The Passing of a Grand Lady: Ethel Stockton

Ethel Stockton

The Mazatlán English community lost one of its Grand Ladies when our indomitable, spirited 94-year-old Ethel Stockton passed away in Seattle, Washington on Wednesday.

A tiny lady with monumental energy and curiosity, Ethel was born in Toppenish, Washington and had been visiting Mexico for thirty years before settling in Mazatlán permanently in 2002. Before that, her intrepid spirit had taken her across country in an old VW bus to Panama, but in Costa Rica they told her the road to Panama was paved with cobblestones, and realizing the old van just wouldn´t survive, she turned around. A few years later she was crisscrossing the States, visiting libraries searching out her family tree. She continued to drive in Mazatlán until two years ago when she finally admitted her reactions might be a little slower than they should be.

Having worked for 50 years as an interior designer and divorcing after 45 years of marriage, Ethel wrote her first self-help book on finance for older women entitled “Stretch Your Dollars” in 1967, followed by a “Cookbook for Losers” in 1999.

The cookbook, she said in a 2004 interview, was a reaction to no-fat diets. “I got mad. I was 84 years old and had been eating fat all my life. It’s the carbs that do you in,” she said. “So I wrote the book on what I call the BRPPS principle – no bread, rice, pasta, potatoes or sugar. It really works.”

Her arrival in Mazatlán at age 86 to live alone, away from family and friends, was a rebirth. Now she had only herself to rely on and she embraced the challenge with eager anticipation.

Ethel (in blue dress) celebrating her 91st birthday with friends and family.

During the next eight years, Ethel became a prodigious writer producing five novels centered around her septuagenarian protagonist Annaliz Fallon, a feisty, worldly woman who lived life to the fullest and shared her common sense advice with the many varied characters who populated her stories.

About her novels, Ethel said “I felt the books needed to be written. I have many older friends who sit in a chair waiting to die, who won’t take risks. You have to decide whether you will let life come to you, or you will reach out. I’m the type who reaches out.”

And reach out she did. She opened a Bed & Breakfast near the cruise ship docks, took Spanish lessons, became a life coach with speaking engagements throughout the States, joined the ladies’ luncheon group where you’d find her on Tuesdays sipping a martini and lighting up another of her favourite Camel lights.

She kept in touch with friends and family through a weekly email report in which she invariably enthused about the delights of Mazatlán, Scrabble games and lunches with friends, and the kindness of her neighbours.

Ethel returned to Seattle when her usual robust health began to falter. A survivor of breast cancer, she realized her health needed attention.

She passed away with family and friends close by, and we will miss her. Her spirit, though, will never leave us.

She left us with a simple clue to living what she called “the Good Life” when, in the 2004 interview, she said: “Attitude is everything for the elderly. I get up every morning and think something wonderful is going to happen to me today, and it usually does.”