Frances Margaret Kudelka

1956–2022

Frances Margaret Kudelka died at Chelsey Park in London, Ontario, after a brief illness.

She was born in Newmarket, Ontario, on October 7, 1956, to John and Kathleen Kudelka (née Kellington) and grew up on a dairy and sheep farm nearby, surrounded by her five older siblings and her paternal grandparents, Sandor and Rose Kudelka (Apu and Anyu).

She worked as an autoclave technician at Toronto Western Hospital for forty years, living all that time at the Stanley Knowles Cooperative at Yonge and Eglinton.

She is pre-deceased by her brother Phillip. Left to mourn are her siblings, Peter (Thelma), sister-in-law Maureen, Jan, Matthew (Deborah), and James, her nieces and nephews John (Michelle), Alison (Kevin), Andrew (Susan), Kate (Matt), Anna Kay, and Franklin (Marnie), and her great-nieces and great-nephews Owen, Xander, Isabel, Aaron, Russell,  Zoë, Milo, Harrison, and Arik.

Frances had a steel trap memory for everything to do with life on the farm. She was the one who always remembered what everyone else had forgotten. She loved pizza and going out for ice cream. She liked Stilton cheese and smoked salmon (not at the same time). She liked a very complicated Starbucks drink of her own invention (“Fran’s drink!,” according to the baristas when they saw her coming). She collected bells. She was fascinated by the Titanic and by the Romanov dynasty. She loved her cats, Dimdim and Maxie, and she loved 1930s Hollywood romances (so did Dimdim and Maxie). She never learned to drive a car or ride a bike, but when chronic health problems began to encroach on her life, she learned how to manoeuvre around the neighbourhood with a power wheelchair for as long as her health allowed it. She decided last summer to move to London to be closer to her nieces and nephews, and entered Chelsey Park in October of last year, where she watched Coronation Street with her sister every day, remotely on her iPad, until she died, on Friday, December 9.

Donations in memory of Frances (Aunt Fran) may be sent to Parkinson Canada. We miss her very much.