Hannah Rachel Schwartz

Hannah was born on our fourth wedding anniversary. She should be celebrating our 50th with us, if Elise and I are so blessed to make it that far, but that was not to be. After a long illness, we lost our beautiful daughter in the early days of the New Year.

Hannah was a determined and inquisitive child from the youngest age. She read voraciously, drew and painted for hours, and would not accept a superficial answer to any question. Visiting Ottawa museums, she would lag behind, studying every exhibit intently, such that we would have to backtrack anxiously to find her in the crowd. Walking with our beloved pup Gracie on the coldest winter nights, Hannah would demand that we grill her on her multiplication tables. Never could we stop at 12; I was always straining to calculate 16x16 in my head to check her work as we walked.

A Christmas weekend at the Chateau Montebello meant swimming in the enormous indoor pool with Hannah and her sisters Emily and Lily clinging to my back. They could swim, but nothing was more grand than to have Daddy do all the work. It was only a couple of years later that I would be reading a book poolside into the evening while Hannah completed the 100 laps she insisted she needed to do, for reasons never explained.

Hannah played competitive soccer and hockey from childhood through high school. In truth, these sports did not come naturally to her. She was often tentative and uncertain, struggling with the pace of play. But when a test of painful endurance was required, then she would shine. Running laps around the soccer field before or after practice she had to be first; likewise skating the Minnesota Mile at hockey practice. One year, soccer training was held at a field next to a steep hill, with a requirement to run to the top and jog back down a few times. Hannah would stay on the course running circuits up that rutted dusty trail, long after the others were packing their bags and collecting their water bottles. Hannah had done well with swimming as a young child. But with three daughters, and the number of activities increasing, it was easiest and natural to stream all of them into the same two sports. I often wonder if we let Hannah down by that; she probably would have excelled in an endurance activity and felt a sense of accomplishment and confidence she didn’t otherwise find.

Schoolwork was not without its tears. Hannah could not let a project go and hand it in and was usually still hard at work on it during breakfast the morning of the final deadline. When I once asked why the cover page of a written assignment needed such elaborate artwork, she looked at me in frustration, explaining that if it wasn’t worthwhile to do a 110% job then it wasn’t worth doing at all. Another time, after hours on the kitchen floor carefully cutting small squares of sandpaper to make tiny shingles for the roof of a popsicle stick house Hannah was building, she admitted the house wasn’t required but seemed like a good adjunct to her English essay.

But this all made her a fine student. Hannah was a Silver Medalist at the Glebe Collegiate Institute in Ottawa, graduated with First Class Honours in the Life Sciences program at Queen’s University, and was in the second year of her Master of Science degree in Cellular and Molecular Medicine in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa.

No, this shouldn’t read like a resume. Please forgive that. There will be no graduation dinner at which to tell these stories and raise a toast.

Hannah carried her love of drawing and painting through her life. Our home is full of canvases she painted based on themes we proposed to her and many more were gifts for grandparents. A box of new coloured pencils given to her for Christmas this season wait unopened on the mantle above the fireplace where she liked to warm herself and draw in recent months.

But none of the foregoing matters as much as Hannah’s character and deep compassion. She loved animals, from the horses in the early days of horsemanship lessons at the long-gone equestrian centre in Nepean, to Goody the bull at the Agricultural Museum on the Central Experimental Farm, through the lifetime of family pets. Our photo records are dominated by pictures taken of cats Oscar and Wilbur who were with us before Hannah was born, and on to Fluffy the rabbit (an abandoned domestic rabbit rescued from the front lawn), to our dog Gracie who accompanied Hannah on so many long walks and adventures, and finally to our kitten Georgie, who joined us in October and was a comfort to Hannah in these last months.

Hannah was a caring person. She was very involved in the Best Buddies program for those with intellectual and developmental disabilities while she was in high school and at Queen’s University. Returning to Ottawa for graduate school, Hannah spent many weekends volunteering at the Roger Neilson Children’s Hospice. She found working with the children there with life-limiting illnesses to be uplifting and inspiring.

Hannah’s giving nature continued to the end. Through the Trillium Gift of Life Network, she became a donor of eye tissue, heart valves, skin, bone, and other tissue. We take some solace in that as she would have wanted it to be no other way.

Perhaps an obituary should not contain so much first-person narrative or take such a personal tone. But I am not writing to provide an account of a person who lived a long life and the aim is to celebrate and memorialize the person, their experiences, and their accomplishments. I write instead as a grieving parent, sharing the loss of a beloved child, taken far too young. No parent should have to write their child’s obituary.

I was there at Hannah’s birth. Tired and lacking sleep. Tedium. The coarse blue and white sheets. Then suddenly she was at risk of inhaling meconium and her pulse dropping. At once there must have been seven people in the room wheeling in a series of carts. I vividly remember the obstetrician saying “this baby is coming out now” and the tugging. It all went well, and I was left standing there with tears on my cheeks and I saw the medical staff glancing up at me as they left the room. I kissed Hannah on her scalp.

Twenty-three years later I come into the same kind of room, with the same coarse blue and white sheets. Hannah is so small and still. What hair she has is thin and flattened to her scalp. I kiss her now cool forehead once again.

Why?

The ultrasound, the folic acid, no coffee, childbirth classes, coming home from the hospital with the new car seat. Then bath time, bedtime stories. Mothers’ groups and play dates. Artissimo at the National Gallery, Kumon, piano lessons, swimming lessons, skating lessons, extra soccer practice, French tutoring. University applications, references. All of it, stretching into distant memory. Yet we have ended up here. Life is a mystery.

Thank you to the so many compassionate, thoughtful, and hardworking staff at the Kingston General Hospital, the Ottawa Hospital, Ottawa Paramedic Service, and other organizations who helped Hannah.

To my beautiful daughters Emily and Lily—thank you for being so brave and letting your father lean on you for support so many times. Please let your mother and me be part of your lives forever, and wherever your future leads you.

Finally, no one could ask for a better wife and mother than Elise. She has devoted everything to her family. There is too much to explain. For now, I will just mention the many weeks she slept in a chair at Hannah’s bedside, on different occasions spanning months, caring for Hannah when she was in the hospital, and her tireless efforts encouraging, sustaining, and supporting Hannah in recent years in an effort to help her be well. No one else could have done it, and we will never forget your sacrifices.

Hannah is survived by her parents David and Elise Schwartz, her sisters Emily and Lily Schwartz, her maternal grandparents Alice and William McGill, her aunts and uncles Regina and David Corrigan, Jennifer McGill, Brian Schwartz, Amy and Alistair Franke, Jonathan and Shelley Schwartz, Daniel Schwartz and Irene O’Brien, and Sarah and Dennis Froese, and cousins Alex and John Corrigan, Gabrielle Franke, Lincoln and Elton Schwartz, and Carmen and Branden Froese. She is predeceased by her paternal grandparents Bernard and Janet Schwartz.

Hannah, we all love you so much and hold you close to our hearts. It is inexplicable why you had to leave us so soon. We will carry your memory with us always, and hope to be reunited someday in a better place.

Hannah would have welcomed donations made to the Roger Neilson Children's Hospice, or to the worthy cause of your choice.