Deborah Lynn Vaughan Mitchell

Deborah Lynn Vaughan Mitchell

December 10, 1954 – July 2, 2026

Deborah Mitchell passed on July 2, 2026, at the Vernon Hospice, after a long fight with cancer that she met with the same stubborn grace she brought to everything else.

She was born two months early, on December 10, 1954, in London, Ontario, impatient from the very beginning and a fighter from her first day to her last. Deb graduated from Dr. Knox School in Kelowna in 1972, in the last class before it became a middle school. She went to work soon after at Kelowna Flightcraft, as one of the company’s first employees when it was still a small operation. That is where she met John. They shared 52 years of marriage.

Deb spent more than forty years in public service, starting with the Ministry of Forests in the early 1970s. Most of her career was in income assistance and family services, where she rose to Regional Manager. Some of the work she loved best was helping people with disabilities find their way into employment programs. She had genuine compassion for people in hard circumstances and a talent for helping them. Later, she spent more than a decade with the RCMP, managing the construction of new detachments and facilities across British Columbia and the Yukon. Deb was proud of that work and prouder still of the people she had helped along the way.

She was curious about nearly everything and half-fearless about trying it. She was an excellent pianist and an accomplished seamstress. She sang for years with the Sweet Adelines. At one point, she took flying lessons and worked her way toward a private pilot’s licence, with training that included a cross-country flight.

But, art was her real passion. In retirement, she went all in, working mostly in coloured pencil and pan pastel on every kind of paper she could get her hands on. In art, she found what she once described as solace, a process that was nurturing and calming. Deb drew lions, leopards and horses, but above all, she drew people’s pets… the ones they loved. Her studio assistants and frequent subjects were her two cats, Sid and Eddie, adopted from the Okanagan Humane Society in 2020. They supervised her work with what she called an “overload of cuteness.” Deb built her own website to share her artwork. You can see it at www.dlvm.art

She gave most of her work away. Deb drew for friends, for fundraisers, for the handlers of service animals at the hospital, and for people she met on her morning walk and decided she liked. A drawing could take her weeks, yet she would hand it over without a second thought. That was the thread running through her whole life: she noticed what would make someone’s day better, and then, she quietly did it.

Deb leaves her husband, John, her son William, her mother Lynn Vaughan Peckham and stepfather Bill Peckham, her sister Cynthia Warrilow and brother-in-law Richard Warrilow as well as many nieces, nephews and extended family in Alberta and Ontario. Deb was predeceased by her father, Marcus Vaughan.

A celebration of her life will be held on Saturday, August 29, 2026, at 1:00 p.m. at the Schubert Centre in Vernon, British Columbia.

In her memory, please consider a donation to the Okanagan Humane Society or, in the spirit of how she lived, give something you made to someone who did not expect it.

Arrangements entrusted to

Cypress Funeral & Cremation Services 250-558-0866

Condolences may be expressed to the family by phone or email through Cypress Funeral & Cremation Services: