Jesse (Jan) Abel

Jan (Jesse) Abel

September 7, 1955 to May 30, 2024

Jesse passed away peacefully in her Esquimalt home of 20 years after a series of strokes. She was loved, comforted and cared for in her last months by her five children – Harleigh, Katie, Peter, Julie and Mary – as well as by John, her partner of 20 years.

Jesse leaves behind 4 grandchildren – Sierra, Adrian, Cooper and Kaylee – they were a source of joy to her as she followed their lives. She also leaves behind four siblings, Valerie, Julie, Scott and Joel. A sister Toni passed away many years earlier.

Jesse was born in Arizona and raised in the Mormon faith; she emigrated to Canada in the early 1970’s eventually settling in the Calgary area where she, along with their children’s father, Gary, raised their family. Jesse was first and foremost a mother to her children and, along with that, she pursued her interests in psychology and law at the University of Calgary as well as being very involved in her faith. Her children speak fondly of their early home life with her, remembering for example from among many things the yearly Nativity scenes wherein they each had a role to act out, choreographed by Jesse who hand-made all the costumes and provided musical accompaniment playing either guitar or piano.

In the mid 1990’s now as a single mother she and her children moved to Burns Lake where she worked for awhile with her sister Toni. They were by all accounts “dirt poor” while in Burns Lake but the teenage children who were there with Jesse remember it as a special time, of lessons learned from hardship and of Jesse keeping them together as family throughout it all.

They then moved to Vancouver where Jesse worked for a support society (WISH) for sex-trade workers and as a community liaison for a Simon Fraser University research project in the tough downtown east side where she also lived. Her non-judgmental respect for all, even for the most troubled of the troubled, made her particularly well suited to these roles and made her well respected in turn by all whose lives she touched. John and Jesse met in late 2000 and became a couple over the next few years.

In 2005 she and John moved to Esquimalt where Jesse retired and she and John made their home. Jesse’s health was not so good in her last years but she bore it with a wry sense of black humor, shared by John, and they spent 20 very enjoyable years together. Jesse was an articulate and intelligent woman full of kindness, compassion and interest in others, her adult children found her easy to talk with and she was intensely proud of each of them.

Even though she has passed on, the love she shared so generously lives on in each of us. Rest in peace Jesse, we love you.