Margaret 'Chiefy' Frizell.courtesy of the family
Margaret Leonebel (Chiefy) Jackson Frizell: Matriarch. Storyteller. Iconographer. Role model. Born May 26, 1928, in Tsingtao, China; died May 1, 2019, in Vancouver, of hemorrhagic stroke; aged 90.
Margaret spent her youth in the lush interior mountains of China, where her father worked. The Second World War forced her American family to return to Santa Barbara, Calif. It was here that she graduated from Mills College. Later she studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and travelled through Europe. While working as a French teacher at a children’s camp on Vancouver Island, she met Charles George (Chip) Frizell, the lodge’s dishwasher. Chip was a young, war-shattered man from the United Kingdom who had fought in the Battle of Britain and recited poetry from memory. They were a remarkable pair of beguiling individuals and fell in love. They married in 1950.
For more than 65 years they were a formidable team, building homes on Mayne Island, B.C., and in Point Roberts, Wash. They raised three sons, Michael, Paul and Mark. Margaret was an untraditional homemaker, wife and mother. She wore pants, smoked cigars, ignored housework and shared coffee with the mailman in broad daylight. And she created a home full of love and acceptance, providing a place for neighbourhood children to play and enjoy fresh baking. Later, it was bacon and eggs in the middle of the night for young men returning from parties drunk or stoned.
As her nickname suggests, Chiefy was indeed the boss. She never sweated the small stuff and picked her battles in a household of boys and men carefully; however, once she made a decision about what was important, she was a force to be reckoned with. She once insisted Chip turn down an offer of waterfront land because she didn’t want her boys playing on the cliff’s edge.
Chiefy had a wild and fascinating mind. She had an iron will and was connected to the strong values of her Catholic faith. In her presence, you felt special: She would tilt that head covered in cotton-candy-textured white hair and listen respectfully and intently. In the 1960s she wrote radio plays for the CBC and was a talented iconographer: Learning the craft from a local, she would grind pigments and apply gold leaf to make the sacred images.
Margaret had a great fondness for cookbooks, which she read with the tenacity of novels, and amassed a large collection. She liked collecting. At one time, Chip was exasperated to discover more than 100 suitcases in the carport filled with dress-making materials, toys, personal writings, wool, pattern books, photographs, newspaper clippings, plant seeds, drawings, art equipment and so on.
Chiefy could be whimsical and silly; joyful and optimistic. She also demonstrated a tremendous fondness for martinis, butter, Hawaii and all things Parisian.
Chiefy was a fierce defender of her sons, who she loved with every fibre of her being. As one of her son’s partners, I would be told, on numerous occasions, to "be nicer” to him. I have never witnessed three more devoted and loving men to their dear mother.
Chiefy’s end was sudden. After a full day, attending mass, lunch with Michael and enjoying a drive along the beach, Chiefy suffered a stroke and died a few days later. She is buried next to Chip, who died in 2014, in the Gardens of Gethsemani, Surrey.
She was many things to many people.
Debra Dolan is Michael’s partner.
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