A nurse, an entrepreneur, a sleep consultant, a mother to three beautiful girls and a wife, Elizabeth MacDougall-Senft, has died aged 45.
After a long battle with breast cancer Liz as she was known recently passed away after becoming ill on a family vacation to Hawaii.
“She was just the most kind human being and everyone who met her felt her genuineness, her generosity, her kindness, her light,” Loreli Palandri, one of MacDougall’s friends, said.
Palandri has also started a GoFundMe campaign to help the family with medical bills, transportation costs and any other expenses that can help her husband and daughters.
There has been an outpouring of support from people in Regina across different communities.
MacDougall’s friend Pam Schmidt, one of the owners of Schmitty’s Smoked Meats Regina, held a fundraising event at the farmers market to make it easier on the family.
She said she met MacDougall eight years ago because both their oldest daughters have Down syndrome.
“Liz was a really popular lady, she welcomed us into the community for kids with Down syndrome; it’s a very tight community,” Schmidt said. “Liz was also a sleep consultant and she really helped me with my daughter who never slept through the night. She solved the problem for us — that changed our life.”
She added that MacDougall had organized a fundraiser for her daughter who had heart surgery when she was 15 months old.
Schmidt said MacDougall was born in Ireland and came to Canada as a little girl; she wanted to take her daughters back to Ireland to meet her family and see how they lived. They were able to visit this summer.
“She was extremely intelligent but also very personable. If you needed advice in your life, she is the person you would go to. Funny, caring, thoughtful, kind, she was a great lad –, she could always find the positive in things and really wanted to make the world a better place.”
MacDougall was first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2016, shortly after the birth of her third daughter. It was devastating news for them as their whole lives were turned upside down.
“Anyone who has been through cancer knows that the treatment regime is gruelling, but I was determined to stay around and did everything my oncologist suggested,” she said on her website.
She went on with chemo, radiation and surgery while making changes in her life like a healthy diet, exercise as well as reducing or eliminating harmful chemicals in my environment.
While she was searching for better alternatives for personal care items she realized the ones she found were either extremely hard and tough on the skin, had weird scents, or they just did not work.
So she started making her own products, starting with a deodorant balm that she perfected with all natural, organic ingredients.
That is how she started her own business called PICKLE & Bee.
“She made a really big impact on the kind of like entrepreneur and maker and community here in Regina and in Saskatchewan, for sure,” Palandri said.
Her friends say she touched people in many different ways: she helped babies sleep, she was a member on her children’s daycare board, she had lots of friends in the breast cancer community, she was huge in the entrepreneurial community and she was also very active in the wide community of Down syndrome parents.
“She was so helpful and so loving. Liz connected with so many people and we knew that Liz had this big light and we knew that everyone loved Liz,” Palandri said. “I don’t think there is one bad quality about her, she touched a lot of people.”
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