Hundreds of mourners gathered at a Halifax church on Friday morning as family, friends, co-workers, teammates and fans gathered to honour Colleen Jones.
The world champion curler and veteran TV broadcaster died on Nov. 25 after a battle with cancer.
She was 65.
“Did you know that Colleen thought her spirit animal was a cardinal? In fact, there was a specific couple — a male and female cardinal — that she’d watch visit us in Mader’s Cove. And she fed them all the time,” her husband Scott Saunders said during his eulogy.
“She felt that the big male bird was God, visiting her. I hadn’t seen God for a couple months, until oddly it showed up for a quick visit in the morning on Nov. 25th. I let Colleen know this before she passed away later that morning.”
A Halifax native, Jones was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2022 and retired the year later from the CBC.
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In 1982, she became the youngest female skip to win a Scotties Tournament of Hearts and would go on to win five more, as well as two world championship titles in the early 2000s.
She was also known as a longtime reporter and host at the CBC.
Whether it was in the curling rink or in front of the camera, Jones was often a burst of positive energy — something that carried on in her daily life.
“She absolutely loved bicycling, and I can’t count the number of times we’d bike around the corner on some coastal road, and she would just burst out with exclamation, ‘So pretty!’ She said that so many times,” said Saunders.
He said in the years since her cancer diagnosis, Jones had come to terms with her death and assured the mourners who packed the room that she is at peace.
Her legacy, some say, will be the joy she spread and the inspiration she became to young curlers and those who love the sport.
“I think about how many people in this last week I’ve heard talking about, ‘I got into curling because of Colleen Jones,’ or ‘I wanted to do better because of Colleen Jones,'” said Rob Belliveau, a member of Curling Canada’s Board of Governors.
“She leaves a statistical legacy that’s going to be hard for people to match, but there’s so many female curlers that are striving to do that right now, and that’s what history will reflect.”
A celebration of life will be held later in the evening at the Mayflower Curling Club in Timberlea, N.S. where Jones first trained as a teen.
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