Patricia Lynne Byers

Our deeply loved and pretty much universally admired mom, sister, grandma, aunt, great-aunt, and friend lamented that making it to 80 was a lot harder than the stats implied. Not for lack of trying though, our beloved mom/Pat was leaving them in the dust in her speed walking competitions and in her jogging group until almost a month before her death at precisely 79.5 from pancreatic cancer. Only her 10 year old dog with a limp, Tilly, could truly slow her down. She was the healthiest cheese and wine aficionado that probably all of us knew, which is no doubt due to her scholarly pursuit of home economics at University of Winnipeg in the 1950s. 

Our mom was an incredible cook and baker, a giver of dinner parties, a drinker of wine, an avid reader, a passionate consumer of all news and politics, an intrepid traveller, and a chatter, to anyone, at any time (and scarily - often while driving while looking at the person she was chatting to instead of the road). 

Despite getting engaged on her second date to our dad, William (Bill) Byers, at the tender age of 21, their marriage lasted 50 loving years and produced four children. She was an equally enthusiastic grandma and great-aunt and so it is that we are left to sort through her many, many boxes and piles of photos, family albums and drawings and cards from the 9 grandkids and great nieces and nephews she loved to pieces. 

The loss of her daughter Amy (1999) and later our Dad/Bill (2015) were her greatest sorrows, but also attest to the incredible resilience of our mom to surmount the deepest and most crippling grief and turn this into the gift of compassion our mom was so well known for - she was able to use these terrible losses to help others suffering similar pain. 

Mom threw herself into the second wave of feminism in the early 1970s with a passion, teaching courses at the local college, and later using this passion and knowledge for women’s rights at work in the Yukon and in her capacity as a volunteer in Stratford, Whitehorse and Qualicum Beach. She raised her kids to be independent, rights-oriented like her, and money savvy (well, she tried), and she was generous right to the very end with her support to all kinds of causes, including delivering food for the food bank throughout the pandemic. 

Her generosity also extended to all enterprises purveying shoes, coats, sweaters, slacks, blouses, t-shirts costume jewelry, and any garment made of houndstooth, a few specific plaids she truly adored, anything in camel or black and white stripes, and lately, leopard print. My but she did love clothes. This love for fashion was translated into an entrepreneurial venture with her best friend, Mary Hill, in Stratford Ontario, where they ran the Pumpkin Patch Children’s Clothing Store for many years and forced their children to model clothing in the show windows, up and down the streets, and in organized fashion shows. 

She liked to claim she had never been sick before she got cancer, but she had infamously survived two gas explosions - one on stage as an early domestic sciences graduate working at Union Gas in Chatham Ontario, and another at our cabin in the Yukon, losing her eyebrows and almost taking out the cabin door, and finally, she cheerful evacuated her sleeping grandkids from their beds during an earthquake in Bangladesh. None of this phased her. She was a cheery optimist to the very end. On hearing her terminal diagnosis, she exclaimed, "Well! At least I don’t have to go into a long term care home!" The bucket list she wrote over the following few days held only six mostly administrative items, because, as she said, there was nothing left she felt she needed to. The sixth was to tell more stories, and a life of stories was indeed what she left us. She truly felt she had lived a wonderful life where she had no regrets. Ours is that she left too fast and too soon and we will miss her more than words can say. 

She is survived by three of her children, Laura, Megan and Andrew, her daughter- and son- in-laws Marilee, Bryan, Michael, her sisters Debbie (Mike) and Janice (Colin), and 9 grandchildren Connor, Jaimie, Graydon, Imogen, Stella, Eli, Cole, Brenna, Ally, as well as nieces, nephews, and countless friends.  

If desired, a donation may be made in Pat’s name to the Diabetes Research Institute Foundation of Canada or to the Canadian Cancer Society.