McKLAM o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2006-12-16 published
MacKLAM,
Georgina
(PULLEN)
Peacefully at Alexandra Hospital, Ingersoll on Thursday, December 14,
2006 Georgina
(PULLEN) of Thamesford in her 92nd year. Beloved
wife of the late Darwin
MacKLAM (1990) and dear mother of Doug
of Kingston, Nancy Sue
MULLER of Toronto, Linda and Ken
BAILLIE
of Moncrief and Mary and Neil
MacKENA of Thamesford. Dear grandmother
of 15 grandchildren, 28 great-grandchildren and 5 great-great-grandchildren.
Predeceased by 1 son Alfred and 1 daughter Wendy, 4 sisters Dorothy,
Annie, Margaret and Mary. A private family visitation will be
held at the Harland B. Betzner Funeral Home, Thamesford on Sunday,
December 17, 2006. Interment Bellsyde Cemetery, Fergus Monday
at 1 p.m. As an expression of sympathy memorial donations may
be given to the charity of ones choice and may be arranged through
the Harland B. Betzner Funeral Home (519-285-2427).
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McKLEM o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2006-03-18 published
BROWN,
Laura (formerly
McMULLEN,
KILGOUR, née
SIMMONS)
At Woodingford Lodge, Ingersoll on Friday, March 17, 2006, Laura
(McMULLEN)
(KILGOUR)
Brown, of Ingersoll, in her 95th year. Daughter
of the late Norman and Ethel
SIMMONS. Wife of the late Nean
McMULLEN
(1963,) Ross
KILGOUR (1981) and Stanley
BROWN (2004.) Dear mother
of Ross McMULLEN and his wife
Joyce of Otterville. Dear grandmother
of Ashley, Megan, Whitney and Meredith. Sister-in-law of Evelyn
SIMMONS of Toronto. Also survived by nieces, nephews, several
step-children and step-grandchildren. Predeceased by one daughter
Elizabeth Ann
ARMSTRONG (1986,) two sisters Madeline
MOODY and
Mary MacKLEM and two brothers George
SIMMONS and Charles
SIMMONS.
A private family service will be held at the McBeath-Dynes Funeral
Home, 246 Thames St. S., Ingersoll on Monday, March 20, 2006
Rev. Bill MAYOROS of Trinity United Church, Ingersoll officiating.
Interment Otterville Cemetery. Memorial donations to Woodingford
Lodge, Ingersoll or London Health Sciences Centre Dialysis Unit
would be appreciated.
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McKLEM o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2006-12-08 published
WACHOWIAK,
Henry
F.
Of Saint Thomas, on Wednesday, December 6, 2006, in his 61st. year.
Dearly loved father of Mark
WACHOWIAK his fiancée Kristine
MacKLEM,
Leah WACHOWIAK and their mother Daniela. Loved brother of John
and his wife
Jane
WACHOWIAK and Helen and her husband Gerry
PHILLIPS,
all of Saint Thomas. Dear uncle of Julia and her husband Doug
GOEBEL
and their son Gavin, Angela and Andrew
PHILLIPS,
Marie
WACHOWIAK
and the late David
PHILLIPS. Dear nephew of Mary
WACHOWIAK of
Saint Thomas and the late Steve
WACHOWIAK.
Sadly missed by a number
of cousins and relatives in Germany and Poland. Henry was born
in Denmark on November 2, 1946, the
son of the late Frank and
Rosa (FRIEDRICH)
WACHOWIAK. He came to Canada with his family
in 1949. He worked at Formet and formerly at Ford Talbotville
(1967-1985). He was a member of Holy Angels' Church. Henry was
an avid gardener outdoorsman and was an avid participant of the
Southwestern Ontario Retriever Club. Resting at Williams Funeral
Home, 45 Elgin Street, Saint Thomas until Saturday morning and then
to Holy Angels' Church where Mass of the Christian Burial will
be celebrated at 10: 00 a.m. Interment to follow in Holy Angels'
Cemetery. Visitation Friday from 2-4 and 7-9 p.m. Prayers will
be recited at the funeral home on Friday afternoon at 4: 00 p.m.
Remembrances may be made to the Canadian Diabetes Association,
the Kidney Foundation, Holy Angels' Church Restoration Fund or
M.A.D.D.
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McKLEM o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-03-15 published
Margaret GIBSON,
Writer: (1948-2006)
Author of Opium Dreams and The Butterfly Ward produced works
of singular vision, writes Sandra
MARTIN. It was an intense and
brilliant output that was too often sidelined by the march of
mental illness
By Sandra MARTIN,
Page S9
There were many Margaret
GIBSONs and all of them were complicated.
She was like a prism that could shimmer with refracted brilliance
one moment and then fracture into dangerous shards the next.
As a writer, she was like a foreign correspondent reporting from
the front lines of insanity, taking readers places where most
of us have never been in collections of stories such as The Butterfly
Ward and Sweet Poison, screenplays such as Outrageous, Ada and
For the Love of Aaron and in her only published novel, Opium
Dreams, which won the Chapters/Books in Canada first-novel award
in 1997.
