Obituary for Henry Plett Friesen
Our Dad Henry P Friesen was born on May 22, 1921 in St Anne, Manitoba to John Eidse Friesen and Gertrude (Plett) Friesen. He was born again into his eternal home Saturday May 28, 2022, just after his 101st birthday.
Dad only needed 7 years of school to acquire enough formal education to lay a good foundation for a lifetime of learning. Dad spent a lot of time reading, and in his last weeks in the hospital he could often be found in his room reading his Bible that he loved so long and knew so well, but never well enough for his own satisfaction. On one visit family walked in to his hospital room and saw a nurse on one knee beside Dad sitting in his wheelchair, both reading the Bible. That is Dad - a lover of God and people to the end. And beyond.
Dad grew up in what is now the Blumenort area, with 7 brothers and 5 sisters, who all preceded him, plus one sister who died in infancy before Dad was born. Dad’s comment in recent years was that it felt a bit like he was being kept after 4, when all of his family was going home and he had to stay. This was never said with bitterness as he loved his family here and continued to enjoy new friends all of his life, but in his last days he was ready to go. Trudy was wheeling him around the hospital one day and asked him where he would like to go. His response was “Take me to where the stairs go up to heaven.”
He learned to work on the family farm, where the horsepower was actual horses, and horses were also the mode of transportation to church and school. From horses to tractors, planes, trains, and automobiles, space travel and internet communication, Dad saw a lot of change in his lifetime and managed all of it with sanguine aplomb. During the COVID isolation mandates he marveled at how he could speak with and see all of his children scattered from Steinbach and Winnipeg to isolated farms in the frozen tundra near Fisher Branch and yet somehow the pictures and messages got through to his iPad with amazing clarity and unconfused.
World War 2 and the attendant conscription presented Dad with challenges as he stood before judges to make his case as a conscientious objector to serving within the war machinery of his country. Dad’s determination to follow in the ways of Jesus the Prince of Peace and the God of love who gave his own body for others, compelled him to refuse his country’s call to take up arms against fellow human beings. After he successfully pleaded his case he was assigned alternative service for the duration of the war. These assignments included work in lumber camps in Norquay and he developed a lifelong love for the woods. Later in life he spent hours in the woods on his home farm blazing walking trails that became a community attraction, trails that his grandson Dylan now maintains in loving homage to his beloved grandfather.
Dad began farming as a young man in the St Anne area, and bought a Ford tractor with a full set of implements for the princely sum of $1200. He did well and quickly became an enticing eligible bachelor. He never told tales of his courtship but we recall Mom telling of walking down the country roads on a Sunday afternoon with her friends when this handsome bachelor stopped to offer them a ride. Mom surreptitiously made it clear to her friends that the front seat with the driver was hers and the rest, as they say, is history.
Mom and Dad were married July 11, 1948 in a double ceremony with Mom’s younger sister Katherine who also had a Henry she wanted to keep. Both couples honeymooned in the Lake of the Woods as the start of many years living close together. When Mom and Dad moved to Morweena in 1960 they found homesites across the road from each other and shared joys and sorrows, farm equipment, work and play, into retirement.
Dad was baptized in the Blumenort church and became active as a songleader, deacon, and minister. He participated in planting the Ridgewood church, and was the Blumenort representative in the first EMC Mission Board. Mom and Dad were sent to Mexico to support the churches in 1957 and again in 1967. Mom and Dad moved to Morweena in 1960 to start a new farm and a new church in a new to them community near Arborg. Dad lead this church until 1984 when he resigned and became engaged in supporting churches in other far-flung communities.
Soon after this move Mom and Dad experienced tragic loss when two of their sons Alfred (age 12) and John (age 6) were killed in a farm tractor rollover in 1965. Dad challenged people who tried to console them by saying it must have been part of God’s plan. It is a testament to his deep faith in a loving God that Dad refused to accept that the God he believed in would plan such tragedy. In 2002 the oldest daughter Bernice (age 52) was taken far too soon after a brief battle with ovarian cancer. Ten years later the love of his life went home on her 87th birthday after 63 years of marriage. Dad’s tenacity in maintaining a positive outlook through all of these experiences leaves us in awe, and is an everlasting challenge to us.
Dad spent his life loving God and people and bringing both loves together, farming in Manitoba, and doing stints of service in Mexico (Los Jagueyes and Tamaulipas), Texas, Kansas, Belize, and Paraguay. This resulted in relationships that enriched their lives, and ours. Mom and Dad blessed and were blessed in these travels, enjoying a twilight honeymoon together.
