SYBIL KAY

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SYBIL KAY

Sybil Kay was born in Winnipeg on January 31, 1929, and died in Toronto on August 17, 2021, loved, admired, and greatly mourned.
She was largely raised in Toronto by her loving and fiercely intelligent single mother, Tania, and nourished by a wonderfully close relationship to her grandmother and grandfather. This laid a foundation for her own strength, creativity, and capacity for love.
When the Second World War ended she went, at 17, to Cincinnati to attend university there before returning to Winnipeg. There she met and married Dr. Sam Kay, who had also just returned to the city from doing a surgical residency in Scotland after wartime service. They raised three sons in a household that was famously welcoming to the friends of their children.
Many of those, to the present day, name her as a formative influence on them. Her attention to them as individuals, her love of music, art, literature, the simple presence of these things in the house, had ripple effects on boys in 1960s Winnipeg, and on the men they became. A number would wryly deem themselves "the fourth Kay son." Her life, in this regard, was an illustration of something all-too-rare: affectionate regard joined to real intelligence.
As her sons grew older, she went back to university in Winnipeg, taking a BFA (First Class Honours) degree in Painting, studying with Ivan Eyre, principally. She painted all her life, passionately explored art in galleries wherever she and her husband travelled. Birthday presents for her were easy: an art book, a classical music album. Much later in life, at 90, at the urging of one of her grandchildren, she resumed making art, having stopped for a long time because of arthritis in hands and knees. Unable to do larger canvasses, she went back to doing Rapidograph pen-and-ink work. Sitting on her couch, sketchbook raised to a working height on a pile of art books on her coffee table, she'd work all day, every day, music playing, her current novel beside her, and often in the evenings a baseball game featuring her beloved Yankees (a love inherited from her husband, who had died much too young).
She was a splendidly engaged, inquisitive traveller, always. She was one of those people who could tell a joke or an anecdote with flair. She was emotional about small things and rock solid about important ones. Her love for her grandchildren was absolute and individualized - just as she'd individualized her sons' friends long before. She made immortal raspberry jam, dill pickles, chocolate chip cookies. She had two dogs, over the years, who brought her their own love and joy.
She was wounded deeply, and never quite the same, after her husband died, but found reserves to still engage with family and old friends and life, and always with books and art and music. She had endless questions to ask and a deep wellspring from which laughter could and did emerge.
She died at 92, at home, living there by her fierce, independent choice. Her death was sudden, without long illness, hospitals, urgent care. She had said that was her hope, and it happened that way.
There are few ways to calibrate what a good or worthy life is that will not include the one she lived, and shared with those she loved.
She is remembered and mourned by her sons, Guy, Jeffrey, and Rex, her daughters-in-law, Laura, Denise, and Johanna, her grandchildren, Sam and Matthew, Zachary and Jordan, Tatjana and Zahavah, and by so many who met her through the decades, and remember her with affection and respect and, as a number have said, with a feeling of good fortune that she was a part of their life.

As published in Winnipeg Free Press on Aug 21, 2021