Lilly was born in Edmonton, Alberta, on February 15, 1935 to Ukrainian parents Nicholas and Sophie. Nicholas was born in 1897, and arrived in NY from Krakow, Poland in 1911 at the age of 14. Sophie was born in Alvena, Saskatchewan, to Ukrainian parents on Christmas Day in 1907. Lilly has a sister, Joyce, who is 3 years younger, and is living in Melbourne, Australia, where she’s been since she moved there in 1964. She married Kevin Elliott, and has three daughters, Linda, Karen and Diane, and a son, James. Lilly and Joyce also had a brother named Walter, for a short time, but sadly, he passed away from a bad flu when he was just a toddler. The family moved to Winnipeg after Joyce was born in 1938. They lived at 160 Perth Ave. in West Kildonan, right beside the Red River, and Lilly would often play by the riverside as a small girl. She attended Seven Oaks Primary School which was quite close to their house. Her father Nicholas, a chef on CN passenger trains, decided to move the family to Vancouver in 1943. On the way to Vancouver via train, they stopped at Saskatoon and then Edmonton, where Lilly picked up chicken pox. Upon arriving in Vancouver, they stayed in a rental house on W. 45th for 6 months while their new house at 35 W. King Edward was being completed. They moved into that house that same year, and this is where Lilly has lived for the past 77 years. Lilly attended General Wolf elementary school, just a block and a half from her house. This school is still in operation to this day. She was a terrific softball player, and using her artistic skills, created some great banners for the school which hung in the gymnasium for decades.
Lilly later went to King Edward High School, but had to drop out in grade 11 in 1952 after her father passed away at the age of 56. Lilly, only 17 at the time, needed to begin working in order to help with the household expenses. Her first job was as a carhop at the Aristocratic Restaurant at 12th & Cambie where she worked for 2 years. Then in 1954, at the age of 19, she was hired by Canadian National Telegraph (which later became Unitel and then CNCP) where she was to work for the next 41 years. Known for her incredible diligence, efficiency and strong work ethic, she was very highly regarded and respected by management and all her fellow employees. Lilly and Joyce were like peas in a pod, and spent much of their time together. They both loved to laugh, and always found joy and humour in everything they did. In the late 50’s and early 60’s, the pair took a number of excursions across the USA... driving from state to state in Lilly’s Buick, having all kinds of wild adventures. Another of their legendary trips was driving up to the Cariboo in Joyce’s Volkswagen Beetle to hunt moose with a rifle and shotgun. They hadn’t figured out what they were going to do if they actually bagged a moose, but at one point, they met some people on a ranch who asked them what they were doing up there. They were invited into the house for a cup of coffee. Everybody had a good laugh and the girls turned around and headed home, sans moose! Another example of mischief the two got into was filling the trunk up with petrified wood from the famous Petrified Forest in Arizona, and driving all the way back into Canada with it, undetected! Another time, they snuck into a restricted area at UBC in the middle of the night so they could fish for trout in the experimental breeding pond next to the laboratory! Never a dull moment with these two! One one occasion, while Joyce was studying zoology at UBC, Lilly was there in the lab, using one of the long tables to put together a detailed advertising booklet that she had created to enter into a competition. The professor, Ian Cowan, asked her what she was doing. She replied “I’m winning a boat”. Well guess what... as sure as you’re born, she did win the boat!
