In loving memory of a life well-lived and deeply cherished.
Obituary
Maria Wilhelm was born on May 10, 1934, the youngest of three children, in the village of Lichtental, in current-day Moldova, then part of Romania. Her childhood, on a farm with kind and loving parents, in a region dotted with Romanian, German, Ukrainian, and Russian-speaking villages was undisturbed – for a while.
The outbreak of WW2 led to her family’s displacement to East Prussia (part of Poland), and ultimately to Germany in the final days of the war, as the family fled ahead of the advancing Red Army. Both her brother and father had been drafted to fight, but only her father returned. She often spoke lovingly of her lost brother. The memories of those times of danger, tragedy and hunger stayed with her the rest of her life and became a touchstone and memory to contrast against the better times ahead.
After the war, there was no going back to Romania, instead her family emigrated to Canada in 1949. There at age 19 she met Walter Steinke, a handsome, hardworking immigrant to Canada, who was also a German-speaking exile from war-torn Romania. They married and built a house on a country road outside of Georgetown, living beside the home of her sister and parents. They grew vegetables, kept chickens, worked hard, and started a family. Tragically, their first child (Werner) died as an infant. But Willi and Richard followed.
While raising her family and caring for parents, Maria also worked as a waitress and cleaned houses – but lived for dancing, bowling, music and her Readers Digest Condensed Books collection. When she was a child, her family had only two books – the Bible and Grimm’s Fairy Tales. She and Walter began setting that straight, starting a library that ultimately grew to over 7000 books.
In 1970 the family moved to Pickering Village, due to Walter’s new job in the emerging high-tech sector of advanced, computerized communications. Maria was a tireless hockey and soccer mom, continued to work, and began to hone her massage skills – skills that were in her mother’s set of healing practices, born of necessity in a rural land with few doctors. With her amazingly strong hands, she gave out massages, healing, and health advice to anyone who wanted those things and to some people who didn’t, or at least until they gave into her insistence that they could and should receive the relief and healing of her hands, and advice on detoxification, elimination of lactic acid and how to think right on all matters of health. The advice was free, but the massage part ultimately became a business – Maria Steinke – Acupressure Massage. In those days, you could find her meditating in the sun with crystals strategically placed on vital Qi points and Meridians, or vibrating on her custom-build sonic massage table with 12 sub-sonic woofers vibrating stress and toxins into non-existence.
The massage business was one project close to her heart. Building a cottage, and being a grandparent, were two others. Acquiring a piece of land with a small cabin on a lake near McKellar, she and Walter built a proper and spacious cottage, after the unfortunate (but ultimately fortuitous) loss of the original log cabin to fire. They worked hard to build a spacious cottage, with cathedral ceilings no less. Meanwhile, Maria kept up with her massage clients down south. Over a few years, the cottage was filled with vases, stained glass, and other decorous items – the type of things that she didn’t have in her childhood on farms in eastern Europe. It was also filled with perfectly serviceable furniture that the less frugal had, strangely, discarded.
While Maira and Walter were finishing the cottage, four grandchildren arrived, all of whom needed massage, care, and healing as soon as, and as frequently as possible. Maria was more than up to that challenge and necessity. Although she was quick to admit that genes accounted for a large portion of her grandchildren’s brilliance (with some acknowledgement to the parenting), only proper massage and healing could guarantee their future. But she also dispensed caring and kindness in equal quantities to the healing, delivering one kind with hands, the other with words.
Maria’s health declined in her later years, but each setback was, in her mind, just a prelude to self-healing and recovery. Her broken leg, she said, was a blessing in disguise and an opportunity to further investigate the healing potential of concentrated meditation and self-massage, all while lying in bed. To some people, it may have looked like she was sleeping, but she asserted it was no such thing - it was deep healing with her mind. Although her hands were not quite as strong as they used to be, that didn’t matter, because her years of intuitive practice led to the discovery of just the right parts of her legs to work on, in just the right way.
In her last few years Maria talked more and more about her childhood. She often spoke about seeing Russians and Allied soldiers meet and share food on the banks of a river in Germany which she and her mother and sister crossed to get to the non-Russian side – and how fortunate that was and how fortunate she was to come to Canada and build a new life, build two homes, and raise a family.
She didn’t want to leave her home in Ajax, even after her husband Walter died. She distrusted the idea of retirement homes, and worried she might not be able to align her bed on the crucial north-south line of restorative energy. Instead, she accepted in-home support and developed strong relationships with several of her caregivers, who she called her blue angels. But after suffering a stroke and spending two months in hospital with decreased mobility, she moved to The Village of Humber Heights and found that a retirement home wasn’t so bad at all. She enjoyed the concerts and visiting musicians, recalling that she had sung in a choir for many years, and had learned to play the accordion. The staff were caring, and importantly some of them needed massaging! A number of the staff and even a few residents would seek her healing hands. Her massaging gift continued to bring joy and give her life meaning up until she died.
Maria was devoted to a number of neighbours and others she met through her community activities in addition to childhood friends and relatives she maintained contact with in Germany.
Maria was a dedicated mother and wife, always happy to help her children and grandchildren in any way she could. She tirelessly tended to Walter, especially in his later ailing years. She is fondly missed but her memory endures.
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Together, let us continue the legacy of compassion and kindness that Maria embodied throughout their life.
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