Obituaries

With heavy hearts we said farewell to a beloved wife, our beautiful mother, loving grandmother and great grandmother on November 6, 2023. In her 90th year, Jewell passed peacefully, surrounded by loving family.

Mum was born in Richmond, Cumberland County, Nova Scotia to Elizabeth (Lizzie Miller) and Clarence Hape. She was an active and curious child and could often be found doing anything from fishing with a branch, rope and a safety pin to teaching herself to knit under the kitchen table so her siblings wouldn't tease her for engaging in a "granny" pastime. Her love of sewing and needlework later became a career as a Singer sewing teacher and repair technician. Besides sewing and knitting, she taught herself to crochet, needlepoint and cross stitch among other crafts. Mum was always very artistic and could do anything she turned her hand at. Her work was always immaculate or faced being pulled out to correct an error. Many a time she could be found sewing all night and into the early morning hours making clothes for Linda and Joel, she even made their underwear. She quite often used material from old clothes people would give her. She’d cut them down and resew them to fit her children. She used to supply some of the tourist gift shops on the marsh between Amherst and Sackville, NB with wee dolls that she sewed Celtic outfits for, including Nova Scotia tartan kilts, tams, sashes and blouses. She made many Halloween costumes as well as dance and figure skating outfits during Karen's dancing and figure skating years. Her needlepoint hobby occupied her free time until she discovered cross stitch which was more challenging. She loved a challenge and learning new things. Mum made hundreds of intricate cross stitch pictures as well as beautiful Christmas stockings for her family and even some of the fur family members. These works of art will be treasured forever. More recently, she discovered a new challenge: puzzles. However, she would only take on anything 1000 pieces or more as anything less was too easy.

Mum enjoyed playing sports. She was always being asked to play baseball with the neighbourhood boys and she loved skating and tobogganing in the winter; swimming, riding a bicycle and camping in the summer and just generally enjoying the outdoors as long as there weren't any bees nearby. As an adult, she joined a bowling league and enjoyed playing weekly. She found her true athletic calling when she was introduced to the sport of curling by her husband, Tom. She not only curled for fun in the Day Ladies League, where she made numerous friends, she excelled at competitive curling during her many years at Dartmouth Curling Club. She was a Nova Scotia Masters champion twice and valued for her front end skills.

Mum spent many years taking care of her family, a job she did well. She was kind and fair, but heaven's forbid you got on her "last nerve" at which point the wooden spoon would come out and get whacked on the kitchen counter. She broke many wooden spoons over the years, but always seemed to have an endless supply. That same wooden spoon also stirred many meals and baked goods including batches of chocolate chip cookies, Scott's favourite and one he frequently requested.

She started earning money as a young girl when she cleaned houses. She always put aside part of her earnings to attend the local dance. As a young adult her first job was working at Grant’s General Store in Wallace then after moving to Amherst she worked at McLeod’s Jewellers and for Singer Sewing Machine Company. She took a secretarial course at night school while raising two young children and started her first clerical job at Douglas & Rodgers Insurance in Amherst. She was offered a position at Dorchester Penitentiary as a secretary which she enjoyed and where she was given her famous boiled icing recipe.

She loved to travel, especially to Florida for a month or two in the winter as she didn't like the cold weather. After Dad's retirement they enjoyed many trips including Florida, Europe, a riverboat cruise on the Rhine and a trip on the Rocky Mountaineer which included a visit to Alaska. Mum was one heck of a car driver too. She taught herself to drive when she was 12 years old by driving her father's vehicle up and down the driveway until he got after her for burning all his gas. She could drive anything through all kinds of weather and terrain. One time she was driving through a snowstorm with her two oldest children in one of her Volkswagen Beetles (she always had secondhand ones) on their way to Dartmouth to visit her sister, when she got to the big hill going through Wentworth Valley at Folly Mountain there were cars and trucks including tractor trailers stuck all over the hill. Mum said “Hold on, I’m not stopping, if I do we’ll be stuck too.”. So she put the pedal to the metal and steered around all the stuck vehicles and made it up the hill and all the way to Dartmouth.

Jewell is survived by her husband Thomas, children Linda Foley (Wayne), Joel Campbell (Margaret), Karen Bateman (Ted), Scott Bateman (Lorna), stepdaughter Kelly Corbett (Brian and family), grandchildren Adam, Danica, Darcy, Aimée, Alexander and Megan, and nine great-grandchildren. Besides her parents, she was predeceased by her sisters Jean Muriel (in infancy) and Ethel Leger, brother Carl Hape, and grandson Chad Foley.

Visitation will take place at the Austenville Owl’s Club on Tuesday, November 14th from 2-4pm (34 Oakdale Cres., Dartmouth) and a funeral service at St. Thomas Anglican Church in Fall River on Wednesday, November 15th at 11am.

Many thanks to the Palliative Care team and to the wonderful staff and volunteers at Hospice Halifax, all of whom were so very kind and helpful. In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to Hospice Halifax, where Mum received excellent care in her last days, or to a charity of your choice.