Elizabeth Rae Nicholson, 1944-2025

Twenty-four years ago I posted Nicholson Sisters (and Brother Bob), which started:

There are some families you can’t escape.

Everything I wrote about the Nicholsons, all those years ago, has only become more true in the almost-quarter-century since, as kids have grown up (and become opera singers and trumpet players and competitive swimmers and bartenders and videographers), as a slice of the family cemented itself into the provincial burgeoning of the Green Party, as kids have had their own kids.

Through all this, Elizabeth Nicholson—mother, grandmother, great-grandmother—was a regular reader of this blog. 

One of the things I sometimes find myself doing when writing blogs posts is imagining a single reader, a single reader eventually reading what I’m writing. More often than not, it was Elizabeth who I imagined.

We didn’t know each other well, but, somehow, all these words, over all these years, and all my weaving into the life of the Nicholsons, over all these years, made it feel like we knew each other very well indeed.

Elizabeth died last week, and I feel like I’ve lost a close friend.

She will be missed.