She kept it in the carport, but never managed to get it into the water, and unfortunately, thieves broke in and stole the motor, so eventually she had to sell it, however just winning the boat in the first place was a testament to Lilly’s sheer drive and determination. In 1963, Lilly and Joyce decided to take a six month trip to Europe. They bought another Volkswagen Beetle there, directly from the factory in Germany, and wound up driving all over Europe, visiting England, Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, Denmark, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Greece and Italy, sleeping often in the car, even once parked on the Appian Way in Rome. They also travelled all throughout the Middle East, including Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Iran and even made it down as far as Pakistan and India. It was a wonderful experience for them. They parted ways in India, where Joyce got on a freighter to Australia... 40 days and 40 nights! She arrived on Nov 30, 1963, with the infamous Volkswagen Beetle in the cargo bay, which she still has in her backyard to this day. Joyce has made three trips back to Vancouver since then, the last being in 2007. After the Europe/Asia trip, Lilly came back to continue working for CNCP. In June of 1964, Lilly got married to Joe Hilborne, but unfortunately, that marriage turned out to be quite short-lived. Nevertheless, Lilly always had plenty of stories to tell about Joe and his crazy friend Ron, who was always getting into fisticuffs with other guys practically everywhere they went. Joe and Ron spent most of their time hanging around the pool hall drinking beer, and things went sour after Lilly found out that Joe had used up all the money in their joint bank account doing this! During the ’70s and ‘80s and ’90s, Lilly continued to take several trips down to the states, often travelling with girlfriends such as Betty Smart or Helen Harrington. Besides visiting most of the states including Hawaii, she also went to Singapore, Hong Kong, Thailand and took a trip to Australia, accompanied by her mother Sophie, to visit her sister and family. Once on a trip to Bermuda with a friend, they arrived late for departure, and had to be ferried out to the ship in a lifeboat! All of these wonderful travel adventures helped to shape Lilly into the well-educated, worldly person that she was. She didn’t need to finish high school! Lilly wanted to see the world, and that’s exactly what she proceeded to do! She loved to take photographs and has mountains of photo albums chock full of pictures from all her various adventures. There are enough photos to start a museum!
After leaving CNCP in 1995, she took a part time job at St. Paul’s Hospital as a security dispatcher until her retirement in 2000. Once again, she was revered there as the ‘model of efficiency’ and just an all-around wonderful person to have on the team. Her mother Sophie’s health began to fail in the late ‘90s, and Lilly cared for her around the clock, taking her every couple of days to St. Vincent’s Hospital for dialysis, pushing her along the sidewalk in a wheelchair. Sophie always had a flower in her hair on these excursions. She eventually passed away in 2002 at the age of 95. Since her retirement, Lilly continued to enjoy life to the fullest. One of her favourite passions was dancing at the German Club on Victoria Drive, which she would frequent every Saturday night to spend time with good friends and get lots of exercise. She also loved to take boat cruises, usually on the Love Boat, up to Alaska or down to San Diego. She said the most wonderful thing on those ships was the endless buffets! She got to know most of the crew, so whenever she’d go on her next trip, they’d already be quite familiar with her! Lilly was the kind of person no one could ever forget. She really stood out in a crowd! On her last boat cruise in 2012, she got a chance to actually swim with dolphins!
She loved collecting things such as clothing and costume jewelry (glitter), most of which she acquired from Value Village, where she would go every Tuesday for the discounts. She loved gardening and tended to her yard with great care, nursing the most beautiful array of flowers and shrubs to their full glory every springtime, and setting up her yard with lovely statuettes for that extra touch. Lilly had a number of wonderful cats and dogs over the years. She acquired her beautiful siamese cat Shiloh in 2012, and he has provided great companionship for her ever since. Lilly also developed an interest in stock trading and played the market, both winning and losing, for many years. That was one of her favourite pastimes. She loved her Cadillac Eldorado, which she owned for 30 years, and even drove it on a trip across Canada to visit various CNCP sites during the time that she was still working for that company. She had the personalized license plate“ Spirit” on her Cadillac. In the 2000’s she had been caring for Kay Adler, a neighbour down the lane, for several years. Kay passed away in 2009 and left Lilly with a large sum of money and told her to buy a new car amongst several other things. Lilly proceeded to purchase her 2010 Chrysler 300, and when the Cadillac finally had to be towed away, she transferred her “Spirit” license plate to the Chrysler. With the word “Beautiful” (from Beautiful BC) over top, it reads “Beautiful Spirit”, which truly sums up Lilly in every way. Lilly also loved to collect retro artwork and cartoons and had built up a large archive of that type of imagery on her computer. One day in 2014 she was purchasing a classic image from retroclipart.com to use in the new poetry book she was putting together. For some reason, the download process didn’t work, so she called the company to find out what happened and to hopefully retrieve the image she had paid for, and that’s when she became friends with Tony Bosley, the owner of RetroClipArt.com.
