Birgitt Traute Beesley

Birgitt Traute Popper Beesley died peacefully in the early morning of Wednesday July 13, 2022 on her 92nd birthday at her Dundas Ontario home, accompanied by her family.

To be in Birgitt’s presence was to feel loved. She loved her entire family fiercely and unconditionally. She loved music, chocolate, crosswords, reading. She was independent and a quiet force of nature, an intellect who loved to talk about the world and what it means to be human. Her passing was one that she chose herself. Her quiet urging was to above all be kind to one another and express our love for each other continually. Birgitt was intensely generous and considerate in her caring for others. She never hesitated to tell each of us how much she loved and appreciated us. Birgitt created her own happiness by helping other people to be happy. She taught us all through her words and actions the importance of “seizing the day” and “cultivating your garden”. The ripples Birgitt created in the world will be felt for generations.

Birgitt was born to Theo and Henriette Popper in Hamburg on July 13, 1930. She was the youngest sister of Abbey, John and Maria. Amidst her urbane, closely knit German family her childhood was filled with wide and playful exploration that included nature, the arts and literature, and experimental culture.

Birgitt and Maria were separated from their family by World War II. They lived with British families, and their relocation was supported by the Kindertransport program. Separated from her parents and brothers from the age of 8–14, Birgitt was treated in widely differing ways while living with guardians, learned a new language that displaced her mother tongue, and attended multiple schools. It is a monument to her strength of character and childhood upbringing that she overcame those years, showing so few outward signs of the turmoil she had lived through.

Members of the dispersed family reunited in London after the war. After a period of challenges around the end of the war, Birgitt entered Farringtons School in Chislehurst, where she became a prefect and gained confidence. She started to work as a volunteer at a primary school and as a paid assistant at a nursery school, and then in 1948 found an au pair position in Switzerland, where she was immersed in French and Italian languages. Birgitt then attended Stockwell Teachers’ College in the Bromley area in 1949–50, aiming to focus on social work with an emphasis on working with troubled adolescents. She followed her studies with her first professional teaching job at Orpington Junior School, London.

Birgitt met Pierre Michel (Mike) Beesley in 1950. They quickly bonded. Unbridled awareness, curiosity, sensitivity and perspective supported by their experience of widely mixed European cultures underpinned Birgitt and Mike’s extraordinary connection. Their meeting occurred just after Mike had committed to work in Ceylon. They lived through the year of separation caused by that commitment, then reunited and married in Colombo, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1952.

Over the next decades, Birgitt led her thriving family in loving collaboration with Mike. She gave prodigious attention and extraordinarily selfless support to countless details in her children’s lives, the lives of her extended family, and her wide and evolving community.

Their first child Michele was born in 1954 in Dickoya, Ceylon. They returned to Britain later that year and lived in Westcliff-on-Sea, where their second child Philip was born in 1956, and then in Newcastle, where their third child Andrew was born at home in 1958. Mike and Birgitt emigrated with their growing family to Canada by steamship in 1959, hosted at first by Birgitt’s brother Abbey, his wife Joyce and their daughter Nicole. They settled in Burlington, Ontario, where Paul was born in 1961, and then moved to Ancaster, in a new suburban development surrounded by agriculture and nature. Michael was born there in 1965.

Within the growing communities, social reform culture, and evolving contemporary arts of Ancaster and Hamilton, Birgitt became a community leader. She became Director of the Ancaster Social Services Council, co-founded the Ancaster Information Centre and Youth Employment Service, co-organized a choir associated with her Unitarian church, and acted as a counselor at Soma, a youth drop-in centre.

Birgitt’s family and community life took a new turn in 1970, when Procter & Gamble asked the family to move to its head office in Cincinnati. Within the extended city that housed her new home, the spectres of the Vietnam war and American politics appeared alongside beautiful music and art. When war-draft age crept close to the children, Birgitt and Mike relocated again back to Canada, to a farmhouse and barn on the banks of the Grand River in Caledonia. Their years at Walden Farm included daily tending of horses, goats, sheep and chickens; the seasonal rounds of an orchard and vegetable garden; annual maple syrup rendering; and a constantly changing backdrop of nature. Birgitt’s community work took new forms that included the Chamber of Commerce welcoming committee and library aide roles.

In 1979, she and Mike moved again, to a home on Sulphur Springs Road surrounded by the woodlands and fields of the Dundas Valley Conservation Area. In the following 6 years, Birgitt co-founded the Pediatric Out-Patient Surgery program — one of McMaster's now-famed client-based participatory healthcare programs — and worked in palliative care and other volunteer roles.

Upon Mike Beesley's retirement from his Procter & Gamble career in 1986, Birgitt retired from her own community circles, withdrawing from the McMaster University volunteer program. She and Mike turned to a new pattern of international travels, interspersed with periods of time spent at their Dundas home and long stays in Florida. With great prescience, Birgitt and Mike acquired two new homes in 1994: a small flat in Ashfield Place, Chislehurst, Kent, near Birgitt's sister Maria and her English family, and a condominium on the forested grounds of St. Joseph's Estates in Dundas. They moved from Sulphur Springs in 1996 and began a new pattern of living alternately in Britain and Canada.

In late 1998, Mike Beesley was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He passed away in early 2000 at home, with Birgitt at his side.

In the years that followed, Birgitt focused her time within Dundas, interspersed with a number of trips to England. She finally closed her beloved Ashfield flat in 2007. In the past two decades, she became legendary as one of the “mothers” of the St. Joseph’s Estates community. Her life became interwoven with the lives of dozens of residents within and beyond, giving support and easing in final periods of life. In recent months, Birgitt’s focus was increasingly concentrated within her home and on the garden it overlooked.

Birgitt is survived by her beloved sister Maria, 5 children and their spouses — Michele & Trevor (Edith, Alana, Lauren), Philip & Anne (Robin, Alex, Tommy, Olivia), Andrew & Gillian (Marcus), Paul & Susan (Laura, Emma), and Michael & Sherri (Kevin, Samantha); god-daughters Lynda, Nicole and Pamela; 10 great-grandchildren (Callie, Mackenzie, Brodie, Violet, Rory, Theo, Rowan, Adrian, Wren, Emre); and a widely extended British, German, Australian and American family. In the depths of friendship she fostered, many — Wenna, Caroline & Bill, Katie, Alan, Elizabeth, Vicky, Marie, Marilyn, Jo, Shirley, Adrienne, Ingrid, Anna, Katherine, Barbara, Pam S, Anita, Margaret & Don, John & June, Pam & Malcolm, Mabel, Monica & Alan, and so many more — also became integral parts of her extended family.

In her final weeks, Birgitt was at peace with letting go. As she did almost always throughout her rich, full life, she projected joyful empathy. Her last words were: love, love, love.”