A bright, sunny, happy 110th birthday party for Manitoba’s most senior citizen

She was born the year women won the right to vote in Manitoba. She was married just days before the beginning of the Second World War. For 77 years, she built a life on her own as a widow, scraping together every penny she could to raise her two young children, somehow still finding time to fill the house with fresh cookies and love.

And on Friday, surrounded by her family and other well-wishers, Mildred Giesbrecht turned 110 years old.

That continues her journey as the oldest living person in Manitoba and, according to one recently updated list, the sixth-oldest in Canada. She’s a grandmother of two, and a great-grandmother of two more; thanks to a community built over a lifetime of hard work, she opened this new year surrounded by love.

“She’s having a really good day,” her 81-year-old daughter Enid Botchett said, chatting Friday morning as birthday guests mingled. “You celebrate when you can. You take these moments.”

To mark the milestone, Enid and her brother Greg Giesbrecht, 79, hosted a sunny birthday party at The Convalescent Home of Winnipeg, where their mother has lived since 2020. Greg’s choir performed a short concert for dozens of guests and other residents; even King Charles and Queen Camilla sent a signed letter to commemorate the occasion.

Though it wasn’t clear how much Mildred understood about the festivities, she seemed invigorated by the positive energy, tapping her fingers in time with the choir’s rendition of Sweet Georgia Brown. When it was time to cut the cake, her eyes sparkled and her smile beamed as she posed for a photo with her children.

For staff at The Convalescent Home, marking Mildred’s birthday was also a rare treat. There are 84 residents at the facility, which is the oldest personal care home in Winnipeg. Most are in their 80s and 90s; several are over 100. But Mildred is the first person that even Convalescent Home CEO Justin Lagace has ever known to reach 110.

“The front-line caregivers, they do fall in love with the residents here,” Lagace said. “It’s such a privilege to look after the elderly. We really have the sense here that people are looking after people like Mildred in a way they would look after their own grandmother. So it’s a really special day today.”

In a way, Mildred’s life is a testament to the hard work, and hope, of growing up on the Prairies. She was born in Gretna on May 8, 1916. As a teen, she and her friends would hike out to a bluff overlooking the American border, to hold picnics in the sunshine.

At 23, she married her longtime sweetheart, Philip Giesbrecht, who lived just down the street. The couple enjoyed many happy years together before their first child, Enid, was born; Greg followed a couple of years after that. If there had been more time, Mildred would tell them later, they would have had more siblings.

But in 1949, tragedy struck when Philip died of a sudden cerebral hemorrhage during a trip to a nearby town.

Although she was still young and spirited, Mildred never remarried. She had once promised her husband that if anything happened to him, she would take care of the children; so that’s what she did. She worked as hard as she could, eventually settling into a long career at a credit union in order to support her young family.

Yet no matter how tight things were, she always shared what she had. Her nieces and nephews would often recall her as a wonderful host, who always welcomed visitors with homemade treats. She was grateful for everything she had, Enid said, and never held a grudge. She simply did what she needed to do in order to keep going.

When Greg thinks on the lessons of his mother’s long life, those are the qualities he reflects on, too. Part of her longevity, surely, is good genes: there are a number of centenarians in Mildred’s maternal family. But another part, perhaps, is the strength of the connections she made, through nothing more expensive than kindness.

“Like people. Be tolerant. Be helpful,” he said. “She encouraged a sense of independence on our part, because she knew she couldn’t help, like with university. So the independence was always there, as well as her love for people, her generosity, her honesty, and her faith.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca