February 28, 1914 - June 22, 2014
On behalf of our families, I would like to thank you all very much for coming today. We really appreciate your being here.
I’m Diane, Stella’s youngest daughter, and it is my honour to speak today for the family and tell “Stella’s Story…A Life Well Lived”.
Our Mom & Gram…she was a sweet and lovely little lady and her life was a long and healthy life, a life well-lived for 100 years. Who could ask for more. When asked what her secret was to a long and healthy life, she would say, “Just keep moving and take Vitamin C.” It should be mentioned, that Mom also had a pacemaker for the last 7 years due to a low heart rate.
Just a little background on Stella’s life. She was born in Meacham, Sask., the 4th of 8 children to John and Anna Yakiwchuk. Her given name then was Stephania which she always liked but later changed it to a more anglicised version, Stella. Her good looking brothers were Mike, Walter and Andrew and her pretty sisters were Jane (Evangeline), Olga, Gurty and Mary.
In 1999, I asked our Mother some questions about her past to fill in a book called “Grandmother Remembers” and here were some of her thoughts about her childhood.
It sounds like her family was a loving family. She said her Dad was a fair man and never spanked them but “when he had to speak to us, he meant business”. He was a slim man who read to them from a storybook on winter nights, 2 or 3 chapters each night and then it was “off to bed!” You knew not to ask for more.
Her mother in contrast was 4’ 10” and more rounded and Mom said she was always busy around the house doing many things. And her mother loved to talk. Now our Mom was quieter, but her Mother reminds us of our Aunt Gurty, her close sister, who was very talkative and we loved how she could talk and laugh at the same time.
“We kids had our chores to do,” she said. “Mine were milking the cows, helping to make lunches and getting things ready for school. Our older brother, Mike, rode our horse and buggy to school 3 miles away and we all had our homework to do at the kitchen table.”
I like this story she told…if her Mother or the sisters every got annoyed, Mike would pick them up and swing them and dance them around until “we got out of our snits”. She said that on Sundays, the family went to the Ukrainian hall after church where all the families met to practise singing, dancing and putting on plays.
For her schooling, she first went to school in Meacham where she was born, in a Ukrainian community. The school was called Syzinski after a Ukrainian poet and she then went onto Norwood School in Star City where her family moved into a more Anglican community. Here, in Norwood, I remember her saying her Dad built an ice rink for the school in the winter because their property adjoined the school. Mom attended a Norwood school reunion in 1980 and reconnected with many old school pals.
I have her autograph book from many years ago, 1933-36 when she was 19-22 years old. She was artistic and some of the autographed pages are enhanced by her lovely paintings. Her friends in her book called her Stephania, Steffie and Steve. Some of the boys wrote funny things. Nowadays, the kids have annuals at school to sign.
In school, Mom said that she enjoyed biology, literature, music, art and dancing. She played the mandolin as an instrument. She said she didn’t care for Math or French. For fun, Stephania loved to skate, go on school picnics and to dances and she even played basketball. But her good stories were about her baseball team, the Campbellville Team. She said they wore white shirts and navy blue bloomers and she played 3rd base. I love her story of how she would catch fly balls…”That was my specialty she would say…I would run backwards and then turn and catch the fly ball every time.” And she would demonstrate this.
Mom passed into Grade 11 and would have loved to gone on to study to be a nurse or a hairdresser but there was no extra money to send her, so she went to work on the Hill family’s farm and later, Mrs. Rogers’ Travellers Inn.
Anyway, all that dancing got her meeting our Dad, Harry Natyshak, from the nearby town of Brooksby near Melfort. They started dating around the ages of 17 and 18 and did so off and on for 5-6 years and were married in 1938. They were the younger sister and younger brother of Aunt Jane and Uncle George who introduced them and were their chaperones or else her brother Mike had to drive the girls to dances, etc. I asked her what she saw in our Dad. She said, “He was fun, tall, nice-looking and a good dancer.” (Those prairie boys sure could dance.) That dancing theme runs through this story. Dad, she said was a bit of a character but a hard-worker. At first he had his own business wood-cutting and grain-chopping and spent a year as a lumberjack before marrying.
Three years after marrying, along came their first-born, Sylvia, born in Melfort, Sask. in 1940. They all moved to Aggasiz, B.C. in 1941 when Sylvia was 2 months old. Harry, our Dad, worked for the C.P. and C.N. Railways fixing tracks and then when living in Vancouver in 1942, he went across the bridge and worked at Burrard Dry Dock in North Vancouver. They were building Liberty ships for the war at that time and Dad ended his career as the rigging foreman. The General Manager at that time, David Wallace, of the well-known Wallace family of shipbuilders called recently to relive some stories of our father who he said was a very good friend, a very loyal, honest and trustworthy man and the person you would go to if you needed a problem solved or a job well done. Thank you for sharing your stories, Mr. Wallace.
Their second born, Diane Marilyn, or Flossie as Dad called me, came along in 1944, born at Vancouver General Hospital.
In 1950, Dad and Uncle John Grypiuk built the family home at Georgia and Windermere fairly close to the PNE where Mom and Dad would live for 37 years until Dad passed away in 1986 (April 7, Expo year).
Mom was as meticulous about the inside of her home as Dad was about the outside. (When I catch myself picking up leaves on our lawn and garden beds in the morning while out with my coffee cup, I think, “Oh, oh, I’m getting fussy just like Dad.”) We could tell many funny stories about Dad and his property. One special thing he did, however, was to buy the lot next door and plant it up with veggies from the front curb all the way to the back lane from one side to the other. No flowers, not like me, just veggies. (Maybe there were sunflowers but I can’t remember.) Sylvia and I remember selling a small bucket of new potatoes to the neighbours that requested them for 10 cents a pail, what a deal, some of them being almost a foot long. (I also used to get 5 cents a cottage cheese container for picking any errant dandelions that dared to sprout up in Dad’s lawn…those were the days before herbicides.) They had a root cellar and Mom did a lot of food canning.
Stella was always good at sewing and made many of our clothes and her lovely dresses over the years and later took up millinery. The first hats were rather funny-looking inverted flower pot shapes but progressed to some lovely styles…in fact, she made my going away hat for my wedding as well as hers and they were pretty nice.
While were in school, Mom did lunches with the Begbie Elementary School parent group and started to bowl 5 pin bowling with the Begbie School Bowling League.
This hobby lasted for 50 years between the Grandview and Hastings Alleys. Her bowling came to a stop not because of her age or health but because the roof burned at the Hastings Alley and that was the end of that building and the end of her bowling career. We as a family will hold a bowlathon in her memory within the next year or so and as prizes, everyone gets one of her trophies….and there are lots of them.
Mom’s other activities included line-dancing (I think that kept her mentally & physically sharp for a long time); she did ceramics and lunches at Confederation Centre; and played crib at Ingleton Place with all her special Ingleton friends that we called her Angel Network. Later they went pitch and putting and played pool downstairs and she even had her own pool cue. At Mom’s 100th birthday, some old friends commented on how she always looked so nice and well groomed and kept her nice slim shape over all those years. And she did.
Also, Mom and Dad were members of Holy Trinity Ukrainian Orthodox Church for many years and Mom belonged to the Ukrainian Women’s Assoc. The members, her friends, got together regularly and made cabbage rolls and pyrogies and Easter bread for the many church functions. In his speech at her 100th birthday her grandson, Cam, said that “they hand rolled over 32 million cabbage rolls and that was just last week.” We, as a family, were the lucky recipients of many wonderful dinners of traditional Ukrainian dishes, earlier on at Christmas with Aunt Kay and Uncle Charlie and Aunt Gurty and Uncle John and our cousins Marian, Rosanne, Ed and Evelyn and later with our own families.