Eulogy for Lillian Grace Lanko by Tony Bosley
I met Lilly in 2014. She had been trying to purchase an image from my website, retroclipart.com. For some reason, there was a glitch with the download, so she decided to call my company to find out what happened, and to see if she could retrieve the image she had already paid for. I apologized for the error and told her I would email the image to her immediately. She told me she was an avid retro clipart aficionado herself and had been collecting retro images for many years, and that she really admired my collection. When I was looking up her customer information in the database, I noticed that she lived only 15 blocks away from my studio. This is unusual because the vast majority of my customers are international, mainly in the US. So we got to chatting, and finally decided to meet for coffee at Starbucks. We became instant friends and just hit it off like gangbusters. She told me all about the humorous poetry book she was trying to get published called “Willy Nilly”, and said she was having trouble getting the publishing company to set it up the way she wanted. Well, I’m a graphic artist, so I told her no problem, I’d be glad to help out. I began working on that project immediately. It took us about 6 months to iron out all the details, as the book was 232 pages long, and contained close to 800 poems. We hung out a lot together and the more we got to know each other, the more we realized we agreed on pretty well everything, and the more I realized what an incredibly intelligent, worldly and enlightened person Lilly was. We started doing dinner every Thursday, with me either bringing takeout, or Lilly cooking up one of her delicious 8-course concoctions. She loved to cook. We’d do computer stuff and maybe watch some Netflix movie. Other times we’d go out to the Keg or Anton’s, or attend major events such as the Cirque de Soleil, or the monster truck rally or the Chinese Ballet. That was always a great excuse for Lilly to get all jazzed up in one of her glittery outfits and jewelry. She loved to wear that stuff. She always made sure we had seats right up front for every event. It was always fun, and as usual, we never stopped laughing about something. Lilly loved to laugh and had a really great sense of humour. There wasn’t a day go by when she wouldn’t make me guffaw out loud about something.
After the book was finished and was sent off to publishing, Lilly then worked on her Weebly website to promote her book. I helped her get going with the admin interface and she just took off from there, spending hours, days and weeks, building hundreds of pages and filling them up with all kinds of retro graphics and animations, many of which she created herself. She just loved doing it. Even though the book never took off like she was hoping it would, it is still a gem, and a wonderful testament to Lilly’s incredible creative abilities, never mind her wonderful sense of humour. In 2016, Lilly and I decided to become partners in the RetroClipArt.com venture. She really wanted to be a part of it and help make it grow, and to help locate new images and get them uploaded. Throughout 2016 and 2017, she uploaded close to 1000 images to our shopping cart, as well as to all the affiliates’ shopping carts. It was an amazing feat, because it also involved uploading all the key words and various other bits of information associated with each image. But it was no problem for Lilly, who was an incredibly relentless, diligent worker, with an amazing attention to detail, which is the reason she was so admired and revered at the companies she used to work for. And while she was doing that, she worked just as diligently locating and downloading thousands of raw, retro image templates from the internet which we can eventually process and add to the online shopping carts. At first I thought that would be too much work for her, but she just took to it like a fish to water, and because of her love for retro art, she found it to be endless fun, constantly discovering new, interesting, classic images. Over the next 4 years, she wound up locating and downloading over 15,000 raw image templates, which are now in the archives, waiting to be processed and added to the online carts. I said, Lilly, this is an incredible amount of work you’re doing. Are you sure you’re able to handle this? Her answer was, “of all the jobs I’ve done in my life, this is the best job I’ve ever had. I love my job”. She was a natural-born collector anyway, so this was really perfect for her. Another thing we began back in 2015 was playing Scrabble. Lilly had never actually played before, and hadn’t even heard of the game, so I got her going with it. Once again, she just glommed right onto it and got really good within just a couple of months of practice. That’s Lilly. She was printing out charts of all the possible 2, 3 and 4-letter combinations so she’d be able to use them against me in our games. She was a formidable opponent. No surprise there. We got so competitive with our Thursday night Scrabble games that in early 2016, we decided to start recording all the scores, along with a detailed description of each game in a spreadsheet, which we kept online in Dropbox. Our 3-game tournaments continued for the next 4 years, right up until covid struck in early 2020, at which point we decided to hold off on visits in order to keep Lilly safe from possible infection.
