Obituary for Barbara Alice Cantwell
Barbara Alice (Burns) Cantwell
February 10, 1955-April 1, 2021
Not a whole lot more needs saying but that she was perfect, even if it is her husband saying it.
She was my sweetie for 48 years, and my dear wife for 41.
Obituaries are traditionally written in the third-person omniscient, but not this one. I’m the writer in the family, and this one is too personal.
I’ll tell you a lot of the usual stuff, along with some details you don’t always get in these things.
Barbara was a preemie baby. Her mother, Gertrude Katherine Burns, and father, Mark Wilton Burns Jr., had recently flown across the country from Massachusetts to Seattle with their young Catholic family, relocating for my future father-in-law’s job as a representative of Pratt & Whitney, which sold aircraft engines to Boeing.
Barbara credited her mother’s air travel for her premature debut on the world stage. When her mother went into labor five weeks early, her father, already with four young children to look after, plopped her mother in a taxi. The driver hustled her to the nearest hospital, at what would become Northgate shopping mall. Barbara always said she was born to shop.
The family eventually grew to include seven sisters – Mary, Kathleen, Ann, Barbara, Julia, Margaret and Sarah – and a lone brother, Mark W. Burns III.
After an early childhood in and near Seattle, Barbara as a girl moved with her family to Melbourne, Australia, where her father took another post with Pratt & Whitney. Her Aussie upbringing would set her apart from the American crowd for much of her life. As an Australian teenager, she was a bit of a rebel in the family. She wore a fringed leather vest and marched for peace in the early 1970s, and she and a Melbourne friend whose father was an American diplomat conspired to surreptitiously paste a “U.S. Out of Vietnam Now!” sticker on the bumper of his official car. Her siblings remember her as “the cool sister” and a kind friend.
Her father’s career took them back to Seattle when Barbara was 16. We met as students at Sammamish High School in Bellevue when I was 16. She was 17 -- gorgeous, blue-eyed, and with a sexy Australian accent. I was the lucky kid she chose. Our first kiss was when she gave me a big smooch on the lips as she bade good night on New Year’s morning 1973 with her (soon-to-be-ex) boyfriend in the car seat next to her.
Together with other friends, we ran the high-school newspaper. She was a talented photographer with a darkroom in her family’s downstairs bathroom.
Barbara earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Washington in the late 1970s. She specialized in America’s colonial period, and usually knew more about Thomas Jefferson than anybody else in a room.
She was smart, creative and witty, as well as being stubborn and tenacious once she’d made a choice for herself. When I went to Florida for college at age 18, she wrote lovely letters to me every day. I returned to Seattle after one term. Later in life, when I journeyed on my own as a travel writer, she always packed my bag and put little notes in every item of my clothing, just to remind me I had a loving wife at home. I never strayed. At the same time, she made no secret that one of her favorite films was “Shirley Valentine,” about a former teen rebel who in midlife leaves her boorish husband and takes up a new life on her own in the Greek isles. Like Shirley, Barbara would be nobody’s doormat.
A voracious reader of history, mystery, fiction and nonfiction, Barbara worked in libraries from the time she was a teen. It became a lifelong calling, and she stood firmly against censorship and in support of the right to read.
After we married on December 15, 1979, Barbara moved from library to library as I moved from newspaper to newspaper over the years. In the Skagit Valley, she split her time between being sole employee of the then-one-room La Conner Library and curating the library at the Skagit County Historical Museum, where she also designed popular exhibits about pioneer life. In the Yakima Valley, she was librarian for a rural elementary school, where she came up with reading contests the students (and principal) loved. In Portland, she brought her quick mind to the pre-Internet telephone reference line, on which patrons would call with questions both routine and bizarre (e.g., the weight of a common housefly). In later life, working at the University of Washington, she helped channel donated materials to the appropriate university libraries, as well as distributing surplus books to libraries in need, scattered from Sri Lanka to West Africa.
