Anna T. Wiebe

Adjust Text Size: A+ A-

ANNA T. WIEBE

Our mother, Anna T. Wiebe, died in Toronto on Tuesday, September 8, 2015. She was most recently a resident of Kensington Gardens in central Toronto and prior to that of Southwood Drive in Steinbach. She was predeceased by her husband Henry on April 14, 2007, after 53 years of marriage. She was also predeceased by five brothers: Bernhard, Heinrich, Herman, David and Johann; and by five sisters: Maria, Sara, Katherina, Neta and Helen.

Anna leaves her three sons and their partners, 10 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. These are: Edwin and his wife Christa, with their children Miriam and her husband Hans-Joachim Wuethrich with their children Joah, Rebecca, Noemi and Ann, all of Switzerland; and Sarah and her partner Benjamin Liebherr, both of Switzerland; and Andrin and his partner Lisa Meier,both of Switzerland. Harry and his partner William Burnfield with their children Evan, Piers, Jotham, Anna and Wells, all of Toronto; and David and his former wife Rhoda Pullan and their children Silas and Macy, all of Vancouver Island. Anna is also survived by her one remaining brother Erdman and his wife Eva of Loma Plata in Paraguay and one remaining sister-in-law, Ann Toews of Winnipeg.

Anna was born at Rose Farm, Manitoba on July 12, 1922, the eighth of 12 children. As a four-year-old, and as part of a large group of Canadian Mennonites, she made the train and ocean and riverboat voyage to the Chaco in Paraguay, settling eventually in the new village of Waldheim.

The decision by Anna’s parents to move to Paraguay very much affected the kind of life their children would lead. Their brave decision to leave Canada (the land of modernity, of English, of too much education and of an imagined lack of religious freedom) resulted in a life of isolation in the Paraguayan interior that was extremely difficult.

Nurtured by parents who had themselves benefited from a fine Canadian public school education, Anna, like all her younger siblings, was raised on an educational diet of Fibels, the New Testament, Catechism and the Bible. Despite the paucity of resources, and the sometimes-patchy abilities of well-meaning untrained teachers, Anna loved grade school and prospered there.

Dogma was the order of the day in this young colony, and those elders who were of the most conservative bent, seemed also to wield the most power. Freethinkers, or liberals, were ostracized and threatened with excommunication from the Church. So, for example, the singing of “evangelical songs” was outlawed at one point, because the melodies seemed to derive from folk songs or other dubious sources.

Life for young people, however, offered other outlets for socializing. Social dancing was very popular and accepted by most Chaco Mennonites as an acceptable past-time, especially for young people. Square dancing (with English-language “calling” among this German-speaking people in a Spanish-speaking country) was especially popular.

Anna stayed home to work on the family farm, long after most of her older and some of her younger siblings married and left home. This was largely out of duty and devotion to her parents, who were already elderly and ailing. Anna was proud of her role as farmer and breadwinner, eschewing a number of offers to take work in one of the two large communities of the Chaco. By her own account, offers of romantic friendship were not infrequent but suitors were always turned away.

Anna was 31 when she married Heinrich Rempel Wiebe on November 29, 1953. Within a year or two, Henry, with some initiative, perhaps some sense of romance, and certainly with a desire to seek a better living and educational environment for their children, persuaded Anna that they should immigrate to Canada. This took some persuasion and was agreed to on the condition that Anna’s mother Maria, and Anna’s sister Neta join the family in moving to Canada, which they did in 1956.

Anna’s early years in Canada were devoted to caring for her three sons: Edwin born in Paraguay in 1955 and Harry and David, born in Steinbach, Manitoba in 1956 and 1958 respectively. After several years of painful homesickness for her familiar environment, Anna came to appreciate all that Canada had to offer. This included a warm reception at the Steinbach Mennonite Church (GC), which had been founded by German-speaking immigrants from Russia, decades after the original Mennonite settlers had established Steinbach in 1874.

After all three sons were launched into school, Anna occasionally took part-time work in the community. For many years she took a great interest in helping out the many immigrants from Paraguay who were moving to Canada and settling in the Steinbach area. Her home on Southwood became a sort of trading post for used furniture, clothing, and home-canned foodstuffs. Steinbach friends, often from the church, would drop all such items at Anna’s home, and she always had a good sense of which new settlers could benefit from these gifts. Of course, no money ever changed hands. The enterprise, as many other similar ones, preceded the self-help centres, which later performed this role in Mennonite communities.

During these early years in Canada, Anna committed a lot of time and effort to ensuring the comfort of her mother Maria Toews and her sister Neta. Anna felt a considerable gap in her life when her sons began to leave home in the mid-1970s, more so when their professional and personal lives required them to move to other parts of the country and the world.

In her retirement, Anna was able to devote more time to her garden (a passion) and house renovations. She and her husband Henry spent countless hours and months of their retirement renovating their home, taking out walls, adding bay windows and built-in beds, and putting down hardwood floors to enhance their enjoyment of the modest house they had built when their boys were pre-schoolers.

Prior to and during their early retirement, Anna and her husband enjoyed several trips to Europe, to Paraguay and to parts of America and Canada. Within a year of her husband’s death in April 2007, Anna moved to Toronto to live with her son Harry and his family, which included five young children. This was a rich time of bonding for these five grandchildren, aged two to seven, when they were able to spend time with Oma every day.

After several happy years living with this rambunctious family, Anna’s care needs required a move to a long term care home. During her last four years she lived at Kensington Gardens, a five-minute bicycle ride from Harry’s house, and this proximity permitted frequent visits by Harry and his children. Regular visits from Edwin in Switzerland and from David on Vancouver Island kept the family connections strong. Also during these last years, many of Anna’s nephews and nieces made the trip from Steinbach, Winnipeg, and Vancouver to visit Anna in Toronto. Anna and her family greatly appreciated these loving visits.

“We ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough … even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
― Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

"Nun aber bleibt Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe, diese drei; aber die Liebe ist die groesste unter ihnen." 1. Korinther 13,13

The memorial service for Anna T. Wiebe will be held on Friday, October 9, 2015 at 10:30 a.m. at Birchwood Funeral Chapel, Steinbach, MB, with ash interment at Heritage Cemetery, Steinbach, MB.

Arrangements by
BIRCHWOOD FUNERAL CHAPEL
1-204-346-1030 OR 1-888-454-1030

As published in The Carillon on Sep 24, 2015