Sadly, a lot of things changed this year, as Lilly was in and out of the hospital 4 times since December, usually for about a month each time. There seemed to be nothing the doctors could do to fix what was happening to her, but they were still able to release her with enough medication to keep her going for a while each time. During the summer she was absolutely determined not to go back to the hospital, because she was sure that if she did, it would be for the last time. I would call her at least twice a day every day, as I always did for 6 years, speaking to her for at least half an hour each time in order to make sure she was alright, and to check to see if she needed anything delivered to the porch, or if she felt she needed to go back to the hospital. She always told me she was fine. Even as recently as late August, her sister Joyce called Lilly from Australia, saying that they had suddenly gotten very worried about her for some reason, and were wondering if she was alright. Afterwards, Lilly told me about that call, and mentioned that she just laughed and told them, “don’t be silly, of course I’m alright”, thus immediately allaying her sister’s concerns, and once again, my concerns as well. So, in spite of her health issues, she was very good at keeping up her telephone persona so that it wasn’t apparent how much she had actually deteriorated. In retrospect, I guess she was just living in denial, desperately hoping that somehow she would be able to snap back to her old self. I guess we both were. In early September, her long-time neighbour and friend Sital, an experienced nurse, decided enough was enough, and on Sept. 11, despite Lilly’s protests, called the ambulance to have Lilly taken to Mount St. Joseph Hospital. For the first two weeks the doctors tried everything they could think of to get her stabilized, but on Sept 23, they arrived at the sad conclusion that nothing more could be done, as all her major organs were failing simultaneously, and so she was sent to palliative care. I received a call from the nurse on Sept 24, telling me that I better come to see Lilly right away, because it would probably be my last chance. I immediately rushed to the hospital, and there I sat at Lilly’s bedside for 10 to 12 hours a day for the next 17 days straight, giving her vitamins, as suggested by her nieces in Australia, and making sure she ate her meals, well as much as possible, and got lots of liquids, while giving her constant pep talks, telling her how much we all loved her, massaging her arms, legs and scalp. For a while it seemed that she was responding favourably, but by early October, it became clear that she was having more and more trouble simply breathing, and was unable to move at all.
She managed to utter many things while she was in that state. Her sister Joyce would call every morning from Australia, so she’d be able to talk to Lilly and overhear all the things that were happening in the hospital room for an hour or more each day. During Lilly’s final two weeks, she repeatedly complained of being unable to simply close her eyes and pass away like her mother Sophie or her friend Kay had done, and that’s when she started pleading for assisted death. Joyce and I tried to talk her out of it many times, and of course Sital, who couldn’t actually come into the hospital due to Covid restrictions, felt the same way, and encouraged me to do everything I could to try to compel Lilly to keep on fighting. But Lilly, being Lilly, was steadfastly determined to do things her own way, as usual. She told the social worker that she wanted to be assisted in death, so that led to the MAID team being brought in, which was composed of several doctors, nurses and social workers, who interviewed her 5 times during that week, and every time she never wavered. She never changed her mind once. They asked her “when do you want to do this?” and she replied “How about right now?” During the fifth meeting, they told her it couldn’t be done in Mount St. Joseph Hospital, but that it could be done later that day at the Vancouver Hospice Society. She replied matter-of-factly, “Ok, then dinnertime is fine”. Anybody who knew Lilly, would know how blunt and direct she can be. She never minced words. She was taken to VHS by ambulance around 3:30 on October 10, and I arrived shortly thereafter. There at VHS, I was extremely upset, and I told her “You know you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to go through with it. You can always change your mind”. She looked up at me and replied, “Why?” I simply had no answer to that question. What could I say? So that you can suffer more? I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. Nevertheless, I became very distraught, crying and hugging her and begging her to change her mind. Then suddenly she looked up at me again and said, “You better see a doctor”. I said, “Lilly, why are you saying this?” She replied, “You look really stressed out”. Again, this was classic Lilly.
