Yvonne Boucher & Fred Hannon
Yvonne Hannon (right) and Rita Theriault
Sons Gerald, John and David, with their mother
| Name at birth: | Yvonne Boucher |
| Date of birth: | December 8, 1916 |
| Place of birth: | Bathurst, Canada |
| Date of death: | June 1, 2002 |
| Place of death: | Bathurst, Canada |
| Resting place: | Bathurst, New Brunswick, Canada |
| Submitted by: | Gerald Hannon (gerald.hannon@sympatico.ca) |
If you did not know my mother, you might think she died a poor woman. Little money, no car, no house, no expensive clothes. But we who knew her know she died a rich woman. She knew that the richest people are those who give everything away. She gave us many things, but I want to talk of only three.
She gave us the gift of her laughter. One of my earliest memories if of her reading bedtime stories to my brother John and me, and starting to laugh, and making us laugh until we could not stop. I know that laughter was a strong bond between her and her best friend and companion Rita and Rita’s sister Jackie, and we would hear stories of nights and days of laughter on the banks of the Nigadoo River, and if that got helped along by a little gin and tonic, that was just fine. She had the nurses laughing whenever she was in the hospital. She had the ambulance attendants laughing all the way to Moncton once. You cannot think of my mother without hearing her laughter.
She gave us the gift of her sense of adventure. My mother would try anything. When she was 50, I took her and my brother David to Mexico — three days on the bus. Put her on a donkey for a six-hour walk in the mountains to a primitive village. She didn’t hesitate for a minute. She loved it. Young people felt at ease with her. They saw the same spirit in her that they felt in themselves.
She gave us the gift of understanding what love is — that you become richer in love the more you give it away. Love meant protecting us, nurturing us, laughing with us, crying with us. Love meant kissing the pain away from a scrape if we fell. It meant putting pennies away till she could put a twenty-dollar bill in an envelope and mail it. It would mean something a little different to all of us — to my brother John, to his wife Liz whom my mother loved as the daughter she never had, to my brother David, to his wife Donna and their children, Trevor and Corrine, to her friend Jackie, to her best friend and companion of more than 20 years, Rita. I pray that somewhere she knows that, that she made us understand love, and that it is coming back to her now with the same richness, the same intensity, the same laughter and today, the same tears, as she gave to all of us.