11-08 Dad Gone

It was Monday, January 13, and I received an urgent call to come down to the tailoring firm and pick up Dad. He had collapsed on the job, and the staff had lifted him up and laid him on one of the cutting tables. I took him straight to the emergency department at Sunnybrook Hospital.
He went into immediate surgery for an aneurysm and died on Thursday the 16th. He seemed to be surviving the surgery but contracted pneumonia which his heart could not handle. The ad announcing his passing was placed by the four boys in the Globe and Mail.
Because he was relatively young at 71, he was well known and the funeral parlour was packed for two days with well-wishers. I loved the obituary written by Peter Worthington, the editor of the Toronto Sun. It was in the form of an editorial.
The Toronto Star wrote an excellent obituary and picked up much of Dad's history as an Irish immigrant coming to Canada and working in the wheat fields of Saskatchewan to pay for his passage. He had almost followed his two best chums to Rhodesia who had joined the Rhodesian Mounted Police. They all played Irish Rugby together and were all over six feet tall and 200 pounds in weight.
It was the Globe and Mail where Dad did most of his advertising. They provided another beautiful obituary.
Dad had been a great supporter of the Smith Regime in Rhodesia and every Canadian-Rhodesian in the Toronto area, out of respect for Dad's brave stand in his ads, showed up at the funeral home. There must have been over 200 visitors of Rhodesian descent.
I will never forget brother Ian showing up from his flight from California. He almost collapsed from the shock of seeing his father laid out in the funeral parlour. Ian and dad were very close. He and Dad had the same physical stature. Ian always maintained he would also die at the early age of 71. And he did.