Yesterday, September 14, she celebrated her 91st birthday. This milestone was about five or six days past the doctor’s prediction that she would die shortly.
Sometime yesterday morning, however, Joyce Anabel Gill, more popularly known as “Aunt Joyce,” surrounded by some of her children, quietly left this world from her home on #191 East Canal Street. She died from natural causes and old age, according to her son, Joel Flowers.
Joyce Anabel Gill was born on September 14, 1917, to Seran and Ralph Gill of Belize City.
At a very young age, “Aunt Joyce,” as she would later become known, wanted to be a nurse, “but my grandfather, Ralph Gill, was not in favor of that,” said Joel, who flew in from New York to be with his mother during her last days.
Because she wanted to help and be close to people, she eventually settled for the food catering business.
“She liked to be around people, and she figured that a vehicle that would bring her close to people would be the food business,” Joel told Amandala, as people were coming in and out of their home, sympathizing and inquiring about when the funeral would be held.
“She made pastries and sandwiches that she used to sell to various government offices in the early 1960s. I used to be the one that would go around and sell for her,” Joel recalled. “She served food to Belizeans at home and many Belizeans who came in from the States. Many of the neighborhood children would come in and get a plate of food from my mother. She finally decided to open the shop that we had sometime in the 1960s.”
The shop, named after her, Aunt Joyce, was a legendary small business. Most people who could remember the good old days, when Belize City had three movie theatres and life was kinder in the city, would know about Aunt Joyce on the canal side. Her shop was the only place in the Southside of Belize City where you could go late at night, after the many dances and parties had ended, and everywhere else had closed, and get a snack of pastries, a ham and cheese sandwich, a slice of milk cake, cup cakes, bread pudding, jam rolls, cold soft drinks, and so on. Aunt Joyce Saloon was an icon in a changing city.
About five years ago, the violence along the stretch of the canal side where Aunt Joyce is located, began to get so out of hand that she decided to close shop. Another Belizean institution had fallen victim to the urban violence that haunts life in the city.
When this reporter spoke to her back then, she said that she tried to hold on, but things were getting out of hand. There was no peace at night on that section of East Canal Street. Almost every night, she told me, there were the terrifying sounds of guns blasting away the peace and quiet.
In 2000, the National Library Service, under its distinguished chairman, Charles Hyde, Sr., published a booklet entitled “Mothers of Belize.” In its introduction, the National Library Service Chairman said, “Within Belizean society, it has become traditional for certain women, by dint of their dedication and hard work, to shine.”
Aunt Joyce was one of the mothers featured in that publication. Although she only had six children of her own, Aunt Joyce was mother to literally dozens of children who passed through her capable, loving hands. Some of the children she adopted; others just happened to come into her life, and she was always kind and loving to them, never turning anyone away.
She always insisted that children get an education. That was one of the fine qualities of this awesomely strong, independent, and spiritual woman that Belizeans came to know as Aunt Joyce, who, at a very young age, graduated from St. Hilda’s College, now known as the Anglican Cathedral College.
She leaves to mourn her passing, her children: Emolyn Tillett, Joel Flowers, Edwin Flowers, Phyllis Mossiah, Austin Gentle, and Sherlyn Godoy.
Funeral services for the late Joyce Anabel “Aunt Joyce” Gill will be held 3:00 o’clock this afternoon at St. John’s Cathedral.