Passages. Steve Ryan : November 5,1943 - August 11, 2025.

My brother Steve died on August 11, after suffering several years of declining health. I will always be grateful for my sister-in-law June's loving care and the devotion of other friends and relatives. June's sister Phyllis, as well as our brother Allan and his wife Laurel, were among Steve's most faithful visitors. The obituary guestbook includes memories that made me smile.

Steve's funeral was on Tuesday, August 19, so I've had some time to collect my thoughts and calm my soul after my one day in Toronto. I was very touched by the comments and condolences of Steve and June's many friends and former co-workers.

After the millennium began and until my 75th birthday on the the eve of Steve's death, he and I emailed memories to each other on our birthdays. We both enjoyed doing so, and for me, the exchange was an opportunity to share an intimacy that we rarely experienced growing up, or as moved through our adult lives. Our exchanges nearly always involved snow, water or other outdoor activities from our childhood and adolescence in our hometown of Temiscaming, Quebec.

Steve was the only Ryan not born in Temiscaming. He was a WWII baby, born a month early in New Brunswick, where our dad, Harry Joseph Ryan, was still serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force after arduous wartime missions overseas. Our mother, Mary Coleraine Ryan (née Macpherson) once told me that she had never been as cold as she was in that first winter of Steve's life, isolated in a frigid house far away from Montreal, where she had lived and worked most of her life before marriage.

As a little girl, I was very envious of Steve's early years, living in Nitro, a 1940s company town built to house workers of the Cominion Industries, Ltd. munitions plant. Housing for returning WWII veterans was hard to find, and the little Ryan family lived there for some time while our dad was attending law school at McGill -- an hour's train ride away. Our grandmother, Mary (Smith) Macpherson, was "Mamma Glasses" to "Stevie", who was the grandchild she knew best. I used to love hearing he stories of Steve's pet rabbit, the cows in the nearby fields, and the time Steve caught a fish "down the hill" and our mother, a city girl, needed our dad to take the fish off the hook. The stories were, to me, evidence of an exciting and happy personal history.

One of my early memories as a very young child is of Steve heading off to St. Theresa's School on a rainy morning, wearing his dark brown leather backpack, stopping every couple of feet to rescue a worm and place it gently on the grass. Steve was known for his love of all creatures, including snakes. He once kept a small terrarium under our back porch and set out regularly on snake catching trips up the hill to the Temiscaming Golf Course. On one such adventure, I was bitten by some kind of green snake, and was sworn to secrecy about the incident, so that Steve wouldn't get into trouble for harming his little sister. He assured me that if I told, he would never take me snake catching again. Well, I didn't tell, but had no inclination to go on subsequent expeditions.

Steve taught all of us little kids to play cards: hearts, mostly, with Steve sitting in an armchair (where he could see our hands) and the three of us on the floor. We also played bridge and long games of Monopoly and Sorry, Crokinole and early versions of NHL table top hockey. Steve's love of chess was well remembered at his funeral, and I have mental images of him teaching my siblings Marilyn and Allan to play. When he first went to the University of Toronto, he would talk about playing "Eastern Europeans" in High Park. I imagined silent hours in the park with refugees and recent immigrants, with no desire or need for conversation.

At the U of T, Steve was a member of swim and ski teams. Because of him, we younger kids all ecame competent swimmers. He taught me to ski, insisting that I shouldn't be afraid of knocking down his homemade slalom poles. Sometimes the rough edges of a pole would leave a scratch on my face and I never much liked slalom for that reason . Steve worked hard at his jumping skills, and one late March afternoon,we played hooky from a crowded Good Friday liturgy to go skiing at the old Temiscaming Ski Club. My main assignment that day was to measure the length of his jumps. I got tired and bored as the afternoon wore on, but finally figured out that he wouldn't leave until he got his best jump. After I added a couple of inches, we finally left before dark and skied down the trail to our house on Elm Street.

Friends and relatives all have a Steve story, from his early life in Temiscaming, including the time he worked at the mill, then owned by Canadian International Paper. Friends from Temiscaming have sometimes stopped me in mid-sentence to ask about Steve. A friend who wrote a memorial tribute commented that he was "unique", a good word for someone with a broad and eclectic knowledgebase encompassing every subject from ancient history to sports.

My favorite recent memories of Steve are from the weddings of Allan and Laurel's daughter Chrissie to Alex (2014) and our son Chris to Melissa (2018). The gap closed on years of separation as the Ryan siblings laughed and danced and genuinely enjoyed one another's company.

After our mom died in 1997, Steve told me he hoped he would one day reunite with our parents. St. Augustine wrote that our hearts are restless until they rest in the Lord, and I believe that our union with God after death will somehow include those we have loved on earth. This is what I wish for Steve. May he rest in peace until we meet again.