The simple little things
A senior’s calling to help those in need
Of all the days ...
Exactly two weeks after Marina Simard (née Rowley) turned four years old, her father died of injuries he sustained in an accident on the family farm in Loretteville on the northern outskirts of Quebec City. Days earlier, the Christmas tree he had been cutting at the far end of the family farm fell the wrong way and knocked him to the ground where he struck his head against a rock. James Rowley never recovered, and died on Christmas Day 1938.
“My mother heard the ambulance go past, and then later the priest came to the house to tell her about the accident,” the 82-year-old Simard recalled from her home in Arnprior, where today she maintains an active schedule of community service to seniors and her church.
“I don’t remember the day itself when my father died,” she said, “but I do remember going to stay at my grandmother’s house on Christmas, but of course my mother wasn’t there with us that day. When all the family came to my grandmother’s house at New Year, I didn’t like it that everybody was crying. I didn’t understand, and it upset me.”
It would be another four or five years before her mother Malvina (née Auclair) would have a family Christmas at home again with her five children, but she got on with managing the farm where they grew vegetables and hay, and kept some livestock. Simard has fond memories of planting potatoes, and helping her brothers take the cows to and from the field across a busy roadway.
As a young girl Simard, her three sisters and two brothers all went to the same school a minute’s walk up the road from their home. She went there from Grade 1 to Grade 7, and said that math was her best subject. As in many rural schools, there was just a single classroom with one teacher for all grades.
“We’d sometimes stand around the fire because it was so cold in the winter,” she recalled. “But imagine that — I had the same teacher for all those years.”
In late 1955, shortly before her 20th birthday, the dark-haired and petite Marina Rowley went to a dance in Quebec City with her older sister Anney and met the man who would become the love of her life, 23-year-old Gérard Simard, an airman in the Royal Canadian Air Force.
“I thought he was kind of nice-looking,” she said, “and I told my sister I was going to marry him. We got married in Loretteville on June 9, 1956. I was 21, so my mum didn’t have to sign,” she laughed.
During their 50 years of marriage the young military couple would travel across Canada and to Europe, and have four sons and a daughter together. Their final posting would be to the Montreal area, where Gérard joined the St. John Ambulance following his retirement from the RCAF. He died in 2005, and over the next few years Marina Simard would embrace a new stage of her life as a Royal Canadian Legion volunteer, helping the veterans at Ste-Anne Hospital on the West Island of Montreal.
“The vets were very glad to see us,” she said. “We didn’t know all of their problems, of course, but some of them were sad because they’d lost their wives, and then there was a man who just liked to sing Irish songs. We’d go there to help with bingo and special events, and sometimes take a few of them out to the Legion in Chomedey for a few hours. If there was music, we would help the ones in wheelchairs ‘dance’ a little bit. We would help them do up a zipper, or carry their plate to the table — it’s the simple little things you do for them that makes them feel good.”
Simard continued her calling to help those in need when she moved to Saint John Chrysostom Roman Catholic parish in Arnprior in 2010, where during a typical week she might be found serving meals to seniors — many of them much younger than herself — at the local NeighbourLink Fountain community assistance ministry, baking pies for a church fundraiser, cooking for the Knights of Columbus or working with the Women’s Institute to prepare hampers for shut-ins. She simply gives of herself to those who are in need.
“I find it’s rewarding working together to help other people,” she said.
In 2016 Simard received the Ontario Volunteer Service Award for her unflagging work with the Arnprior Branch of the Federated Women’s Institutes of Ontario. She has been a member there since 2010.
Where this grandmother of nine, and great-grandmother of three finds all her energy is something of an unknown. In September she made a bucket list trip with some of her family to Flanders in Belgium.
Whether she is scrubbing pots, arranging flowers or helping to raise funds for charitable causes, Simard said she feels blessed to be able to get out and help people through her volunteer work.
“I couldn’t do this when my children were young, so I have to volunteer while I can now,” she said. “And at my age, I have no time to lose.”