Families and friends mourn the dead,
Dorothy Sewell, Geraldine Brady mourned in consecutive services
A city that suffered, then rallied, is now mourning after the horrific van rampage on Yonge St. that took the lives of 10.
Visitations, funerals, the motions of grieving: steps taken in the same ways by different families, remembering the stories that ended in one place. Near St. Clair this week, a line for the visitation of Anne Marie D’Amico, 30, stretched down the street and around the block.
Strangers dropped off flowers amid friends at a visitation in North York for Ji-Hun Kim, 22. And just across the street and down the block, the red-brick R.S. Kane funeral home has been handling the goodbyes of three other victims’ families over the same two-day stretch.
Betty Forsyth, 94, was Monday; Dorothy Sewell, 80, and Geraldine Brady, 83, one after another, were Tuesday afternoon. Orville Green, a minister from nearby Lansing United Church, came to the aching realization that Brady and Sewell had been members of his congregation. He took a lap around the block between their two services. And inside the funeral home, in a room with two neat rows of pews and a simple, wooden cross, the camaraderie of the city was apparent.
Roula Massin, who’d tried to help save Dorothy Sewell when she was struck, was in attendance at the earlier service, too. Sitting in her car in the parking lot before leaving, Massin was overcome with emotion. She had been praying for the nightmare to end, she said. But for all the grief, there too was light. Brady’s grandchildren elected not to dress in black for her service.
“Our grandmother loved colours and life, and I feel she would love to see us this way,” her eldest grandchild, Jennifer, told the room.
Her brother Douglas stood beside her as she delivered a eulogy, for emotional support — a speech that remembered the practicality in Brady’s love. She mended favourite clothes, ready to wear over again, and for even the smallest accomplishments, Jennifer said, Brady would be over the moon.
The small nuances of long lives appeared in both funerals on Tuesday afternoon. At the service for Sewell, Green told the Star, the smallest of memories were spilled — from Sewell and a close friend solving “the world’s problems, even if the world didn’t care to hear” to her rooted faith in never drinking any water except for that flowing from a tap.