase, “Grief is the price you pay for love.”

I would like you to attend the reception. I want you to go there have a laugh, talk about anything you think is funny because I want to see you leave happy. I hope you will visit the “Thomson In the Park” website to read about Diana’s obituary. I want to invite John Friesen back to say the Lord’s Prayer.

Thank you for the time, thank you for all the beautiful memories you gave Diana by your stories and your help. Thank you.

* * * * * * * * * *

RITA DIANA FOREST

Rita, or Diana as she was more commonly called, was diagnosed with liver and pancreatic cancer on December 18, 2012 and died April 10, 2013. She survived her first two-week cycle of strong chemotherapy but in her second cycle something changed. She became weaker and could no longer eat enough to sustain herself; as a result she was admitted to the Victoria General Hospital on Monday April 8, 2013. Despite wonderful attention from the doctors, nurses, and staff at Victoria Hospital she continued to decline until 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday, April 10, when her breath was taken away from her. Sadly only an hour earlier she had gently encouraged her husband, James Forest, to go home to get some rest so he could look after her the next day. After receiving a call from the doctor, Jim and a friend rushed back to the hospital to visit Diana for a few moments. Today, as he writes these words his chest is quivering with sadness, and tears are falling on his hands. His only solace is that her suffering was short and that, as the doctor stated, she died peacefully.

Besides her husband James, or Jim, Diana is survived by her three sisters, Edna Hunchak and husband Bill, Gladys Webster and Jim (Al Berube deceased), and Isabel Smith and Peter (deceased). As well there are numerous nieces and nephews who were able to enjoy her company.

Diana was born on May 10, 1944 to Sophie and Tom Tomaszeski (both deceased) in Edmonton, Alberta. She spent all of her early years in Calmar, Alberta until she went to work in Edmonton as a secretary; here she quickly learned that her job did not offer her the opportunities she wanted so with the advice and encouragement of her brothers-in-law, her sisters, and the Dean of the Faculty of Pharmacy, she decided to improve her high school grades so as to enter pharmacy.

In late 1962 she was introduced to her future husband by, of all people, her future father-in-law, Joseph Forest. Jim was already attending the University of Alberta in psychology and Diana joined him in September of 1963 in the Faculty of Pharmacy. Her excellent memory and work habits helped her through many tough courses leading to her graduation with a B.Sc. in Pharmacy, the same year Jim graduated with a B.A. in Psychology. During those years they had their spats and on several occasions broke up but Diana’s good looks and intelligence, plus her excellent egg salad sandwiches got them back together. With the lack of insight that goes with being a man, Jim went off to Seattle Washington to graduate school not realizing that Diana had hoped for a wedding ring and an invitation to go along with him.

Their long distance relationship lasted the two years he was gone and when he came back he had the money to buy her a ring, leading to their marriage in August of 1968. Prior to their wedding Diana made a suggestion that changed their lives forever. She proposed that they go to Europe for their honeymoon which they did and which led to a life-long passion for travel.

After their marriage on August 16, 1968 and the honeymoon, Diana became the primary breadwinner for three years as Jim earned his Ph.D. in Psychology. In 1971 he obtained a position in Winnipeg at the University of Manitoba Psychology Department, just before the September start of the academic year. Diana was left in Edmonton to pack up their apartment after which she came to Manitoba.

For four years they lived in apartments until they could afford to buy half of a small side-by-side house which became their home for 11 years. Diana showed her stamina and determination by taking whatever pharmacy jobs she could obtain including one that required her to travel from Winnipeg to Portage La Prairie and back each day by bus, an 80 mile trip. In 1977 they lived for a year in Europe on the sum of $35.00 a day. She enjoyed the excitement of European life, the bars, cafes, clubs and even some of the seedier inns that they had to live in, where, for example, the heat was turned off completely in their hotel in Lourdes, France , and the showers and sinks in the Spanish hotel in Sitges could deliver only untreated salty sea water for washing.

After nine trips to Europe, she and Jim switched to winter vacations in Mexico for three years however a nine day bout of Montezuma’s revenge in Mexico City and Merida caused them to drop Mexico as a travel destination. The island of Oahu became their favourite December destination for 32 years.

Diana sacrificed part of her career and future pension by going with Jim on each of his research leaves throughout the U.S., and in doing so became a highly competent but amateur accountant, travel agent, and activity organizer. They visited numerous U.S. cities and had fond memories of San Antonio, Austin, Albuquerque, San Francisco, St. Petersburg, Las Vegas and many other places.

In 1986 they moved into a newly build house in Lindenwoods that became her pride and joy. She recognized the need for maintenance and repair in a way that Jim could not; she could shovel snow for an hour, prune trees and shrubbery for six hours, and paint garage floors five times over five years in a war she eventually lost to the power of weather erosion. Upon returning home from a short or long trip Diana would become quite anxious about her house but when she rounded the corner of the street to see her home still standing a smile would appear on her face.

She worked as a full time pharmacist whenever she and Jim weren’t travelling and by treating their combined salary as the profits of a small business they managed to provide for their retirement, travel extensively, and enjoy the Winnipeg nightlife. Diana’s jobs were highly stressful so it was agreed that she should retire first which she did in 2002. She retired from pharmacy without incident because she was honest, competent, and unwilling to compromise the health of her patient’s. Indeed she was let go from a pharmacy position because she refused to speed up the rate at which she filled prescriptions. She nearly died when an armed man shot a bullet that passed by her left ear as he robbed the pharmacy. A manager with a national retail chain learned a hard lesson because he failed to heed Diana’s advice that lawyers cannot manipulate pharmaceutical laws. She did fail to convince one drugstore owner that it was dangerous to smoke in a storage room full of canisters containing pure oxygen. There never was an explosion but Diana had many tense moments when the owner disappeared for a smoke. When asked if she would ever go back to work as a pharmacist Diana said she would rather wash floors for a living although her love of plants made her think that a career in botany was a possibility

After Jim retired in 2007, he and she made many trips to Las Vegas, Minneapolis and Honolulu. They were packing for Hawaii the very day she received news of her cancer diagnosis.

Throughout her life Diana came to love a broad range of music including hard rock, jazz, celtic, rap, folk, country, and tejano. She was a physically active woman too; she played tennis, squash, and racquetball, took part in strenuous exercise classes, jogged, and loved to dance. Diana knew how to play chess, Go, cribbage, backgammon, and a variety of card games. She was a news junkie, a lover of comedy shows, and much better at handling horror movies than her husband. She wanted her food delivered to her table hot and cooked to her specifications, otherwise the chef would hear about it. Friends said she had a great laugh when she was teased. Her husband loved the way she talked with him on their many coffee outings. She distinctly disliked Canada geese that messed up walking paths, rabbits that insisted on living under her deck, and dogs along with their owners who thought that her front lawn was their special potty. As for internet banking well that was a sure-fire way to have scammers steal all of your saving.

She had her bad habits of course; often she would interrupt people as they talked. Sometimes she overestimated her ability to know what people were thinking or likely to do. She could be grumpy too especially when people didn’t do what she thought was appropriate in a situation, and people got her advice whether they asked for it or not.

Jim often wondered if or why Diana loved him but she would quell his concerns frequently by sitting or lying beside him and say, “I love you so much; I bet you didn’t expect to be kissed on all 2000 body parts.” So maybe Jim wasn’t the incompetent husband he often felt he was.

“Lots of hugs and kisses Diana, I love you too.” Jim.

A Memorial Service to celebrate Diana’s life was held at 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, April 20, 2013 at Thomson “In the Park” Funeral Home, 1291 McGillivray Blvd. In lieu of flowers please donate to the charity of your choice.