Family, friends, colleagues bid farewell to Lindor Reynolds

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This article was published 22/10/2014 (4001 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Lindor Reynolds planned her own funeral.

A few hundred close friends, family, colleagues and readers filed into Holy Trinity Anglican Church to mark the passing of the award-winning columnist today.

The service, from its opening organ prelude to its final video with an Elvis Presley video medley of gospel tunes, was as much a tribute to her family, friends and the readers of the Winnipeg Free Press as it was to her. It was perfectly Lindor.

Reynolds died last week after a 15-month battle with brain cancer, much of which she chronicled in her blog and in stories that she bookended, first with the devastating diagnosis and then her final thanks to readers after two decades of columns.

The Rev. Mervin Lanctot delivered a sermon that encapsulated her work in an opening sentence when he said, “Lindor was a Winnipeg personality… people from all walks of life have come up to me and said, ‘I didn’t always agree with her columns but I always wanted to read what she had to say.’ She will be missed.”

Her best friend, Cate Harrington, offered a personal and moving account of Reynolds’ private side through the lens of friendship that tracked back to their university days.

Winnipeg Harvest executive director David Northcott eulogized Reynolds’ gift for touching people deeply and shared her love of good chocolate through a friendship that predated her work as a columnist. Winnipeg Free Press editor Paul Samyn read from the New Testament, Rev. 21:1-7, the famous alpha and omega passage about heaven on earth, the birth of a new Jerusalem, and the second coming of Christ.

It was the music, however, that left mourners smiling through their tears, such as the hymn His Banner Over Me. It was set to the tune of Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me, on steel guitar and organ. The video finished the hour-long service, with Elvis belting out Battle Hymn of the Republic, crooning the Joan Baez standard, All my Trials, and ending with his rendition of Dixie Land.

“Shortly after her diagnosis, Lindor began planning for this day… I thought we’d have more time to sift through 38 years of friendship, to find the moments that mean so much but we didn’t… I realized our friendship had no ending,” Harrington said.

Reynolds was 56. She is survived by a husband, mother, a daughter and son-in-law and three stepdaughters.

Reynolds’ remains are to be interred at the St. John’s Cemetery, 135 Anderson Ave.