ANNE SMITH

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(MONA) ANNE SMITH (Mona) Anne Smith died on Monday, March 27, 2017, in Evergreen Baptist Care Home in White Rock, near Vancouver. She had declined very rapidly over just a few days and her sudden death is a shock. Anne outlived her husband Norman, her sister Dot (Leslie), niece Sonja, and friends Mabel Langlands (Martin) and Sheila Kennet. She in turn is survived by her son Graham (Alix), daughter Jocelyn (Vladimir), grandsons Jason (Erin) and Taylor (Larissa), great-granddaughter Winter, nieces Carole (Ian) and Linda, nephews Christopher (Elizabeth) and David (Jill), sister Della (Waddy), cousin-in-law Sheila, and friends Sue and Graham Murray and David Cann and Rosaleen MacFadden. Anne was born in Sheffield on June 6, 1924. She was the youngest of the three daughters - Della, Doris and Anne - of Ellen (née Stone), and David Barron. She attended Sheffield High School but when war came in 1939 she was evacuated to Forfar, in Angus. She stayed in Scotland to study medicine at St. Andrews and graduated with an MB and ChB in 1947. At her first job, in Dundee Royal Infirmary, she met Norman Kinnear Smith, a handsome young Scottish doctor who had recently come home from wartime service in India. Anne and Norman married in 1949, a few days after Anne had passed the diploma exams for a specialization in ophthalmology. They lived first in Dundee and then in Middlesbrough. In 1965 they and their son and daughter immigrated to Canada. In Winnipeg Anne practised ophthalmology at the Children's Hospital and in the Boyd Building until she and Norman retired in 1988 and moved to the West Coast. She cared very much about her work and had the gift of being able to build a full picture of a patient's character from just a few words or a facial expression. All her life Anne loved sport, especially golf and athletics. During the long prairie winters, when the golf course was snowed over, she and Norman snowshoed across fields outside Winnipeg. She was also a keen birder and opera buff. She appreciated visual beauty and had a fine collection of sea glass and unusual shells and stones from beaches in the UK, Canada and the Caribbean. In retirement she continued to golf. With great enthusiasm she also took Spanish lessons and travelled to Barcelona and Granada several times. Anne belonged to the generation of women who would not leave the house without putting on lipstick. She loved fashion. Her style was classic British tailoring, jazzed up (as she would say) with brightly coloured accessories and with jewellery made of lapis lazuli or blue john. She had a passion for dark chocolate and most evenings she drank a glass of Johnnie Walker. Her favourite scent was lily of the valley. The deaths, within two years, of her beloved sister Dot, her great friend Mabel, and her husband took away much of Anne's joy in life. She stopped drinking whisky when Norman died in 2015; it reminded her too much of happy times, gone forever. In recent months she often spoke of her wish to be taken to heaven and reunited with her parents and with Dot and Norman and Mabel. Anne's family would be very happy now if you poured a peg or two of whisky on her behalf and toasted long friendship and enduring love.

As published in Winnipeg Free Press on Apr 01, 2017