Jennifer Rosemary Bauman

Jennifer Rosemary Bauman — Jen — was born on August 9, 1947, in a small hospital in Carcoar, a country town in the Central West of New South Wales, Australia. She was the middle of Roy and Mary Lewis’s three daughters, and she had a fighting spirit from the very beginning. Her mother, who was a nurse, used to joke that the babies must have been accidentally swapped at birth. It became a family story, and in time it read less like a joke than a prophecy.

Her father served in the Australian military during the Second World War, and afterwards the family moved to Sydney. Jen was educated at a Catholic private school, and from there she went to work as a cardiology technician at Sutherland District Hospital. It was there that a young doctor named John Bauman noticed her.

She turned him down. John had a reputation as a flirt, and Jen was not easily impressed. But he persisted, she relented, and they hit it off — and the Sydney years that followed were the ones both of them returned to most often in the telling: the beach, skin diving, and driving around in John’s sports car. They also came close to losing each other twice. Once a dump truck reversed onto the hood of the car and very nearly climbed into the cab. The second time, a light plane carrying Jen, her sister Jo, John, and the pilot came down in the mountains. Remarkably, no one was hurt. John has always believed that crash bonded them for life.

When John went to Britain to continue his surgical training, Jen followed a few months later, and they were married at St Mary’s Catholic Cathedral in Edinburgh, Scotland, with John’s parents and his closest friend David — also training in surgery — in attendance. It was the start of fifty-seven years of marriage.

After three years in Britain they set out for home in Australia, stopping in Canada so John could take a locum and put some money aside. Their first son, John Mathew, had been born by then. Six months of small-town surgery turned into an orthopaedic training position at the University of Alberta; their second son, Peter, was born; and John set up practice as an orthopaedic surgeon in Calgary. Their third son, Mark, was born there in 1977. The stop-off had quietly become a life.

The early Calgary years were hard. Jen ran John’s office and looked after three boys at the same time, and John has said plainly that without her he doubts he could have managed. They struggled along until the early 1980s, when joint replacement and arthroscopic surgery opened up entirely new fields and the practice at last found its footing. What Jen built in those lean years, she built for all of them.

The family’s happiest seasons were spent outdoors. There was a cottage at Pine Lake, Alberta, and a speedboat, and the boys became excellent water-skiers. Arthur, the family’s miniature schnauzer, would sit in the back of the boat and bark at them the whole way — John was never convinced the dog believed what he was seeing. In winter the boys took up ski racing, and it became a family affair: Jen and the other parents out on the course keeping gates while John served as the team doctor, following the races across Western Canada.

Jen was a keen skier herself, and she loved tennis and golf. She was a member of the Calgary Medical Ladies and active in their social programs. She and John travelled a great deal together, by ship and by land — Cairo and the Nile, the Amazon, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Iguazú Falls, Rome, Athens, Venice, Latvia, which was John’s birthplace, Thailand, New Zealand, and many trips home to Australia.

She was forty-seven when she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. It was a crippling blow to a woman who had always been in motion. She responded the way she had responded to everything since Carcoar — by fighting — and she became a staunch supporter of the Parkinson’s Society of Southern Alberta, raising funds so that others facing the same diagnosis might have more than she did.

Brain surgery was undertaken to relieve her symptoms. It went wrong, and it cost her a great deal: left-sided paralysis, seizures, and the rest of her life in a wheelchair in nursing care. She bore seven years of that. Those who loved her watched her do it, and what they will remember is not the illness but the refusal to be defined by it. On August 5, 2026, her body gave up its long fight. She is at peace now, in the arms of the Lord.

Jen is survived by her husband of fifty-seven years, Dr. John Bauman; her sons John Bauman Jr. and his wife Debbie, Peter Bauman and his wife Lisa, and Mark Bauman; and her granddaughter, Chloe Bauman — all of Calgary, Alberta. She was predeceased by her parents, Roy and Mary Lewis, and by her sister Kathleen, who died in Winnipeg in 2024. She is survived also by her sister, Josephine Macdougall, of Sydney, Australia; by Kathleen’s husband, Doug, of Winnipeg; and by nieces, nephews, and extended family in both Australia and Canada.

In her memory, donations may be made in support of Parkinson’s research through the Parkinson Association of Alberta.

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