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Gillian Patricia Hamer

5 March 1944 – 20 May 2009


Gillian Patricia Hamer died peacefully of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease in the Ottawa General Hospital on 20 May 2009 with family and friends present. Gill was predeceased by her mother Patricia Hamer (2001) and father Henry Hamer (2003), and is survived by her brother and sister-in-law David and Robin Hamer, and her niece Laura (Hamer) Nazarek, all of Fort St. John, BC.


Gill grew up in Revelstoke where her father was a physician and her mother was a teacher and school counsellor. Gill left Revelstoke after Grade 12 to take business training in Alberta and Saskatchewan. She worked in Kamloops and Regina briefly, and in Red Deer for several years, but mostly she lived in Ottawa, where for many decades she worked in the federal government. Gill had life-long friends from Revelstoke, including the Koshmans, and she kept in touch with classmates from her days at Revelstoke High School.


Gill always had a love of life, and in her last years she kept plowing forward, pulling behind her an ever-lengthening cargo of serious health problems – yet she never had a “Why me?” attitude, but rather with humour and dogged determination she kept going. The Ottawa medical community won’t be the same without her, and her family and friends will remember her feistiness, her humour, and the way she unrelentingly and independently took on life.