Although she self-diagnosed as autistic after she read Donna
Williams's memoir, Nobody Nowhere, Ms.
GIBSON was probably a
paranoid schizophrenic. In one of her "good" periods in the early
1990s she described what it felt like to have a mental illness.
"It is not so much that madness… is a muddied eyehole, but rather
it is seeing things too sharply, clearer than clear, a light
that fills up your eyeholes and is, in the end, blinding with
its visions."
Ms. GIBSON worked with some top literary editors, including Ellen
SELIGMAN at McClelland and Stewart, Phyllis
BRUCE at Harper Collins
and Barry CALLAGHAN of Exile Editions. "All writers write out
of their experiences, but this was like an open vein," said Mr.
CALLAGHAN.
"If ever a writer in this country hit on the terrors that seem
to strike at women who are defenceless and vulnerable," it was
Ms. GIBSON. "
She was frightening in her presence and she was
frightening in her work because she was really in touch with
the madness that was loose inside herself" and by extension,
in "metropolitan life." "Losing the words" to describe her terrors
was often a signal that her illness was on the march again. And
that made knowing Ms.
GIBSON a desperate struggle to keep her
afloat without being sucked into the whirlpool that was her life.
As her loyal friend, Shirley
FLAVELLE, said: "She was a 24/7
girl. You could only live with her when you were young."
Margaret Louise
GIBSON was the second of five children of Bell
Telephone engineer Dane
GIBSON and his wife
Audrey (neé
McCULLOUGH.)
She grew up on a small rural property on what was then the eastern
edge of Scarborough, Ontario, on land her father, an air force
tail gunner in the Second World War, had been able to buy with
a veteran's grant. Her older sister Dana was bright, gregarious
and an excellent student. Her twin sisters, Lenore and Deirdre,
were a younger playful unit. Margaret, or Margie as her family
called her, was the solitary dreamy one.
"We were a typical Canadian family except that there was one
daughter who was always ill, her whole life," said Deirdre
GIBSON,
a planner. Margaret
GIBSON herself once said that "colours hurt"
when she was a child. "A leaf was a kaleidoscope," she said.
"Starting kindergarten damn near killed me. But I was never lonely
I'm a one-piece band." Puberty is difficult for most adolescents
but for Ms.
GIBSON it was catastrophic. Always withdrawn, she
started slashing her arms and eventually attempted suicide. She
spent about a year at the Homewood Health Centre in Guelph, Ontario,
experiences that she would later use as a trigger for her fiction.
After she was released, her parents sold the beloved family property
and moved to a housing development so she could start "over again"
in a fresh environment.
The new school was even more disaffecting than the old one, but
Margaret did make Friends with two alienated classmates, Shirley
FLAVELLE and Craig Russell
EADIE. He later became well known
as the female impersonator, Craig
RUSSELL. A bisexual, he was
addicted to drug and drinks and died of an Aids-related stroke
in 1990.
In September of 1971, Ms.
GIBSON married Stuart
GILBOORD, a young
man she had met briefly six years earlier through her father.
"She was damn interesting to talk with," Mr.
GILBOORD said, adding
that she was an attractive woman who wore heavy makeup as a defence
against the world. Their son Aaron was born on November 22, 1972.
At the time, Ms.
GIBSON's psychiatrist was encouraging her to
write as therapy. "I would come home from work and we would talk
for three or four hours about her writing," said Mr.
GILBOORD.
Her concentration was all-consuming and obsessive and she used
phrases that were brilliant, but the process was "draining."
Mr. GILBOORD took some of his wife's stories to a script supervisor
he knew at
TVOntario.
She showed them to Michael
MacKLEM of Oberon
Press in Ottawa. Ms.
GIBSON's stories subsequently appeared in
Oberon's annual Best Canadian Stories anthologies and in a solo
collection, The Butterfly Ward, under her married name, Margaret
Gibson GILBOORD.
(She and Mr.
GILBOORD, who now works for a call
centre, divorced when their son was a toddler.)
Reviews were exultant. William
FRENCH, then literary editor of
The Globe and Mail, described her as a "writer of burning intensity
and rare vision, an accomplished explorer of hidden caves of
the mind." This debut shared the City of Toronto Book Award in
1977 with Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle.
Meanwhile, Ms.
GIBSON's story Making It (from The Butterfly Ward)
about her Friendship with Craig
RUSSELL was made into the low-budget
film Outrageous. Starring Mr.
RUSSELL as himself and Hollis
McLAREN
as Ms. GIBSON, it was the hit of the 1977 Toronto film festival.
Former Chatelaine editor Rona Maynard was a young writer at Flare
magazine at the time. Intrigued by both Ms.
GIBSON and The Butterfly
Ward, she began writing a profile of the "hot" writer. "She had
a deep Lauren Bacall voice, kohl-rimmed eyes, an air of world-weary
glamour," smoked long black cigarettes in a holder and "had a
burning passion for language unlike anything I have ever seen,"
said Ms. Maynard.
