Obituary of Sheila Grace Hirtle

Hirtle, Sheila Grace –  Of Middle LaHave, NS, left us this week, her traitorous liver giving in after a long lifetime of good living, good cheer, gourmandizing, travel, and friendship. She was (not quite) 83. Sheila departed her hometown of Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, at 16, to head to New York, where she was schooled in fashion and design, after which she worked as an illustrator, art director, editor of design magazines, and artist (she had several one-woman shows at the Pollock Gallery in Toronto). Along the way she lived and worked in a number of interesting and sometimes esoteric places, including London (where she worked for a young person later to become the renowned entrepreneur Terence Conran), Moscow, for a year or so, Paris, for another year or so, Cape Town, and spent more than a little time in Asturias, Samarkand, Bukhara, Xian, Addis Ababa and, yes, Timbuktu. To get to Cape Town from London she bought a Vespa motor scooter and crossed Europe to Trieste, whence she departed through Suez for Dar-es-Salaam and Zanzibar, before ending up in Durban, still with Vespa in tow. She married Marq de Villiers (married for 59 years and 225 days, alas no longer counting), and accumulated many friends, now of long standing and equally bereft. She leaves behind to grieve her husband, brother Ken, and sister-in-law Linda, cousins Janet and Margie and their families, godson Marq Mellor, and a gaggle of nieces and nephews and sort-of-cousins, all of whom are astonished that she is gone.

There will be no services at this time. Arrangements have been entrusted to Sweeny’s Funeral Home, Bridgewater, where messages of condolence can be made online at www.sweenysfuneralhome.com