KOLIC, Markus Franz

Died at 73 on April 26, 2023, after a brief illness. The only son of Marko and Angela (Pozsgay) Kolic, refugees who’d lost everything resisting fascism, Markus was born in 1949 in a Red-Army-administered ex-Habsburg castle near Hohenau, Austria; after years of poverty his family immigrated first to an attic in Toronto then Elmwood, Ontario in 1961, where their farm boasted a hand pump, a wood stove, and an outhouse. Markus taught himself English via Superman comics and won a full scholarship to McGill University; there he and his lifelong love Joyce Taylor (the two of them 1st and 2nd in the Hanover District High School Class of ‘68) began a resolutely unconventional forty-six-year partnership that took them first to 1970s Toronto, where Markus wrote and acted in underground theater and dabbled in precious metals trading while Joyce worked as an actuary, then 1980s Washington, where Joyce climbed the corporate ladder while Markus became a fixture on the piano bar scene and learned the secrets of every closeted Reagan-era politician. With the birth of son Markus Jr. in 1988, the family returned to Ontario, where they cultivated a vast social circle, an idiosyncratic intellectual life, and a series of well-fed cats from their tree-hidden home in a Pilkington Township cornfield; after Joyce’s untimely death from cancer in 2013 and his own bout with it in 2016, Markus retired to Heritage River in Elora, enjoying many visits to Markus Jr. (now of Massachusetts) and his grandsons Kevin (born 2015) and Marty (born 2017). From him they have inherited the elder Markus’s superpower: a permanent, gleeful disregard for social convention. In that spirit, no funeral will be held, but contact Markus Jr. (markus.kolic@gmail.com) if interested in an informal gathering this summer; in lieu of flowers, please give your money or time to any organization that resists authoritarianism or bigotry.

www.grahamgiddyfh.com