Mary Linda Miles Ingram, known as Linda or Nin or Grandma Nina or the Lady of the Lake, passed away peacefully on June 28th at the age of 84, surrounded by her loving family, at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, after suffering a massive cerebral hemorrhage. In lieu of flowers, please consider making a donation to the Heart and Stroke Foundation or to the Nativity of Our Lady at Pikwakanagan in Golden Lake.
After growing up in Toronto in relative luxury with her younger sister Kathy and little brother John, doing all the up-and-coming Toronto society things like debutante balls and being raised largely by nuns, Linda fell in love with a young man she met as part of the theatre group at the University of Western Ontario — she would often go back to his apartment and do the dishes while he called his fiancee, who eventually fell by the wayside, defeated by the charms of this blonde bombshell with the cats-eye glasses.
They became an inseparable team, the director telling everyone where to stand and what to say (or which country and province to move to next) and the young ingenue playing the role of an Air Force officer’s wife, party hostess, mother, and later grandmother, aunt, friend, and walking encyclopedia.
Over the next 40 years, they would move more than 30 times, starting with a tiny apartment above a barn in Zweibrucken, Germany where she raised three young boys while he patrolled the West German border in his Sabre jet, watching for incoming Russian MiGs. From there they went to Edmonton, then Winnipeg — where they both got involved in community theatre, and Linda performed in the Dominion Drama Festival’s production of “Copper Queen” — and then Cold Lake, then Toronto, then Chatham, New Brunswick, then back to a tiny town in Germany where Don worked with NATO, and finally the Netherlands.
They retired to the cottage in the Ottawa Valley, where she tried in vain to enjoy winter sports, then on a whim they decided to answer an ad in the newspaper looking for a couple to run a BnB in the Seychelles islands, and they went off to hack their way through the jungle and learn how to cook fruit bat (which starts with throwing them at the wall in order to tenderize them). Linda even got used to sharing her home with a tortoise, which came with the house.
Linda often seemed like a delicate flower, but she had a core of steel (which she got from her mother Ruth), and she met every challenge with guts and determination, from setting up house in a foreign country or dragging three sullen boys through various airports to the difficulties of widowhood, followed by a series of severe brain injuries, including multiple strokes. She managed it all with grace and savoir faire, and a lot of help from her daughter-in-law Becky, who became Linda’s full-time personal care worker, with every medication and doctor’s name at her fingertips.
Linda even beat COVID-19, which she dismissed like an uninvited dinner guest. Her son Mathew remembers calling the hospital after the diagnosis, fearing the worst, and the nurse said: « She’s sitting up and asked if she could have some more books to read. »
Linda was preceded in death by her beloved husband, Donald Lew Ingram, and is survived by her sons Miles (Carrie), Mark, and Mathew (Rebecca), and grandchildren Lindsay (Keenan), Caitlin (Wade), Scott, Meaghan, Curtis, Zoe, and Rylie. She also leaves her sister Kathy and her brother John (Shelly), and nieces and nephews Christopher, James, Patrick, and Jessica. She will also be missed by what she called her “daughters-in-love,” Diana Ingram and Barb Maxner, and “sister-in-love” Carole Miles.
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June 28 2021
Nos plus sincères sympathies à la famille et aux amis de Mary Linda Miles Ingram Miles June 28 2021..
Décès pour la Ville:Killaloe, Province: Ontario