Disa Kittila Adelman.Courtesy of family
Disa Kittila Adelman: Grandmother. Motel owner. Artist. Mystic. Born April 17, 1930, in Helsinki, Finland; died April 7, 2023, in Toronto, of sepsis; age 92.
On the cusp of 30, Disa Kittila was still sharing a tiny two-room apartment with her parents. She was also bumping up against the constraints of a struggling postwar Finland where finding work in the art world seemed impossible without contacts. So in 1959, she packed up her hopes and dreams for a commercial art career and set out for Canada. There, the opportunities were said to be boundless.
Within days of arriving in Toronto, Disa stepped into a pizzeria in search of the want ads and met a man who would capture her heart. By 1960, she was in Vancouver delivering Bill Adelman’s pizzas with her infant daughter, Michelle, on the seat beside her. Her son Jason’s arrival a few years later completed the family. By the early 1970s, Disa was in Grand Bend, Ont., toughening her artist’s hands laying concrete and grouting ceramic tiles at the motel she and Bill built brick by brick.
After Disa and Bill separated in 1991, she moved in with her daughter and son-in-law, occupying the lower level of a succession of their homes. In grumpy moments she called her various apartments “the dungeon.” Disa and Bill remained friends. During his visits – which sometimes lasted days – the two could be heard talking and laughing late into the night.
Leyla (one of Disa’s five grandchildren along with Leor, Jasmine, Nina and Liat) would often lead playmates downstairs to see the grandmother she kept in her basement. The girls would find Disa painting, cooking, crocheting or sewing, and ready to relate some marvel, often about animals. Disa gazed intently on her world, always finding its beauty. And she could be silly. Leyla once captured Disa on video, barking like a dog and then wondering out loud what barking dogs are trying to say.
Never demonstrative, Disa loved quietly by doing. She was a great listener and answered every last-minute request to bake birthday cakes, sew clothes, help garden, ferry kids around and shovel snow into her 80s. In her 90s, with the grandchildren grown and opportunities to serve few and far between, Disa finally learned by the example of her granddaughters and ventured to return their many “love you” endearments with her own.
Thanks to Bill, Disa reigned as the non-Jewish matriarch of an entirely Jewish family – at one point even Orthodox. She presided over her annual Christmas Eve dinner, with, other than herself, only Jews at the table. Disa likewise attended every Jewish holiday event hosted by her children. When asked once how she felt about helping celebrate the important holiday of Rosh Hashanah, she said “the food is good.”
Disa was in no way religious, but in every way, spiritual. As she grew older, the veil between the world of the physical and the other of the spirit thinned. She exercised her intuition daily, dowsing for answers to almost every yes/no question that occurred to her. She’d sometimes wake to non-physical people and animals standing by her bed, most of whom she didn’t recognize. For years she was serenaded by the beautiful, rich voice of a male singer no one else could hear – a gift at a time when her physical hearing was failing her.
She also spoke of visits from family members who had died. The most recent was from her brother, whose death had left her bereft. He appeared to her one day looking healthy and happy and in the prime of life as she sat watching television. He bent down to ask meaningfully how she was doing and then shimmered away into nothingness.
As she lay dying, Disa mused deliriously about having had a boy and a girl, her “diamonds.” Not to mention her grandchildren, whose arrival had ushered in what she’d often described as the happiest years of her life.
It was on this family that Disa, the Swedish-Finnish artist, ultimately made her greatest mark.
Michelle Adelman is Disa’s daughter
To submit a Lives Lived: lives@globeandmail.com
Lives Lived celebrates the everyday, extraordinary, unheralded lives of Canadians who have recently passed. To learn how to share the story of a family member or friend, go online to tgam.ca/livesguide