Caryn Mladen.Courtesy of family
Caryn Mladen: Traveller. Dancer. Wordsmith. Friend. Born Feb. 23, 1965, in Scarborough, Ont.; died Sept. 17, 2020, in Vancouver, of unknown primary cancer; aged 55.
Standing below five feet tall, Caryn was a force to be reckoned with. Caryn was born to Macedonian parents – Mary and Tom – and grew up with her older brother, Michael, in Scarborough, Ont. She spoke like an adult as a small child and could read by the age of 3; her family realized she was highly intelligent, but it was the school system that ranked her IQ higher than Einstein’s. In high school, she overcame any intellectual challenge and finished Grades 12 and 13 at Woburn Collegiate in one year, achieving 100 per cent in most classes, including the ones she self-taught. She could not, however, do a cartwheel and our friendship began with a negotiation: I would teach her how to do a cartwheel, she would share her mastery of dancing.
Caryn graduated from the University of Toronto in 1986, earned a law degree from the University of Victoria and then practised law in Toronto. In the early 1990s, she mastered the internet when it was still in its infancy.
Caryn never fussed with material possessions or worried about climbing the corporate ladder, but her successes were many and varied. She worked with technology privacy groups to protect human rights in North America and Africa, became co-editor-in-chief of America Online’s print magazine and co-authored five computer, business and self-help books (one was used as expert testimony in a Silicon Valley intellectual-property trial).
She travelled frequently and loved making use of her fluency in four languages. She visited almost 60 countries, immersing herself in the local cultures. She spent a night in a Bedouin cave (where she claimed to hear the best pick-up line: “There are no mosquitoes in my cave”), lived with a witch doctor in Kenya, and, upon her solo arrival in a remote Syrian village, locals invited her to be the guest of honour at a wedding.
She was in South Africa to celebrate the release of Nelson Mandela, and in Namibia to celebrate when it became an independent country. She travelled to Bhutan before it was open to visitors and hitchhiked via yacht through the Mediterranean. It wasn’t all fun: She seriously injured her knee in a motorcycle accident in Portugal (where the doctor told her she would recover, but “with a scar like that she would never find a husband”) and was so badly bitten by a poisonous spider in either Bhutan or India that she almost lost a leg.
Caryn had only one niece and one nephew, but her stardust made her the adopted favourite aunt of many. She preferred skipping to walking and stopped to dance when buskers were at play. She adored her beloved dogs, Steve and Pilot. She refused to throw out expired chocolate and would laugh at her own jokes. But, as her aunt remembers, “Watching her react to her joke cracked me up more than the joke itself.”
Caryn’s fairy-tale romance gave her the most joy. She met Sandro Furini later in life. With all her accomplishments, true love was the one thing that had eluded her for so long. They married in December, 2014, in a surprise wedding. Her family arrived, expecting a party, and discovered Caryn had prepared a skit, complete with her wedding dress under her clothes, a marriage certificate, an officiant, self-penned Dr. Seuss vows and a cake and flowers from the local grocery store (because, in Caryn’s own words, she was no bridezilla).
Her marriage was the last item on her bucket list and with all the experiences she crammed into her life, it is hard not to ponder what the next few decades would have been like with her in this world.
Susan Tereposky is Caryn’s friend.
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