A long life for a loving family woman
Born less than 20 years after New Zealand women won the vote, two years before the outbreak of what was then dubbed the Great War, Southlander Vera Mervyn Wilkie lived here into her 106th year, one of the longest-living women in the land.
Even her middle name, Mervyn, belonged in history; she being called after a boy cousin who drowned when the Titanic went down in the year of her birth.
While her death on March 14 ended a remarkable span of nearly 106 years, Mrs Wilkie endured hardship and sorrow along with a wealth of experiences.
She loved, cared for, and laid to rest two husbands, eventually three of her four children and so many friends and family members she might well have felt everyone had left, and gone on ahead.
Yet when it came to her own farewell, the Lindisfarne Methodist Church was packed with old friends and generations of her family, down to great-great-grandchildren, who came to say goodbye to the so special Nana of whom they were lovingly proud. The service, led by the Reverend Peter Taylor, included hymns Mrs Wilkie had loved, sung with an organ accompaniment by family friend Fay Brown.
Born at Longbush in June 1912, Mrs Wilkie was the sixth child in a family of nine.
She was a good maths student at the Southland Technical College and that inborn sense of order served her well throughout her long life.
On her 100th birthday she credited her good health throughout that past century to her habit of eating fresh vegetables every day, usually those grown by herself in her own garden.
While that sounds like a rural idyll, hers was a life of hard work, some romance with an elopement preceding her first marriage, two lonely spells of widowhood, years of battling alone to feed and care for a family of four young children and the loss of three of her children in her own later life.
Her only surviving child, Betty Snell, said it was only when her own family came along that she realised fully what a battle her mother had as a widow caring for them all on a small Southland farm holding.
Her mother was widowed at the age of 32, left with four young children when her husband Seymour Thomas Evans lost a battle with cancer.
In 1956, their mother married Jack Wilkie and travelled overseas with him for nine months while their new home was being built on his north Makarewa farm.
Each of her children were married there. Betty and Bill Snell in 1958, Margaret and Keith Rogerson in 1959, Dorothy and Peter Ryan in 1961, and Tom and Ngaire in 1967.
When Mr and Mrs Wylie retired, they moved to Bridge Hill in Alexandra, where Vera’s vegetable garden grew to include many fruit trees and her jam-bottling and chutney-making routine continued.
She cared lovingly for Jack when he developed emphysema, but he died in 1982, leaving her a widow again.
She had loved Alexandra, and stayed on her own there for the next 20 years, returning to Invercargill in 2003 only so she might be nearer her family.
Initially she bought a town house at the Rowena Jackson Retirement Village, moving into care only when she need more help with life.
She had always valued her independence and managed most of her life very well, Mrs Snell said.
When she was younger and living in the south, she was involved with Rural Women and she enjoyed the company and the conferences involved.
Pre-deceased by her son Tom and daughters Margaret Rogerson, of Queenstown, and Dorothy Ryan, Otautau. In her later years, Mrs Wilkie had valued the growing generations of her family in which daughter Betty is now the senior surviving member, keeper of the records and teller of the many tales of the life of a mother who was a role model for them all.