Yesterday evening, Father Roman Tsaplan, the Reverend of Mother’s church, officiated a Blessing and Passing On service for Stephania (Stella) and this was special and attended by some church and choir members that knew Mom well and we thank them for that. They sang like angels.
Speaking earlier of family, Mom would say that her family was so very important to her. She loved us all unconditionally…Sylvia and Clint, Fred and I and her 4 wonderful grandchildren….Sandy with Dean, Kevin, Cameron with Michelle and Brennan with Shannon. She loved you kids so much, she really did. She just beamed when she walked on the arm of one of her grandsons when we went out to dinner. She let everyone know that her handsome grandson was her “date”. When we’d leave her apartment, she was hopeful that someone would be on the elevator, in the lobby or at the restaurant so that she could introduce her date. (One of the grandsons may elaborate on this.) And Sandy, we know how special you two were to each other.
Then along came the great-grandchildren…5 of them: Taylor Cristofoli, 18, who just graduated this year and will be going on to the University of the Okanagan; Chelsea Cristofoli, 13, and another accomplished ringette and soccer player; tall and handsome Troy Brown,16, and loving Kylee Brown, 14; and our nice grandson, Cole Christiansen who is 19 and is in 2nd year Business at UBC. Mom loved to hear about all of their accomplishments and I think what is so nice about these kids is that they really are nice kids and she knew that. “Love you, miss you, Gram!” they would say. It would have been nice for her also to have seen Brennan and Shannon’s little baby girl who will be born in September but she was able to pass on her furry bunny recently to them and wish them her best.
Mom actually wrote some thoughts about when this final time would come…and she had printed… “I lived a healthy life and was independent. I lived until my 90’s and passed away in my apartment”. That was close, Mom. You were certainly independent…all the merchants and the girls at the bank in Burnaby Heights knew you well as you walked and bussed through your community all the time. They all really liked and admired you. “BUT…did you take your walker as you were supposed to in later years after a few falls?”….”No, I didn’t really need it,” she would say, (only for older people). We were always amazed as she “bounced back” in a few weeks after about 4 or 5 hospital visits. We nicknamed her “the energizer bunny”. When she had her stroke last year, she eventually went to Carlton Gardens Care Home in Burnaby where the caring staff loved “Stella”. It was there that she had one of her 100th birthday celebrations, in a wheelchair and still looking good. She received her certificate from the Queen and other gov’t. representatives and was quite overwhelmed by all the attention and was so happy to reunite with old relatives and friends.
Mom was healthy otherwise. Despite her limited hearing and eyesight, she was mentally there and you could have a nice visit with her. Thanks to all those that had that opportunity to visit her. We’d especially like to thank our cousins, Marian and Rosanne who went up regularly to see her and Marian even brought her little dog, Siri the Friday before Mom passed on. Also, our good friends Helena and Al took the time to take their 4 yr. old grandson, Oscar, up to visit Stella and they really had a sweet connection.
What was Mom’s favourite outing and favourite food? Yes, fish and chips…for someone who couldn’t see that well, she’d eat up all her fish and dip each and every French fry in ketchup and finish the whole thing. We always said for such a little person, she had such a good appetite. When you next eat fish and chips you might remember this story and smile.
We’ll remember many stories and lovely times with you Mom and Gram. You loved us all unconditionally, never complained to us and we will miss you dearly but you really will always be a part of us. Many things that happen, like a butterfly stopping to rest in front of us while Sylvia and I were making plans for today and noticing a silver star-shaped helium balloon that had come from somewhere and got caught up in my hydrangea bush (Stella’s star??) will remind us that you are still with us, just in a different way. Now, you will be with the Lord in the comforts of Heaven and you can continue your visits with Aunt Gurty and Aunt Kay and your dear friends and relatives that have gone on before you and…..you can dance again with Dad.
Love you forever and always………..
(submitted by her daughter, Diane)
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