Alan George Williamson

Alan was born on September 26, 1944 in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba.

He died of heart failure on July 14, 2026 at his home in Gravenhurst, Ontario.

Alan had coronary bypass surgery in 2014, which barely slowed him down. An aortic valve replacement and pacemaker were added in 2024, and he was climbing ladders and skipping up stairs (a habit from childhood) days later. On Tuesday July 14 after his morning walk, he texted photos of himself playing with his grandsons in the lake when they were little. He visited his wife Marianne on the memory floor of Muskoka Shores care home and fed her lunch. Later that afternoon, he drove to Bracebridge where he passed his driving test, then celebrated with friends and sundaes. At 6 PM, he texted me about what a good day it had been. He made himself dinner, and then fell asleep in his chair. At 7:30, his pacemaker detected a failure and attempted a defib reset, which failed.

Alan had spent every waking moment since October 10, 1964 caring for his bride and their two sons. He gave up an apprenticeship in accounting for the security of a job with Bell Canada when Marianne was pregnant with Bob. The company moved his family from Fort Frances to Rainy River, and then finally to Sioux Lookout when Scott was born. Alan stuck with a job he didn't like as a telephone installer, and advanced to a job he didn't like managing the central office. I don't think he ever took a sick day - he was keenly aware that the town depended on him for their only connection out, on aging equipment. He was often called out during storms, and he maintained phone systems all over the north.

But his best work started after 5 PM. He taught himself to play the piano, extending his boyhood accordion lessons. He remodeled the kitchen of their first home before he turned 25, and turned the basement into a play space for the boys, where a crate with wheels became a ride-in car that he would push for hours with a broom handle. He built his first ice rink in the back yard on top of their vegetable garden, and when his 6-year-old son thought it would be cool to have a ramp to zoom down onto the ice, he built that too (it didn’t work). Taking design advice from children would become a common theme throughout his life. If Marianne thought the results were insane, well, he’d just do it over again. Our annual Christmas trees were the most common examples of that process.

When they moved up the street into a bigger place, he built a cardboard submarine in the next basement - the only one ever made with its own lightbulb powered by a hand-cranked generator, and of course, onboard telephone service and piano bar, with snacks delivered through the rope-and-pulley hatch. When they outgrew that, Alan built a Commodore 64 computer play station with its own Faraday cage to attenuate display noise. Then he knocked down the back wall of the house to add a 400 square foot sun room and hot tub.

At their cabin on Hannah Lake, he added a screened porch dining room and a bedroom with home made bunk beds for the kids, and a night-time bathroom for Marianne, who was not fond of his custom outhouse with its eerie translucent green roof and glass phone booth door. He built a dock among the lakeside rocks and rigged a 30-foot guy-wired pole out over the water for a tarzan swing. He cut his own cross-country ski trail through a few km of bush one summer, and groomed it in winter with an old bed spring dragged behind the snow machine. Through it all, we spent weekends fishing, waterskiing, camping, playing crokinole on his home-made board, square dancing, imagining, making, and laughing. Alan's boundless energy carried us on a thousand thousand adventures.

Marianne and Alan designed their dream home in 1989 and built it on Butterfly Lake, 15 miles south of Sioux Lookout. He did most of the finish carpentry, plumbing, and electrical work himself. Everything but the drywall, which I suspect was essentially a righteous stand, stemming from his life-long ambition to have the inventor of Phillips-head screws shot. He researched and installed a lake-source heat pump to warm and cool the house, and a two-stage hot water tank to make the most of it, with an eye to efficiency many years ahead of its time. He felled trees, planted trees, and transplanted trees. He cleared brush and hauled sand and logs to make horseshoe pits and a bocce court. He built raised garden beds equipped with a running water sink and drive-thru peas, and watched moose eat the asparagus. In the process, he taught his sons that they could do anything.