When Dr. Wiebe arrived at 5:30, she asked Lilly once again, are you absolutely certain you want to do this? Lilly told her, “Yes, there’s no other way”. And those were the last words she spoke. Dr. Wiebe began the procedure. I was in absolute hysterics at this point, wailing, crying, basically climbing the walls. This was the absolute worst experience I’ve ever had in my entire life, and I’ve had some doozies. I don’t know how the doctor and the nurse were able to remain so calm. After Dr. Wiebe pronounced that Lilly was “gone”, they left the room, and there I sat, holding Lilly’s hand for the next 4 hours. I delayed the transport, as I felt I needed the time for everything to settle and to make peace with Lilly. I felt this was all my fault... that I could have stopped it from happening. But the nurse and doctor both came back separately to see me, and both insisted that this was truly what Lilly wanted, and that there was no need for her to continue to suffer, as her vital signs clearly indicated that she only had mere hours to live. But still.... Something seemed very wrong about it. This experience has changed me for the remainder of my days. I am no longer the person I was before, and I will never be. No one can go through this, especially with someone they love and care for, and expect to bounce back to normal. It’s simply not possible. Now, it’s just so hard to believe that she is no longer with us. I can’t call her and chat with her. We can’t discuss our ongoing projects, or world politics, or what she made for dinner, or anything at all. The finality of death is something that I will never be able to wrap my head around. To think of Lilly, a person who was so much larger than life in so many ways, being gone, seems unfathomable to me, and yet, it is so. Anyone who knew Lilly, knows how special she was. This was a person with a zest for life like few others possess. Lilly was never old. She was always a young vibrant soul, stuck in a body that had simply run its course on this Earth. Her enthusiasm was off the charts. Her sense of constant joy and the glee she felt just living every moment was so precious and undeniable. During these last two years, Lilly gave it everything she had just to try to stay alive and keep on rollin’. She was so strong. But in the end, even she, with all her legendary strength and determination, could not overcome the insurmountable odds she faced. One of the things we always used to say to each other was, “we’ve still got so much to do”. I would always remind her of that, because my grade 5 teacher had told me the best way to stay young and live a long time was to always be planning what you’re going to do, rather than reminiscing about your past. I always wanted Lilly to be looking forward to the future, with the hope that she might live to 100 and beyond. After all, her mother Sophie made it to 95, so I was sure Lilly had at least another decade. But it was not to be. Of all the things she was able to say during her final days, the one thing that stuck out the most to me was when she quietly uttered, “Garden of the world.” I asked her, what do you mean? She repeated.... “The garden of the world, I’ve seen it Tony, I’ve seen it”. Several days later, while I was sitting by her bedside in the hospital, with her eyes closed, she muttered, “It’s raining”. We had no view of the windows where we were, so we couldn’t see outside and when I had arrived that morning it was perfectly dry outside, so I told her “No, it’s not raining Lilly”. She repeated “It’s raining”. I said “Ok”. An hour later, when I went to get supplies, I stepped out of the hospital front door, and lo and behold, everything outside was soaking wet and there were massive puddles everywhere. Yes, it had indeed rained, very heavily in fact, at the time that Lilly had mentioned it. And somehow, she had been able to perceive this, while I saw, nor heard nothing. I am certain that Lilly is there now, in the garden of the world, planting her seed anew, preparing to be, as always, a force to be reckoned with in this grand old universe. Thank you Lilly for being the absolutely amazing woman that you were. I love you dearly, and we will all miss you very, very much.
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