The two women became Friends, but when the profile was about
to be published, Ms.
GIBSON had her lawyer send a threatening
letter to the magazine, and "so she dropped out of my life."
At the time, Ms.
GIBSON was also immersed in a bitter custody
battle with her former husband. She turned some of that experience
into Sweet Poison, a collection of stories published by Phyllis
Bruce at HarperCollins. Another story was turned into the television
movie, For the Love of Aaron.
Mr. GILBOORD provides a convincing anti-story to Ms.
GIBSON's
claims of abuse, saying that he and his father-in-law were in
constant communication with each other and with child-welfare
officials trying to protect Aaron and manage Ms.
GIBSON's erratic
behaviour.
"She tried the best she could to raise me," said Aaron
GILBOORD,
who is now 33 and living with his wife and three sons in Manitoba,
where he works as a juvenile counsellor with young offenders.
He left home when he was 16, but remained in touch with his mother
and his father. Ms.
GIBSON wrote a poem about her son, when he
was 5, saying in part, "and to phone the doctor when I a.m. crazed
and always you bring my pill bottles/offering them up with renewed
hope each time." The poem appeared in Aurora: New Canadian Writing,
edited by Morris Wolfe. By the late 1980s, Ms.
GIBSON was living
in a subsidized unit in a housing co-op. That's how she met her
second husband, Juris
RASA, an architectural draughtsman who
was living in the same development. Apparently, she showed up
at his door one day to ask for bandages because her fingers were
bleeding from banging on the keys on her typewriter. Eventually,
they moved in together and married. He helped her learn to use
a computer and to make the transition from short stories to the
longer form of the novel.
Her literary Friends, including the late Timothy Findlay and
his partner, screenwriter William Whitehead, and journalist June
Callwood helped her get grants to support her writing and introduced
her to agent Dean Cooke, who agreed to represent her in the early
1990s. He believes that Mr.
RASA made it possible for her to
write Opium Dreams, the novel that Ellen Seligman published at
McClelland and Stewart.
"I was always amazed by her stamina and staying power because
I anticipated the editing of the book would be hard for her,"
said Ms. Seligman, who came to treasure their long conversations
on the telephone. "I think writing sustained her, more so than
any other form of nourishment."
The novel was a literary success, but Ms.
GIBSON was sinking
again into mental illness. She and Mr.
RASA separated in the
late 1990s after she repeatedly accused him of trying to murder
her. He died about a year ago. Ms. Maynard had reconnected with
Ms. GIBSON in the mid 1990s during one of her many episodes of
instability and formed an unofficial support group with Mr. Cooke,
Mr. Wolfe and Ms. Callwood. "She was getting farther and farther
away from reality," said Ms. Maynard.
About four years ago, Ms.
GIBSON was diagnosed with an aggressive
breast cancer. She was seeing an oncologist, but stopped chemotherapy,
probably because she was afraid of the side effects of her complex
combination of medications.
Margaret Louise
GIBSON was born in Scarborough, Ontario, on June 4,
1948. She died of metastasized breast cancer in the Palliative
Care Unit at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto on February 25,
2006. She was 57. She is survived by her son Aaron, his wife
Jennifer LAMBERT, their sons Logan, Drew and Ayden, and her three
sisters Dana, Lenore and Deirdre and their families.
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McKLIN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2006-05-22 published
MacKLIN,
Charles
On Friday, May 19, 2006 at his residence. Charlie
MacKLIN, beloved
husband of the late Anne. Loving father and father-in-law of
Sandi and Philip
GOLDMAN, and Howard and Valerie. Dear brother
of the late Irene
KLEIN, and the late Belle
SILVER.
Devoted grandfather
of Jeremy and Eliza, and Alyson and Derek; Toby, Chelsea and
Lindsay. Services were held at Benjamin's Park Memorial Chapel,
2401 Steeles Avenue West, on Sunday, May 21, 2006. Interment
Palmerston Synagogue section of Mt. Sinai Memorial Park. If desired,
memorial donations may be made to the Charles and Anne Macklin
Fund, Baycrest Centre, 416-785-2875.
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McKLON o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2006-12-26 published
HUMPHREY,
Florence
Mary (née
DELAUNAY)
Passed away peacefully at Victoria Hospital on Saturday December 23,
2006, Mrs. Florence Mary
HUMPHREY (née
DELAUNAY) of London in
her 85th year. Beloved wife of the late Thomas G.
HUMPHREY (1973.)
Dear beloved mother of Timothy T.
HUMPHREY and wife
Ann of Thorndale.
Predeceased by her twin sister Dorothy
MacKLON (2002.) Fondly
remembered by Rachel and Sarah, family and Friends. Friends may
be received in the Needham Funeral Chapel, 520 Dundas Street,
London (519-434-9141) on Wednesday, December 27, 2006 from 2-3 p.m.
followed by the Funeral Service at 3 p.m. Cremation to follow.
As an expression of sympathy, donations may be made to the Heart
and Stroke Foundation.
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