In Portland, Barbara also served in her all-time favorite job, as librarian aboard the county’s bookmobile, roving as far as the tiny burg of Bonneville in the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. She had a talent for stocking shelves with books geared to the regular patrons at each stop. That experience inspired a series of three mystery novels that she and I co-authored in the past eight years: “Murdermobile,” “Corpse of Discovery,” and, written during COVID-19 quarantine and published just four months before her death, “Iced, With Sprinkles,” all under the banner of Portland Bookmobile Mysteries. We had started Book 4 shortly before she passed away.
In recent years, she was also working on a mystery of her own, a gender-bent Sherlockian story featuring time-traveling lesbians. She avidly researched details and corresponded with sources in the United Kingdom.
Above all, Barbara loved being mother to our daughter, Lillian Freelove Cantwell, born in Portland in 1991 and named for my great aunt Lil and Barbara’s great aunt Freelove. “It’s a virtue name, like Faith, Hope and Charity,” not a 1960s hippie holdover, Barbara would explain. Freelove Princetta Burns of Nova Scotia helped raise Barbara’s father, whose mother died when he was a young child.
Once Lillian was born, Barbara never worked full-time, saving her hours to be with our daughter after school. By that time, we lived on our 32-foot sailboat, Sogni d’Oro (the Italian version of “sweet dreams”), and Barbara made sure Lil never came home to an empty boat.
Among our adventures was a two-year hiatus from jobs in the mid-1990s to sail off into the sunset with our three-year-old child. We made it as far as the Sea of Cortez in Baja, Mexico, for a great adventure among sun and surf. When spouting blue whales followed us into a bay, a protective Barbara held Lillian up and called out, “We have a baby on board!”
Perhaps her greatest, loving gift to me and Lillian came when I became a travel writer for The Seattle Times and began traveling far and wide. Barbara recalled when she was a girl and her father traversed the Pacific for his job. The kids got gifts when he returned, but they didn’t get to go along. “Take your daughter with you,” she urged me. Barbara would stay home with the cats.
Thus began more than a dozen years of annual father-daughter trips, starting from the time Lillian was 10. Our destinations ranged from a sea-turtle sanctuary in Costa Rica to a little-visited Mayan ruin in jungles of southern Mexico. I will forever be thankful for the bonds forged with my daughter on those adventures. Barbara gets the credit.
Barbara and Lillian enjoyed their own mother-daughter travels, to Boston, Victoria and places they loved. Sampling good bars and bakeries often topped their itineraries. Lillian holds the memories dear.
Barbara also enjoyed travel with us as a family, from chartering a yacht in the British Virgin Islands with dear friends, to a farm-stay on a remote sheep station in Queensland, to a delightful 50th-birthday trip to Paris. She especially loved Hawaii. She was always happy to meet new people, and her friendly smile and kind manner served her well.
Barbara also was blessed with the quiet skill to make herself and people around her happy. She was an excellent, creative cook and a welcoming hostess. She could be an obsessive knitter, producing quirky woolen miniatures, such as Bernie Sanders in his famed Inauguration Day 2021 sweater. In our final years, retired on Center Island in Washington’s San Juans, she was a beloved neighbor in a tightly knit community.
Barbara was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in May 2016. She quietly but steadfastly did all she could to fend off her illness, and thanks to her own efforts and a combination of mainstream and alternative medicine we had four very good years. Her final year, coinciding with the COVID pandemic, was challenging, as medications began to fail her. Extraordinarily generous, loving help from friends and family helped us endure the tough times.
Barbara left this life on April 1, 2021, at age 66, after spending her final days with Lillian and me in the island cabin she loved, surrounded by family photos and artifacts from our travels. She was in no pain. She simply fell asleep and didn’t awaken. Lillian’s vision is that her mum is gone on a long walk on Oregon’s Cannon Beach, another of her favorite places. We’ll all meet up again when she’s ready.
Barbara Alice (Burns) Cantwell was the love of my life, my best friend who could always make me laugh. She was the best mother a girl could have. She will live forever in our hearts.
--Brian J. Cantwell
Please***Do Not Send Flowers!!
In lieu of flowers, donations are encouraged in Barbara’s memory to:
• Northwest Literacy Foundation, striving to enhance youth literacy in the Pacific Northwest by providing literature and resources to underserved communities, https://nwliteracy.com
• The American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, to help fight censorship and support the nationwide observance of Banned Books Week, https://ec.ala.org/donation/OIF-0000-INTELL.
