Elizabeth Eileen Mears

April 3, 1924 - February 20, 2018

"I prefer living in colour."

David Hockney

Hers was a colourful life rooted in long marriage and family. Resolute, sympathetic,

and supportive, Eileen Mears was an adventurer with an eye for beauty and a love for

avant-garde art.

The bedrock of her family, Eileen is survived by her husband of 63 years, Denison

Mears, her son John (Helene) and daughter Bronwen (Stephen Antle). "Amma" will

also be missed by her grandchildren Denison and Chantal Mears, and Gareth and Kai

Antle, as well as her nieces and nephew in Ontario with whom she shared a close bond:

Sondra, Nancy, and Ted, the children of her sister, Velma McGregor.

Eileen was born into a farming family in Ontario and grew up in Sunderland, a small

town north of Toronto. Education was her ticket out of small town life, and she excelled

in her chosen course of study, graduating in 1945 with honours from the University of

Toronto in physiotherapy.

For the next decade, she worked and travelled, soaking in the wonders of the world at

mid-century: she flew to Hawaii in 1948 at the dawn of airliner travel; toured France,

Italy, and Russian-occupied Vienna in 1951, her travels guided by curiosity and an

interest in seeing the Great Masters she had read so much about. In these years, she

practiced in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, St. John, New Brunswick, London,

England, and finally Boston. Her work in Boston, at the height of polio outbreaks before

the Salk vaccine, was hard but rewarding. Her therapy techniques for polio victims who

had suffered serious physical disabilities were such that she was one of the few

selected to show Harvard Medical School doctors what could be done, and how it

should be done.

It was in Boston on a blind date in 1954 that she met the young engineer "Den," an

Englishman at Harvard working on his MBA. The date was a success: they married in

England the following year. Eileen remained there as Den travelled to Egypt to work on

preliminary plans for the Aswan High Dam, establishing a pattern that would continue

until his retirement as he "gallivanted around the under-developed world" and she took

care of their life on the home front. When Western support for the Aswan project

ended, Den was out of a job, and they moved to Ontario.

After her marriage, Eileen’s physiotherapy career was confined to work on family

members: John was born in Ontario in 1956, and Bronwen in Vancouver in 1958, and

she met family disasters with aplomb, including ski accidents and Bronwen’s serious

riding accident at 13. Eileen masterminded the family moves: the ski cabin at the new

Whistler in 1968, to Edmonton in 1976, and back to the coast in 1992 after initiating and

directing the construction of a waterfront home and wild garden on Bowen Island that

was her pride and joy and anchor for the family for 25 years.

Eileen’s deep interest in contemporary visual art led her in the 1960s to a long

involvement with the Vancouver Art Gallery as a docent. She collected art, primarily

prints, by iconic artists of her era.

Her adventurous spirit didn’t waver in her struggle with arthritis and declining health in

her final years. Eileen is irreplaceable. She will be dearly missed.

No service by request. Donations in memory of Eileen can be made to the Arthritis

Society of British Columbia.