Obituary
Don Newgren passed away on March 8, 2026, at St Joseph's Hospital. He died peacefully, surrounded by loved ones.
Don was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. He eventually had two job offers on the table: teaching art at the college level in either Seattle or Toronto. Toronto was just five hours down the turnpike, so Toronto it was. He never left.
Don built a happy and meaningful life in Toronto , working for many years as the Dean of design at York University and making wonderful friendships along the way. He is survived by his son Todd Newgren, from his first marriage to Kathy Newgren, Todd's partner Danielle, and their two boys, Jett and Gideon. He is also survived by his brother Ken Newgren and Ken's wife Joan, with their children Andy, Kristofer, and Molly. He was previously married to Nancy Carr, with her children Holly, Amy, and Alex — Holly in particular, whom Don quietly considered the daughter he never had.
And then there was his beloved Elizabeth Barry. His partner for the last twenty-six years, a woman who never needed convincing that art, cinema, and a healthy disregard for the ordinary were perfectly reasonable things to organize a life around. Together they managed, well into their eighties, to still look at each other like the whole thing was a very good idea. Her children, Siobhan(James), Olivia(John), Keith(Aiya), and granddaughter Kiera were all such an important part of Don's life with Elizabeth.
He was kind. He was warm. He was generous in the way that costs a person something — which is the only generosity worth mentioning. He will be greatly missed.
Two of My Favourite Memories of My Father
The Deep Water, Circa Summer 1981
My father taught me to fish, which is the kind of sentence that sounds simple until you've actually spent a summer doing it.
The arrangement, as I understood it, was a gentleman's agreement: we would spend the morning catching smallmouth bass—good fish, cooperative fish, fish that respected the social contract—and then, for one hour, we would troll the deep water. His hour. His lure, always purchased on the recommendation of whatever man behind the tackle shop counter had most recently looked him in the eye and said this is the one. The one that would catch the big one. The local secret. The lure that every single man in every single tackle shop in every single lake town has apparently been quietly sitting on, waiting for exactly the right customer to come through the door. My father was always that customer.
Down it would go into the darkness at the bottom of the lake, and my father would watch the line with an expression somewhere between faith and stubbornness, which, in his case, were largely the same thing.
We got excited several times. The line went taut. The rod bent. Something enormous and ancient seemed, for one suspended moment, to be considering the offer.
It always passed.
He never did catch the biggest fish in the lake. He entered the fishing derby on the Vineyard too, hunting bluefish, same mission, same result. And yet he went back every season, bought another lure, sent it back down. There is something almost unbearably like him in that — the refusal to accept that the big one wasn't coming, the absolute certainty that the deep water held something worth waiting for.
Wrigley Field, October 2016
My father was a Chicago Cubs fan from birth — not as a hobby, not as a pastime, but as a foundational fact about who he was, in the way that some people are left-handed or afraid of snakes.
I had made him a promise, sometime in the decades before 2016, that if the Cubs ever made the World Series, we would go. Together. It was the kind of promise that felt safe to make, in the way that you might promise someone you'll visit them on the moon.
And then, on October 28th, 2016, we went to Wrigley Field for the first World Series game played there in one hundred and eight years.
We were led down to our seats, and I watched it happen in real time — the way his face changed with each step, not from the crowd or the noise or the history happening around us, but from something quieter and more private than all of that. It was the two of us. That was the thing. Thirty-four years since we had been to a baseball game together. A promise made in a different lifetime, now being kept, step by step, down a concrete aisle at Wrigley Field. Everything he had ever wanted from that particular corner of his life - his city, his team, his son was walking right beside him, and he knew it, and I could see him knowing it.
When we finally reached our seats, he sat down and started to cry.
It is the only time I ever saw my father cry. Not because he was sad. Because everything, for once, had come together exactly as he had always hoped it would.
I miss you, Dad. We all miss you.
In lieu of flowers, Don was a lifelong and passionate supporter of the Evans Scholars Foundation, a cause that touched his life deeply and one he believed in completely. If you would like to honour his memory, a donation in his name would mean the world.
Evans Scholars Foundation: evansscholarsfoundation.com
