Shirley Anastasia Casey: Journalist. Oracle. Neatnik. Napper. Born July 18, 1925, in Winnipeg; died July 3, 2025, in Richmond, B.C., from pneumonia; aged 99.
Shirley Anastasia Casey.Courtesy of family
“Your aunt is fine,” the nurse at Vancouver General Hospital tells me. “She’s being released on Friday.”
“That’s great!” I reply.
“And she’s decided to have a medically assisted death on Thursday,” the nurse says.
That sounded just like Shirley Casey.
At eight years old she considered herself the head of the family when her siblings James and Anita were born. By 1936, when her railway worker father moved the family to Vancouver, she was already writing stories and poems and helping her mother learn to read.
As a headstrong, 17-year-old aspiring journalist she bypassed the want ads and went directly to the homes of newspaper editors and publishers to ask for jobs. A few years of writing for the Vancouver Sun (her favourite assignment was interviewing coloratura soprano Miliza Korjus) lead to a career in public relations at Vancouver General Hospital.
She credited her fast rise to her knack with a sentence, her ability to read people (and tarot cards), and the gold ring she wore on her wedding finger. She wasn’t married and never would be; she just wanted the men she worked alongside to leave her alone. In her 30s she traded her career for caretaking, first for her parents and then for an aunt and even for her sister Anita’s family.
We’d shake our heads over meddling phone calls about something she “saw in the cards” (an accident at work, a sudden illness) and yet because she was sometimes eerily correct we could never entirely ignore them.
When her parents and aunt died, Shirley was in her 70s and alone again. She spent her time walking, reading tarot cards and badgering her financial adviser about her investments to the point he limited her to one phone call a week.
She was alone in her apartment (which she cleaned and dusted every day) when she fell just before her 96th birthday. She took herself to the hospital, was diagnosed with a hairline fracture in her arm, and learned that her age made her a candidate for MAID.
Shirley Casey was always proud of her ability to read people and tarot cards.Courtesy of family
She was ready, she said, having already prepaid ($750) for her own funeral in 1999. As her nephew, I argued that her arm was healing; she argued she “wanted to get things over with.”
I convinced her to come to Richmond and live with my mother and me.
Now the headstrong woman who took care of everyone else and loved order was being taken care of – sort of. Her meals were to be served at the same time each day. Her bed was to be changed twice a week and the crystal candy dish beside it better be full of Werther’s Original éclair toffees. But with every demand there was always a “please” and a “thank you” with a kiss on my cheek as a tip.
She turned her bedroom into a library, a symphony and an art gallery all at once. Obscure classical music would play on her stereo, books by Ernest Hemingway would be neatly stacked on her polished coffee table, a large 18th-century oil painting of a sailing ship in a heavy, ornate frame hung on the wall. She learned to relax and enjoy naps, often saying she’d be fine if she closed her eyes and never woke up.
We’d wake each other up during 2 a.m. washroom breaks and sneak into the kitchen (where the WiFi signal was strongest) for YouTube parties. There, she’d put in the earbuds and we’d sing and dance to Andy Williams, John Travolta and k.d. lang. And then we’d sneak back to our beds, bleary-eyed the next day. We’d whisper that we couldn’t do that any more – and then do it again the next night.
In late June, Shirley began napping more, reading the tarot cards less, and asking for her dessert before dinner or not at all. At bedtime I gently asked, “what’s going on?”
“It’s just me being old,” she said with a sigh. “I AM 99.”
The woman who liked to “get things over with” went into the hospital on Wednesday and died there on Thursday. But this time she was not alone. I held her hand, kissed her forehead, and wished her a nice, long nap before her next big adventure.
Christopher DeVito is Shirley Casey’s nephew.
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