BEATRICE JOYCE HUME (GRIFFEN)

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BEATRICE JOYCE HUME (nee GRIFFEN) On Wednesday, January 21, our dear mother, Beatrice Joyce Hume finally came to the end of her long road, passing quietly and peacefully, surrounded by family, after an eight day stay at St. Boniface Hospital. In life, Joyce was a graceful, sophisticated, and elegant woman who comported herself with rigorous dignity, finding immeasurable joy in the company of her family and a fierce singular pride in their achievements. She was an educator, both professionally for a time, and as a matter of course throughout her life, sharing insights, observations and understanding with generous enthusiasm. Joyce loved language, music, art and drama, and carefully invested her children with an appreciation for all of these. At the same time, Joyce was possessed of a remarkable core of iron strength, having known, endured and thrived in the hardships of her Canadian experience -- from the Great Depression on the prairies to Flin Flon's often brutal northern Manitoba winters. This was not a hypothetical or ceremonial toughness. In her seventies, while driving alone on the Thompson highway and having found the facilities at Ponton not to her liking, she ducked into the woods for a rest stop, slipped, fell and broke an ankle. She walked back to her car, finished the drive, and called family from the ER at Thompson General to let them know she'd had a bit of trouble, but hadn't wanted to bother anyone before getting it looked after. Joyce is survived by three children Peter, Heather, and Bob whose wife is Leanne; three grandchildren Lenore (Jack McGee), Lindsay (Jason Gigian), and Vivian; and four great-grandchildren Hailey, Wyatt, Emmett, and Huck; sister-in-law Deanna Griffen; and her nieces Darian (Chris Stroud) and Cathy (Chris Carberry). She was predeceased by her husband Gerald Guy Hume. On September 24, 1920 Joyce was born at Miss Till's Nursing Home in Winnipeg to Frederic and Martha Griffen. She spent her childhood in Pelly, Saskatchewan and Swan River, Manitoba. She had three siblings, a brother, Richard, and two sisters, Violet and Addie. Neither of Joyce's parents were formally educated, but both learned by doing. Like everyone else, they were strapped for cash during the Depression. Joyce's mother, a resourceful businesswoman who had a hair salon and later managed a grill canned food and did embroidery and crochet for extra income. Her father ordered an arch-top mantel radio from a Chicago paper for $12.50 which, when it arrived, filled the house with jazz and big band music from America. Joyce later interpreted many of those tunes on the piano, which she played with a deft touch and beautiful phrasing until the year she passed away. Joyce's post-secondary education, which began in 1936 (two weeks shy of her sixteenth birthday) took her to United College and the University of Manitoba. She graduated in 1940 with multiple awards, including the Fletcher Gold Medal. During that time, she was awarded several scholarships, most notably to the Banff School of Fine Arts. In her fourth year, she received the highest Sociology mark awarded (98%) and tied a francophone student from St. Boniface for the highest mark in French Literature. Also that year, she came within an eyelash of earning a scholarship to study at The Sorbonne in Paris. Following graduation, a high point of her work as a teacher at Swan River Collegiate was assisting returning World War II vets in picking up the pieces of their lives and resuming their high school studies. She was offered a principalship, but instead chose to apply for work in Flin Flon, Manitoba. It was there that she first saw Guy Hume. "It was," she said later, "the warm, brown eyes, bushy eyebrows and open smile." They were married in Swan River on July 2, 1949. Peter arrived in 1951, and Heather followed in 1952. The 50's and 60's in Flin Flon were a golden age of sorts for Joyce. No less than four of Guy's brothers and their wives as well as his sister, Thelma, lived there. They were a powerful social force, an active and boisterous group. While Joyce ran the household, first on Tweedsmuir and then on Creighton Street, Guy served on City Council (53 or 54) and was involved with the Coop, the Machinists' Union, the Legion, the Masons and the Shriners, He was also an avid curler, and ran for mayor twice. Shortly after Bob was born in 1966, Peter and Heather moved away. Peter eventually settled in Thompson, where he worked for Manitoba Hydro. Heather studied at the Ontario College of Art and worked at the Health Sciences Center before eventually settling into a long career at Great West Life. Peter has migrated to Calgary, Heather has recently retired, and Bob now teaches high school overseas. In 1974, Joyce and Guy began work on a cabin at Bakers Narrows, which they owned and enjoyed for almost a decade. Working feverishly in the short summers, they moved every single piece of the rough lumber used to build it themselves, first hauling it by station wagon from a saw mill on the Old Road, and then hand-carrying it up a steep slope to the hill-top building site. And there, they assembled it, piece by piece, until it was done. If Joyce had a regret, it was that the cabin passed from their hands after so short a time spent enjoying the fruits of their labour. Following Guy's sudden death in 1989 while returning to Manitoba from BC, Joyce moved to Winnipeg, and started a new chapter of her life, living first on Fort Street, and eventually taking an apartment at Portsmouth Retirement home. Her sister Violet had died in the 80's. Her sister Addie had passed away a decade later. Her brother Richard died in 2006. And now, Joyce's journey has ended. We, her family, are sad, but, as she would want us to be, proud of our mother for she met death exactly the way she lived life: gracefully and with careful, deliberate dignity. In the last months of her life, Joyce's thoughts turned inevitably to the completion of her journey. In reference to the large group of Humes that had once been such a central presence in her life, she acknowledged, "I'm the last one." There was no greater source of pride or pleasure in Joyce's life than her children, and the children they had in turn. "I never told myself," she said, "that there would be such a wonderful feeling of riches when the children are adults, and they distinguish themselves. It is an epiphany. It is serendipity. It is an unforeseen bonanza." (continued...)

As published in Winnipeg Free Press on Jan 24, 2015