Cyril taught us kids that all people were created equal and deserved respect for the simple fact that the creator had put us on this wonderful planet at the same time and there was room for everyone. I owe him for the fact that today I hold no racial, religious or sexual prejudice.

Cyril would bring home from work a telescope or at least that’s what us kids called it. It was actually a transit that he used for surveying and running levels for Ottawa Valley roads. I used to think that every corner on every road we drove on as a family Dad had surveyed. That was not too far from the truth. After the sun went down he would set up the transit and point it at the full moon. How exciting it was to see the craters, the valleys and the rough crust of the surface that we could only imagine by looking with the naked eye.

Cyril would ask us to look up at the stars and he would say “Every one of those stars, and there are thousands, are just like our sun, some bigger and some smaller than our sun. Around those stars or suns are planets and solar systems just like the one we live in and then he would ask us, do you think that if God could create that amount of stars and planets would we be the only planet out of tens of thousands or millions that he would put life on?” When I was ten years old men were travelling into outer space and to the moon and I have now as an adult some four decades later four large scrapbooks of the Apollo space missions. As a teenager I read every UFO book I could get my hands on.

I was able to relive this childhood memory with my father, not with my own two boys, but rather with a group of children aged 6-16 who were in my care at a residential treatment program near the town of Carnarvon, Ontario. Cyril was staying at a motel a few miles from the farm where I was a Youth Worker for Browndale-Ontario. He was surveying roads in that area for a couple of weeks. I thought it would be nice to have Dad visit the home I worked in and get to know some of the kids I was working with so that he could better understand the challenges in the work I had chosen for myself at the time. The kids from the home and I picked up Cyril from the motel and took him to a movie and afterwards went back to the farm where he pulled out his “telescope.” The kids all took turns looking through the eyepiece at the moon that was there in its entirety that evening. Did the moon reveal itself to us by chance that night? I think not. He went through the same exercise he put us kids through just 15 years before when we were the age of the kids I now found myself working with and these kids ate up every word. After that he pulled out his violin and played tunes for the kids in my charge and the kids from the neighboring home. All of a sudden I was a far cooler youth worker because I knew Cyril.

When Cyril retired he became a very active member of the Eganville Rotary Club. He would never turn down an opportunity to play his violin at a seniors home or charity event, an attitude towards community life that has not been lost on his three children or his five grandchildren. The last time I saw him alive I was driving towards the home where he and my mother lived and he was driving the other direction. He waved as we met and I thought it unusual because he had never waved from his car to anyone, an Ottawa Valley habit he never really acquired. A coincidence? I don’t think so. That afternoon I received a call from my aunt telling me that Cyril had died of what they thought was a massive heart attack. A post mortem would reveal just that. The humor of the post mortem was that after a life of being a policeman in his early years, a land surveyor, a violin player, a man who gave unconditionally to his community, his occupation was listed as “Grave Digger.” Cyril had died doing what he did best and that was giving to his community. He was helping run levels with his transit (or telescope) in the Anglican Church graveyard, the church he and mom had been members of their whole lives together, so that the area would drain properly. He stopped for lunch, sat against a cedar tree and leaned back never to look through a telescope again.

I remember my brother and I laughing so hard at the wake through our tears at the thought of one of Cyril’s friends doing that. Dad would have thought that was the funniest thing, a guy dying in a graveyard. “Hey, no fuss, I’m here now, just dig a hole and kick me in, don’t go to any trouble.” A practical end for a practical and caring man.