February 10, 1955-April 1, 2021
Not a whole lot more needs saying but that she was perfect, even if it is her husband saying it.
She was my sweetie for 48 years, and my dear wife for 41.
Obituaries are traditionally written in the third-person omniscient, but not this one. I’m the writer in the family, and this one is too personal.
I’ll tell you a lot of the usual stuff, along with some details you don’t always get in these things.
Barbara was a preemie baby. Her mother, Gertrude Katherine Burns, and father, Mark Wilton Burns Jr., had recently flown across the country from Massachusetts to Seattle with their young Catholic family, relocating for my future father-in-law’s job as a representative of Pratt & Whitney, which sold aircraft engines to Boeing.
Barbara credited her mother’s air travel for her premature debut on the world stage. When her mother went into labor five weeks early, her father, already with four young children to look after, plopped her mother in a taxi. The driver hustled her to the nearest hospital, at what would become Northgate shopping mall. Barbara always said she was born to shop.
The family eventually grew to include seven sisters – Mary, Kathleen, Ann, Barbara, Julia, Margaret and Sarah – and a lone brother, Mark W. Burns III.
After an early childhood in and near Seattle, Barbara as a girl moved with her family to Melbourne, Australia, where her father took another post with Pratt & Whitney. Her Aussie upbringing would set her apart from the American crowd for much of her life. As an Australian teenager, she was a bit of a rebel in the family. She wore a fringed leather vest and marched for peace in the early 1970s, and she and a Melbourne friend whose father was an American diplomat conspired to surreptitiously paste a “U.S. Out of Vietnam Now!” sticker on the bumper of his official car. Her siblings remember her as “the cool sister” and a kind friend.
Her father’s career took them back to Seattle when Barbara was 16. We met as students at Sammamish High School in Bellevue when I was 16. She was 17 -- gorgeous, blue-eyed, and with a sexy Australian accent. I was the lucky kid she chose. Our first kiss was when she gave me a big smooch on the lips as she bade good night on New Year’s morning 1973 with her (soon-to-be-ex) boyfriend in the car seat next to her.
Together with other friends, we ran the high-school newspaper. She was a talented photographer with a darkroom in her family’s downstairs bathroom.
Barbara earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Washington in the late 1970s. She specialized in America’s colonial period, and usually knew more about Thomas Jefferson than anybody else in a room.
She was smart, creative and witty, as well as being stubborn and tenacious once she’d made a choice for herself. When I went to Florida for college at age 18, she wrote lovely letters to me every day. I returned to Seattle after one term. Later in life, when I journeyed on my own as a travel writer, she always packed my bag and put little notes in every item of my clothing, just to remind me I had a loving wife at home. I never strayed. At the same time, she made no secret that one of her favorite films was “Shirley Valentine,” about a former teen rebel who in midlife leaves her boorish husband and takes up a new life on her own in the Greek isles. Like Shirley, Barbara would be nobody’s doormat.
A voracious reader of history, mystery, fiction and nonfiction, Barbara worked in libraries from the time she was a teen. It became a lifelong calling, and she stood firmly against censorship and in support of the right to read.
After we married on December 15, 1979, Barbara moved from library to library as I moved from newspaper to newspaper over the years. In the Skagit Valley, she split her time between being sole employee of the then-one-room La Conner Library and curating the library at the Skagit County Historical Museum, where she also designed popular exhibits about pioneer life. In the Yakima Valley, she was librarian for a rural elementary school, where she came up with reading contests the students (and principal) loved. In Portland, she brought her quick mind to the pre-Internet telephone reference line, on which patrons would call with questions both routine and bizarre (e.g., the weight of a common housefly). In later life, working at the University of Washington, she helped channel donated materials to the appropriate university libraries, as well as distributing surplus books to libraries in need, scattered from Sri Lanka to West Africa.
In Portland, Barbara also served in her all-time favorite job, as librarian aboard the county’s bookmobile, roving as far as the tiny burg of Bonneville in the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. She had a talent for stocking shelves with books geared to the regular patrons at each stop. That experience inspired a series of three mystery novels that she and I co-authored in the past eight years: “Murdermobile,” “Corpse of Discovery,” and, written during COVID-19 quarantine and published just four months before her death, “Iced, With Sprinkles,” all under the banner of Portland Bookmobile Mysteries. We had started Book 4 shortly before she passed away.
