Dean Floyd Boundy was born the second of two children to Cyril and Vera Boundy in the South Australian outback town of Broken Hill on January 21st, 1932 and passed away peacefully at Melville Hospice in Surrey, British Columbia on May 8th, 2021 at the age of eighty-nine.
How does one capture in words the life and character of this remarkable man? Blessed with many gifts, Dean would have excelled in numerous fields: music, theology, mathematics, law, classical literature, or biblical scholarship—but it was to Christian ministry that Dean chose to dedicate his life. He loved the pageantry of Christian worship: its liturgies, prayers, hymns, and music; its cathedrals and its history. He believed in the sustaining power of the Christian faith and in love as the truth of life.
Dean came to the Lower Mainland in the mid-1950s and began attending St. Andrew’s-Wesley United Church in Vancouver. He joined the church youth group, where he caught the eye of another member, Ivy Petersen. Ivy was taken by the young man’s easy charm, lively wit, and peerless piano playing. They began to date, romance flowered, and Ivy said yes when Dean asked for her hand in marriage. Dean and Ivy wed at St. Andrew’s-Wesley in 1956.
Over the next several summers Dean and Ivy would drive to Naramata, where Dean undertook theological study at the Christian Leadership Training School, and to Kispiox and other towns where Dean served his mission field. While he and Ivy were starting a family, Dean earned a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Classics from The University of British Columbia and a Bachelor’s Degree in Divinity from Union College. He taught classical Greek at UBC and New Testament Greek at Union College while a theology student. In 1966 Dean was ordained into the clergy of the United Church of Canada while serving at Sunnyside United Church in Surrey. He would later bring the word of God to congregations large and small across the Lower Mainland and on Vancouver Island and in central B.C. His sonorous bass voice enriched the many choirs he led or accompanied on piano and marimba. A sensitive communicator in spoken and written word, Dean brought joy to weddings, consolation to the bereaved, and comfort to those at the crossroads of life. If each person he touched over the course of his ministry were to pluck a single blossom and place it on Dean’s resting place, Dean would sleep beneath an endless field of wildflowers.
Dean was as devoted to his wife and family as he was to the Church. He loved to tell his kids—Evelyn, Edwin, Howard, and Karen—bedtime ghost stories when they were small. As they grew he shared in their activities, teaching them chess and various musical instruments, including electric bass, saxophone, and piano (eldest daughter, Evelyn, would serve as organist in many church services). With a friend he built a gutbucket—a single-string acoustic bass—from a length of gut, a piece of lumber, and an overturned washbasin. Dean and the family would raise the roof at church or at home just for fun.
Not one for dining in restaurants, Dean would sometimes spring for TV dinners, which the family enjoyed on folding trays while delighting in the television adventures of Batman, The Avengers, and Star Trek; The Flintstones and Lost in Space. In later years Dean would treat himself to a glass of Karen’s family’s homemade red wine—strictly “for medicinal purposes” he assured everyone.
From an early age Dean was a keen athlete. Leaving Australia at nineteen, he arranged with a friend to crisscross Europe by bicycle, covering some seven thousand miles before reaching Finland for the opening ceremonies of the 1952 Helsinki Summer Olympics. Dean relished a good game of tennis; his intimidating net presence and punishing crosscourt slam inevitably left foolhardy opponents beaten and bewildered. Off-court, Dean learned to work a mainsail and jib, and for a time in the early 1970s sailed with his kids at Crescent Beach aboard his sixteen-foot Enterprise.
To be sure, Dean often “had his nose in a book,” as Ivy teased him, but he also regularly sat at the piano and improvised. At such times all conversation in the home would stop as everyone came under the spell of his extraordinary musical gifts.
At the supper table or on the living-room chesterfield, Dean was an engaging conversationalist. He could enliven any exchange with anecdotes from literature, history, languages, art, and music. A bibliophile by nature, Dean built a library of the Greek and Latin texts of Livy, Tacitus, and Cicero; Homer, Pindar, and Thucydides; Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus—and above all, Plato, who Dean believed taught that in the end we return to God redeemed. He studied the Old Testament in Hebrew. A visitor to Dean’s study would not be surprised to stumble upon a well-thumbed Teach Yourself Arabic, which the teenage Dean had bought in 1947, or a tattered Conversational Spanish, which the globe-trotting twenty-something had stuffed into his canvas backpack for his adventures across Central America in the early 1950s.
Bearing witness to Dean’s love of travel are his surviving passports with their visas from numerous countries. In 1974 Dean took a leave from the United Church and whisked the family to Germany, where he studied theology at the University of Heidelberg. A steadfast servant of the Lord, Dean used his holidays to take Ivy on pilgrimages to the Holy Land.
Whether recording his adventures or reflecting on his readings or preparing a sermon for Sunday, Dean was a copious note-taker. He would bring home industrial-size spools of foolscap that Ivy would tear into pocket-sized sheets. On these Dean scribbled his indecipherable shorthand or all-but-illegible longhand. Stacks of notes rose from the floor of his study; his kids laughed good-naturedly whenever he tried to navigate this minefield to reach his desk.
Dean retired from the United Church in 1997 and he and Ivy continued to make Surrey their home. He passed his time reading, traveling, and spending time with his children and grandchildren. He and Ivy enjoyed brisk walks to White Rock Beach and slow dances at the Royal Canadian Legion, Branch 240, in Crescent Beach, where Dean served as Padre from 2005 to 2012.
For most of the past three years Dean and Ivy lived at Westminster House, and it was here that he gave to Ivy—his dear wife of nearly sixty-four years—his last and greatest act of ministry. As Ivy’s health declined he sat for long hours at her bedside and comforted her with readings from the Bible. They talked about the different churches they had served, and in the quiet of the room and with a love that only the two of them could know, they shared their story one more time in happiness and remembrance.
After Ivy’s passing in September 2020, Dean moved to Evergreen Care Home in White Rock. On March 26th he and Karen visited the beach and Promenade. In a photograph he sits quietly on a bench overlooking the ocean. The air is cool, but he is dressed for it. He is stooped and uses a cane. He looks out onto the beach, but he is also looking inward. He is remembering. “Make good memories,” he will tell Karen, because he understands that memories are everything to him now.
At Melville Hospice on the morning of Saturday, May 8th, as Howard was reading to him from the Bible, Dean—the beloved and loving father of four, grandfather of eight, and great-grandfather of three—passed away peacefully, to be reunited with Ivy in the glory of God’s kingdom.
The Cremation Garden of Victory Memorial Park lies among rolling lawns and towering evergreens that sway gently in the wind. The air is crisp and clear. The silence is broken only by the chattering of birds flitting among the trees and by the ripple of a stream that catches the dappled sun and casts its light heavenward. This quiet glen beautifully evokes the Psalm of David that Dean and Ivy loved: “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.” Here Dean and Ivy will be laid to rest together. May they dwell in the House of the Lord forever.
Dean is survived by daughters Evelyn (Jerry) Moore and Karen (Tony) Cavezza; sons Edwin (Caroline) Boundy, and Howard (Sarah) Boundy.
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