Obituary: Helen Doreen (Nan) Mullen

11 August 1933 –  28 October 2022

On 11 August 1933, Helen Doreen Stalmach was born on a farm in Brewer, Saskatchewan surrounded by a large extended family of Austrian and Polish immigrants. At the age of 14, she moved with her parents to Nanaimo, BC, where she met her neighbour, Patrick Howard Mullen. In her diary entry that day, she confided that she found him “tall, not dark, but handsome”. Seven years later, she married him. They lived in Chase River near their families until, in 1964, they bought a beach cottage, and later a houseboat, in Sechelt, BC, where they made their life and their living from the woods and the ocean that they both adored.

Doreen was determined and kind, pragmatic and cheeky, sharp and loving,…