Lily Aulin Matriarch. Volunteer. Education advocate. Traveller. Born April 12, 1930, in Shalka, Alta.; died April 22, 2018, in Salmon Arm, B.C.; of complications of diabetes; aged 88.
Lily Aulin.The Globe and Mail
Born in Shalka, Alta., the second youngest of 11 children, Lily Aulin and her siblings made their own fun. They had no toys but played ball or hide and seek when they weren’t weeding the garden, picking berries, gathering eggs or plucking chickens.
Lil, as she was known, though her mother used her Ukrainian name, Ukaletza, had to leave school after Grade 10 because there was no high school in her tiny village. She moved from the farm to Edmonton for secretarial college. She would say she was “flabbergasted” at hearing 50 typewriters clattering away but was soon typing 70 words a minute and became a secretary at Canada Packers. She enjoyed the perks: being able to visit the coolers to get some garlic sausage or pig jaws for dinner.
In 1949, Lil travelled to her brother’s wedding in British Columbia, where she met John. He was so shy, he spoke to her while looking up at the ceiling. They wrote love letters for two years. When she returned for a second visit to Chase Creek, John proposed under a harvest moon. They were married two weeks later.
Perhaps because she couldn’t go far in school, one of the many things Lil and John shared was respect for education. They impressed upon all their children how important it was; all six went to college.
Lil never sat still for long, becoming an integral part of the community of Chase, B.C., devoting countless hours to the museum, health centre and the United Church. She volunteered at school, too, from the time her oldest started in 1958 until her youngest graduated in 1988. From her huge garden, Lil canned tomatoes, made jam and pickles. She was always on the hunt for mushrooms and baked the best golden bread, for which she won blue ribbons at the local fall fair. People still talk about the candied apples she spent all Halloween day making to shell out.
After decades at home and as a volunteer, Lil put her writing skills to work (she was a whiz with words, whether completing crosswords or creating contest jingles) as a reporter for the Chase paper. She was also elected to the school board as trustee.
Lil was gracious. She was 40 when she had her youngest, and when Melanie asked if she was an accident, Lil said: “No. You were an unplanned treasure.” She was also quirky: Lil did not like be dropped in upon. Sometimes when she saw a neighbour on her way over, she hid below the window with the kids and pretended not to be home.
When John died in 2006, Lil was devastated. But she carried on gracefully, and became a world traveller, visiting her parents’ birthplaces in Romania and Ukraine; touring Tokyo and Taipei; crossing North America from Alaska to Hawaii and from Las Vegas to the Maritimes.
Lil always looked forward to having her kids visit and would protest when we did the cooking, because, of course, she could never keep still.
Virginia Aulin is Lil’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 to tgam.ca/livesguide