Dad’s service of love was not always well received, as is frequently the case, but his gentle persistent love changed lives, and people initially annoyed but his persistence now speak with deep respect for the genuine caring Dad showed. Several times Dad faced threats of physical harm because of his work. In one particular instance when he was threatened with a whupping, his response was that he had not often been spanked by his father and might benefit from a whupping, but he wanted to sing a song for his challengers first. When he opened his eyes after singing his song, the people who threatened to whup him had all left. Once again, gentle love won over threatening animosity.
Dad loved plants, but a trip without Mom to the Butchart Gardens, which normally would have been a real treat for him, turned into a speed-walking competition in which the comments lamenting Mom's absence outnumbered the comments about the beauty. Another trip to the Royal Botanical Gardens a few years later, accompanied by Mom, was a much more leisurely affair in which the flora and fauna were nostalgically savoured as they sauntered hand in hand.
Mom and Dad were not only lifetime partners, but life time sweethearts and lovers, and that sentiment was palpable in almost everything they did and provided a powerful example for their children in their future relationships. We like to imagine them strolling heavenly gardens hand in hand, together again at last and for always. They can no longer come to us, but we go to them.
We cannot adequately express our appreciation for the community that has been an immeasurable support to Dad over through the years. Dad loved his place at Assisted Living, but much more he appreciated the people. The staff and residents quickly learned to love our Dad dearly and they gave Dad the best of care. Family visited Dad a few months after he moved into Assisted Living and found him broken hearted about losing a very dear friend. We wondered which of his lifelong friends had passed, but it turned out it was one of the residents he had met since moving into the complex. Dad loved deeply, cared expansively, and forgave freely.
Thank you to the staff and residents of Assisted Living, Arborg Hospital, and Arborg Personal Care Home. Thank you to Doctor Loudon, Dad’s physician for many years, who developed a deep friendship and a relationship of mutual respect with Dad. Thank you to Doctor Donnelly who cared for Dad during his last hospital stay. You have been nothing less than God's angels sent to care for Dad, and you will never know how much your actions meant to Dad and the family. You did so much more than take care of Dad, you genuinely appreciated him and cared about him, and for that we are humbly and eternally grateful. We will never again be able to forget that no matter what the actual faults of our health care system, and decisions we wish had been made differently, there are stellar people working in a flawed system who genuinely care for the people they serve with profound respect. May God bless you.
We want to thank the Morweena community that has supported Dad and us through the years and in our time of loss. Thanks for the visits, and the delicious meals that were provided so generously. Thank you to everyone who helped today. We appreciate your support. Thank you. Moutich veeda.
The Friesen Family.
Dad only needed 7 years of school to acquire enough formal education to lay a good foundation for a lifetime of learning. Dad spent a lot of time reading, and in his last weeks in the hospital he could often be found in his room reading his Bible that he loved so long and knew so well, but never well enough for his own satisfaction. On one visit family walked in to his hospital room and saw a nurse on one knee beside Dad sitting in his wheelchair, both reading the Bible. That is Dad - a lover of God and people to the end. And beyond.
Dad grew up in what is now the Blumenort area, with 7 brothers and 5 sisters, who all preceded him, plus one sister who died in infancy before Dad was born. Dad’s comment in recent years was that it felt a bit like he was being kept after 4, when all of his family was going home and he had to stay. This was never said with bitterness as he loved his family here and continued to enjoy new friends all of his life, but in his last days he was ready to go. Trudy was wheeling him around the hospital one day and asked him where he would like to go. His response was “Take me to where the stairs go up to heaven.”
He learned to work on the family farm, where the horsepower was actual horses, and horses were also the mode of transportation to church and school. From horses to tractors, planes, trains, and automobiles, space travel and internet communication, Dad saw a lot of change in his lifetime and managed all of it with sanguine aplomb. During the COVID isolation mandates he marveled at how he could speak with and see all of his children scattered from Steinbach and Winnipeg to isolated farms in the frozen tundra near Fisher Branch and yet somehow the pictures and messages got through to his iPad with amazing clarity and unconfused.
World War 2 and the attendant conscription presented Dad with challenges as he stood before judges to make his case as a conscientious objector to serving within the war machinery of his country. Dad’s determination to follow in the ways of Jesus the Prince of Peace and the God of love who gave his own body for others, compelled him to refuse his country’s call to take up arms against fellow human beings. After he successfully pleaded his case he was assigned alternative service for the duration of the war. These assignments included work in lumber camps in Norquay and he developed a lifelong love for the woods. Later in life he spent hours in the woods on his home farm blazing walking trails that became a community attraction, trails that his grandson Dylan now maintains in loving homage to his beloved grandfather.