In recent years, she was also working on a mystery of her own, a gender-bent Sherlockian story featuring time-traveling lesbians. She avidly researched details and corresponded with sources in the United Kingdom.
Above all, Barbara loved being mother to our daughter, Lillian Freelove Cantwell, born in Portland in 1991 and named for my great aunt Lil and Barbara’s great aunt Freelove. “It’s a virtue name, like Faith, Hope and Charity,” not a 1960s hippie holdover, Barbara would explain. Freelove Princetta Burns of Nova Scotia helped raise Barbara’s father, whose mother died when he was a young child.
Once Lillian was born, Barbara never worked full-time, saving her hours to be with our daughter after school. By that time, we lived on our 32-foot sailboat, Sogni d’Oro (the Italian version of “sweet dreams”), and Barbara made sure Lil never came home to an empty boat.
Among our adventures was a two-year hiatus from jobs in the mid-1990s to sail off into the sunset with our three-year-old child. We made it as far as the Sea of Cortez in Baja, Mexico, for a great adventure among sun and surf. When spouting blue whales followed us into a bay, a protective Barbara held Lillian up and called out, “We have a baby on board!”
Perhaps her greatest, loving gift to me and Lillian came when I became a travel writer for The Seattle Times and began traveling far and wide. Barbara recalled when she was a girl and her father traversed the Pacific for his job. The kids got gifts when he returned, but they didn’t get to go along. “Take your daughter with you,” she urged me. Barbara would stay home with the cats.
Thus began more than a dozen years of annual father-daughter trips, starting from the time Lillian was 10. Our destinations ranged from a sea-turtle sanctuary in Costa Rica to a little-visited Mayan ruin in jungles of southern Mexico. I will forever be thankful for the bonds forged with my daughter on those adventures. Barbara gets the credit.
Barbara and Lillian enjoyed their own mother-daughter travels, to Boston, Victoria and places they loved. Sampling good bars and bakeries often topped their itineraries. Lillian holds the memories dear.
Barbara also enjoyed travel with us as a family, from chartering a yacht in the British Virgin Islands with dear friends, to a farm-stay on a remote sheep station in Queensland, to a delightful 50th-birthday trip to Paris. She especially loved Hawaii. She was always happy to meet new people, and her friendly smile and kind manner served her well.
Barbara also was blessed with the quiet skill to make herself and people around her happy. She was an excellent, creative cook and a welcoming hostess. She could be an obsessive knitter, producing quirky woolen miniatures, such as Bernie Sanders in his famed Inauguration Day 2021 sweater. In our final years, retired on Center Island in Washington’s San Juans, she was a beloved neighbor in a tightly knit community.
Barbara was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in May 2016. She quietly but steadfastly did all she could to fend off her illness, and thanks to her own efforts and a combination of mainstream and alternative medicine we had four very good years. Her final year, coinciding with the COVID pandemic, was challenging, as medications began to fail her. Extraordinarily generous, loving help from friends and family helped us endure the tough times.
Barbara left this life on April 1, 2021, at age 66, after spending her final days with Lillian and me in the island cabin she loved, surrounded by family photos and artifacts from our travels. She was in no pain. She simply fell asleep and didn’t awaken. Lillian’s vision is that her mum is gone on a long walk on Oregon’s Cannon Beach, another of her favorite places. We’ll all meet up again when she’s ready.
Barbara Alice (Burns) Cantwell was the love of my life, my best friend who could always make me laugh. She was the best mother a girl could have. She will live forever in our hearts.
--Brian J. Cantwell
Please***Do Not Send Flowers!!
In lieu of flowers, donations are encouraged in Barbara’s memory to:
• Northwest Literacy Foundation, striving to enhance youth literacy in the Pacific Northwest by providing literature and resources to underserved communities, https://nwliteracy.com
• The American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, to help fight censorship and support the nationwide observance of Banned Books Week, https://ec.ala.org/donation/OIF-0000-INTELL.