14 December 1979

Thirty years ago tonight, my father passed away.

My parents lived in Toronto and my father had gone to bed earlier in the evening (my mother had stayed up to watch her beloved Perry Como whose Christmas special aired that night).  My mother heard him get up to go to the washroom, she thought.  Then she heard the bang as he fell.  Obviously upset, my mother called me in a panic,  "The ambulance has taken him away ..."

Those were the most difficult calls I've ever had to make, as I let my siblings know in turn that our father was gone and our mother needed us.

He was 53 years old when he died. "Myocardial infarction" is the official medical term for the first and only heart attack my father suffered.

My little chickadee was only four years old in 1979, and she thought that had we been visiting that night, she could have saved her grandpa.  When we were there, she always "went to bed with gwampa" to read him stories so he would go to sleep "pwoppelly." 

This photo was taken in the summer of 1979.  My little chickadee had put Grandpa to sleep and was now phoning her "Whea" to bring her up to date on the day's events.

To my little chickadee's thinking, if she had gone to bed with her grandpa that night, she could have saved him.  It wasn't true of course.  Nothing could have saved him from the massive attack about which he had been warned just months earlier.  One of his favourite jokes was about his doctor's having told him to stop smoking, stop drinking, and lose weight.  So he was looking for an overweight doctor who smoked cigars and liked to drink.  Today, I think most people take their health responsibilities a little more seriously than that.

My father was born Richard Romeo Cherryholme in 1926, the third child of Thomas and Marilda (Raymond) Cherryholme, although he never knew his older brother who had died in 1925.   (I didn't know about this older brother until my Aunt identified a photo of a child for me.  Since then, I've found the documentation of the child's birth and death.)  My father's only sister was six years older; younger twin brothers would follow, but not for another six and a half years.

It wasn't until about a year and half ago when I located my father's baptism record that I discovered why his middle name was Romeo:  he was named after his godfather, a common Catholic naming convention.  The man was obviously someone close enough to the family back in 1926 that my grandparents asked him to take on what, to Catholics, is a very serious role.  I could find no further reference to the person in any other family documents, and we never heard mention of the man in our household, that I know of.   (The surname does show up in our family tree, but I had to go back a century earlier than my father's birth year to find it.)

After finishing his education at Ottawa Technical High School, my father worked at Ottawa Car and Aircraft as a precision grinder.   He married Dorothy Mae Sharpe in 1943 and enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force in the same year, serving as air gunner.  His service included one year in the United Kingdom and India.  He was discharged in 1946, having been awarded the 1939/45 Star, the CVSM and Clasp, and Air Gunners Badge.

Dorothy Mae (Sharpe) and Richard Romeo Cherryholme
c 1950

My parents raised a crowded, rambunctious household of two boys and six girls.  At the time of my father's death in 1979, their descendants counted 20 grandchildren and four step-grandchildren.  Those numbers have grown considerably in the thirty years since his passing, now obviously including great grandchildren and several more step-versions as well.

Rest in continued peace, my father.