Dad began farming as a young man in the St Anne area, and bought a Ford tractor with a full set of implements for the princely sum of $1200. He did well and quickly became an enticing eligible bachelor. He never told tales of his courtship but we recall Mom telling of walking down the country roads on a Sunday afternoon with her friends when this handsome bachelor stopped to offer them a ride. Mom surreptitiously made it clear to her friends that the front seat with the driver was hers and the rest, as they say, is history.
Mom and Dad were married July 11, 1948 in a double ceremony with Mom’s younger sister Katherine who also had a Henry she wanted to keep. Both couples honeymooned in the Lake of the Woods as the start of many years living close together. When Mom and Dad moved to Morweena in 1960 they found homesites across the road from each other and shared joys and sorrows, farm equipment, work and play, into retirement.
Dad was baptized in the Blumenort church and became active as a songleader, deacon, and minister. He participated in planting the Ridgewood church, and was the Blumenort representative in the first EMC Mission Board. Mom and Dad were sent to Mexico to support the churches in 1957 and again in 1967. Mom and Dad moved to Morweena in 1960 to start a new farm and a new church in a new to them community near Arborg. Dad lead this church until 1984 when he resigned and became engaged in supporting churches in other far-flung communities.
Soon after this move Mom and Dad experienced tragic loss when two of their sons Alfred (age 12) and John (age 6) were killed in a farm tractor rollover in 1965. Dad challenged people who tried to console them by saying it must have been part of God’s plan. It is a testament to his deep faith in a loving God that Dad refused to accept that the God he believed in would plan such tragedy. In 2002 the oldest daughter Bernice (age 52) was taken far too soon after a brief battle with ovarian cancer. Ten years later the love of his life went home on her 87th birthday after 63 years of marriage. Dad’s tenacity in maintaining a positive outlook through all of these experiences leaves us in awe, and is an everlasting challenge to us.
Dad spent his life loving God and people and bringing both loves together, farming in Manitoba, and doing stints of service in Mexico (Los Jagueyes and Tamaulipas), Texas, Kansas, Belize, and Paraguay. This resulted in relationships that enriched their lives, and ours. Mom and Dad blessed and were blessed in these travels, enjoying a twilight honeymoon together.
Dad’s service of love was not always well received, as is frequently the case, but his gentle persistent love changed lives, and people initially annoyed but his persistence now speak with deep respect for the genuine caring Dad showed. Several times Dad faced threats of physical harm because of his work. In one particular instance when he was threatened with a whupping, his response was that he had not often been spanked by his father and might benefit from a whupping, but he wanted to sing a song for his challengers first. When he opened his eyes after singing his song, the people who threatened to whup him had all left. Once again, gentle love won over threatening animosity.
Dad loved plants, but a trip without Mom to the Butchart Gardens, which normally would have been a real treat for him, turned into a speed-walking competition in which the comments lamenting Mom's absence outnumbered the comments about the beauty. Another trip to the Royal Botanical Gardens a few years later, accompanied by Mom, was a much more leisurely affair in which the flora and fauna were nostalgically savoured as they sauntered hand in hand.
Mom and Dad were not only lifetime partners, but life time sweethearts and lovers, and that sentiment was palpable in almost everything they did and provided a powerful example for their children in their future relationships. We like to imagine them strolling heavenly gardens hand in hand, together again at last and for always. They can no longer come to us, but we go to them.
We cannot adequately express our appreciation for the community that has been an immeasurable support to Dad over through the years. Dad loved his place at Assisted Living, but much more he appreciated the people. The staff and residents quickly learned to love our Dad dearly and they gave Dad the best of care. Family visited Dad a few months after he moved into Assisted Living and found him broken hearted about losing a very dear friend. We wondered which of his lifelong friends had passed, but it turned out it was one of the residents he had met since moving into the complex. Dad loved deeply, cared expansively, and forgave freely.
Thank you to the staff and residents of Assisted Living, Arborg Hospital, and Arborg Personal Care Home. Thank you to Doctor Loudon, Dad’s physician for many years, who developed a deep friendship and a relationship of mutual respect with Dad. Thank you to Doctor Donnelly who cared for Dad during his last hospital stay. You have been nothing less than God's angels sent to care for Dad, and you will never know how much your actions meant to Dad and the family. You did so much more than take care of Dad, you genuinely appreciated him and cared about him, and for that we are humbly and eternally grateful. We will never again be able to forget that no matter what the actual faults of our health care system, and decisions we wish had been made differently, there are stellar people working in a flawed system who genuinely care for the people they serve with profound respect. May God bless you.
We want to thank the Morweena community that has supported Dad and us through the years and in our time of loss. Thanks for the visits, and the delicious meals that were provided so generously. Thank you to everyone who helped today. We appreciate your support. Thank you. Moutich veeda.
The Friesen Family.