When Bell offered an early retirement buyout, he took it gladly, then reinvented himself - returning to bookkeeping for Scott's hardware store. A few years later, Alan and Marianne started over yet again in Gravenhurst. They both picked up their high school instruments and joined the Bifocals Band, full circle from where they had met as teenagers in Fort Frances. Their dancing turned from square to Scottish, and he took it a step further, shocking everyone who knew his quiet way by memorizing Robbie Burns's "Address to a Haggis" and performing it at the top of his lungs. Repeatedly. I'm sure his mother's McBain ancestry inspired him. When one of his new friends invited him to go for a bike ride, he agreed eagerly as he always did, only later learning that the friend was a former pro cyclist. When he finally made it home, he put his bike back on the rope-and-pulley hooks and lifted it up into the garage ceiling. The same pulley probably once raised the hatch of a cardboard submarine.

Alan's attention turned to his grandsons, who gave him three good excuses to turn back the clock once more. He spent hours (days?) preparing for their visits, building gigantic "marble" runs for golf balls using central vac pipe through walls and under stairs, and then encouraging them to dream up their own. His winters were committed to shovelling all of his driveway snow into one pile, reinforced and equipped with a built-in ladder for optimized sliding and tunneling. The list of forts and games and contraptions (often self-propelled and wired up) is truly endless. He would play all day, tuck them in at night, and be up making waffles at first light.

All the while, he showed Marianne that there was no limit to his dedication to her, literally leaping to whatever quest she could devise. Mom told me he had a temper as a young man, but mastered it. I saw him angry only twice in my life - both times when this foolish son had treated her badly. His patience was almost endless, but above all else, he was her knight. She was concerned about healthy food, so he sourced organic wheat berries and ground his own flour and taught himself how to bake. She enjoyed warmth to manage arthritis, so he added a sauna to their basement. She needed a place to sew, so he built a rolling table with an expanding work top, and a room to use it in. He proved it all over again when Alzheimer's took her and he did...everything. When he emerged from that dark half-decade (he called it "the cave") after Marianne moved into full-time care a year ago, Alan re-joined the band and found bright friends and new experiences waiting for him to come out and play again. This he did.

He had an uncanny ability to re-create himself at each phase of his life and become whoever he needed to be to meet whatever challenge. An accountant, electronics technician, carpenter, mechanic, musician who became a haggis-toasting, tech-savvy, emoji-texting bread-baking caregiver. Very few knew all of him. The end at age 81 came so much sooner than we had all imagined. But it came to him in his own self-perfected, semi-automated, wired and pulleyed home, at ease and untroubled by any worry for the family he had sustained and inspired for so long. He never had to deal with any meaningful decline in capability, or linger in a bed. After all those years of work and play and care, he was exactly where he wanted to be. Happily. I can't type that without tears, but they're for us, not for him.

Bye Dad. We loved all of you.

Bob, Jennifer, Scott, Laura, Alan, James, and Thomas,
for his bride, his savior, and his life-long muse, Marianne

Please consider supporting the Bifocals Concert Band (e-transfer to bifocalsband@gmail.com), or the Ontario Alzheimer Society (https://alzheimer.ca/on/en – select Donate and you may choose to “dedicate” your donation in honour of Alan and Marianne if you wish). Condolence messages may be left for the family at www.peacefultransition.ca

Where Whispers Carry

We have this lakeside view of life
And watch it flow like time and care,
Washing away both joys and strife
Or skipping stones like memories there.

The surface shows when touched a wake
But more waves curl beneath unseen,
Caressing hearts designed to break
And lighting minds with what has been.

Warm sun over cool perspective
That buoys old burdens and softens too
Such hindsight overly reflective
Of all the things we thought we knew.

With love I think about my dad
Throwing rocks at a lily pad.

Our laughter splashing on a shore
Profound in shallows. Sharing all.
Unspoken dreams heard over the roar
Of worldly need. We played to fall.

And oh! What wealth! What good we’ve known,
There by our lake, no more to be.
But I remember skipping stones;
I close my eyes and I can see.

 And every ripple draws a tear.
And every cloudless moonlit night,
Where silence echoes calm and clear
With sweet perfection, reflects his light.

 No surprise the dreamers tarry
In the place where whispers carry.

RA Williamson