July 20, 1931 – September 23, 2022
Anna Neufeld passed away peacefully at the age of 91 years on September 23rd, 2022 in the Garry J. Armstrong Long Term Care Home in Ottawa. She was born on July 20th, 1931 in Olinda, Ontario to Henry and Agnes Neufeld. Anna was a sister to Jake, John and Henry, and was the first child to be born in Canada after the family fled the Mennonite colonies in Ukraine in 1929. The family grew by three more children in the following years, with Bill, Agnes and David.
As a young adult, Anna attended Canadian Mennonite Bible College in Winnipeg, where she met Dick Neufeld. They were married in 1955, and their life together took them on many adventures and to many different homes in Canada and beyond. They shared a love of music, and were known in their early years to sing duets, as well as participate in choral singing.
Anna was a strong and independent woman. Throughout her life, she embraced opportunities to learn and to contribute to her family and her community. This included employment, such as cooking in a halfway house for recovering alcoholics in Sudbury, working with MEDA in Jamaica, and working in accounting at the Newcomer Center in Calgary. It also included many volunteer roles at church, and more recently in the Seniors’ Residence where she and Dick lived in Ottawa.
Anna and Dick loved travel, an active life, good food and playing games with family and friends. Some of their adventures included kayaking in British Columbia, walking through rural England, and travels to Peru, Bolivia, Tanzania, Guatemala, Mexico, Switzerland (among others). They lived and worked with MEDA for six years in Kingston, Jamaica. Anna also visited the Ukraine to tour the Mennonite colonies from which her parents had emigrated.
Anna expressed herself through many creative activities including knitting, soap making and particularly writing – whether it was communicating with her family through letters, working through her grief on the loss of her sister, Agnes, or sharing family history through story writing. In her later years, she documented daily life writing over 2,840 haikus. She was proud to complete and publish a biography of her parents. In 2001, Anna won a CBC Alberta Anthology Award for her story, “Let Him Go.” In 2020 at age 89, Anna was interviewed a second time by the CBC, when she completed a fundraising climb of Mount Kilimanjaro by walking a circuit in her one bedroom apartment while in lockdown due to COVID. This determination to keep active and to live with purpose was a defining characteristic throughout Anna’s life.
Anna is survived by her son Kenneth David and daughter-in-law Cheryl Frankiweicz, son Philip Albert and daughter-in-law Leslie Buckland, daughter Karen Anne, daughter Lynnette Marie and son-in-law Ricardo Rodriguez, her six grandchildren, Hannah Lynn, Allijah Taylor, Kate Sara, Nicole Sofia, Andrew Mark Roy Solo, Dylan Alejandro, and her great-granddaughter Kaliya Jade. She is also survived by her sister-in-law Anne (Jake), brothers John and Henry, her sister-in-law Evelyn (Bill), her brother-in-law Peter Nickel (Agnes), and her brother David and sister-in-law Sue. She was predeceased by her husband, Diedrich Neufeld, her parents, Henry and Agnes Neufeld, and by her brother Jake, sister-in-law Elizabeth (John), sister-in-law Elna (Henry), her brother Bill and her sister Agnes. A memorial will be held to celebrate Anna’s life on November 19th at 1 pm (MST) in Calgary Inter-Mennonite Church. The service will also be available on Zoom, and a link will be shared in the near future. In lieu of flowers, contributions to MEDA or MCC are welcome.
