Sheila Milton

Sheila Mary Milton was born in Ripley, Surrey, England on August 19, 1935 to Herbert William James Milton and Bessie (Staines) Milton and a large, cohesive family. Almost immediately, her childhood was afflicted by the trauma of war: rationing, privation, bombings, her father’s imprisonment by the Nazis, and the fracture of her parents’ marriage. Intelligent and resilient, she trained as a nurse and served at the world-famous London Hospital, with which she retained contact as an alumna until her death.

Emigrating to Ottawa, Canada on general principle, she met Shashanka Shekhar Mitra, a recent PhD graduate from the University of Michigan whose childhood in India had been similarly disrupted by war. Together they lived in Toronto and then Chicago, where their daughter Nila Sharmilla Mitra was born. As a team, they brought together a combination of capacities, and it is worth noting that Sheila’s British citizenship was instrumental in their achieving permanent residency is the United States.

In 1966, they moved to Kingston, Rhode Island, where son Shaibal Shekhar Mitra was born in 1967 and where Sheila lived for the rest of her life. After their marriage ended in 1974, they continued to raise their children together and remained on close terms until Shashanka’s death in 2012. Sheila returned to school and earned a BA and then an MA at the University of Rhode Island, writing her thesis on the role of bells in the poetry of Thomas Merton. Over the next quarter century, she shared a creative relationship with Christian Hempstead, exploring Roman Catholic mysticism and pacifism and engaging in the communities of Christ the King Church in Kingston and the International Thomas Merton Society in Louisville, Kentucky, through which she became a globally recognized Merton scholar. Sheila also became deeply immersed in the natural world and cultivated Shaibal’s interest in birdwatching. She enjoyed amateur ornithology for the rest of her life, at first traveling widely, and then retiring to her wooded property in Exeter, which she regarded as a sanctuary and a paradise.

Sheila is survived by Nila, her husband Thomas Ottilige, and grandsons Hugh and Quinn, of Canterbury, Connecticut; by Shaibal and his partner Patricia Lindsay, of Bay Shore, New York; and by many cousins in the Staines and Milton families, in England, Australia, and elsewhere.

Visitation will be held on Friday, February 24, 2023, from 4 PM to 6 PM in Avery-Storti Funeral Home, 88 Columbia St. Wakefield RI. A Mass of Christian Burial will be held on Saturday, February 25, 2023, at 10 AM in Christ the King Church, 180 Old North Rd, Kingston, RI. Burial will follow at New Fernwood Cemetery.

In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to Hope Health Hospice Care, Christ the King Church, or the Audubon Society of Rhode Island.