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Marie-Rose Gervais Bourgie
[edit]- The page is below is about my grand-mother. I posted it when I was still new to Wikipedia and it was quickly deleted as being unencyclopedic. Fair enough, but I can put her bio on my own user page :) hehe.
Marie-Rose Gervais Bourgie (June 28, 1900 - June 9, 1994) (last name pronounced "jair-vay boor-jee") was matriarch of a typical middle-class French-Canadian family in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She was wife and aunt to prominent local dentists.
Marie-Rose Gervais was born in Sturgeon Falls, Ontario, Canada the eldest daughter of Régina and Zénophile Gervais. Zénophile was a blacksmith in French-speaking northern Ontario but in 1903 health concerns required him to abandon this physically demanding trade. The Gervais family moved to Beauharnois a Québec village on the Saint Lawrence River, 50 kilometers upriver of Montreal. They kept a hotel that soon became the center of secular village life.
Marie-Rose was raised much as other bourgeois village girls: she went to school until the age of 17, learned the piano, and helped out in the family business. Also, as the eldest child and daughter, she helped raise her six siblings. Despite being an excellent student and showing some musical aptitude, she was never offered the chance to pursue her studies.
In 1926, Marie Rose married 28 year old Wilfrid Bourgie, a dentist and son of the village undertaker, in Beauharnois. They went to live in Montreal, in an apartment linked to Wilfrid's dental practice. Marie-Rose gave birth to their first child, Yolande, On August 15, 1928; to Monique on 19 December, 1931; finally to Pierrette on 22 December, 1933.
The depression hit everyone hard but Wilfrid often accepted payment in kind (and sometimes worked for free) from his less well-to-do patients. The family achieved some prosperity and by 1944 had moved to the Notre-Dame-de-Grace district of the city. They invited Marie-Rose's widowed sister Marie-Laure Gervais Laplante and her son Jean-Guy to move in with them.
Yolande, Monique, and Pierrette all attended Villa Maria girls school. As in Marie-Rose's time, social conventions discouraged parents from having their daugthers pursue formal education further than high school. Ironically Wilfrid, who had dreamed of neurosurgery as a career, now had the means his own father had lacked to send his children to university. However, being conservative catholics, the family followed social custom, and instead donated large amounts to catholic schools.
All three daughters eventually married. Yolande married Doctor Marcel Lesage, Pierrette married Jean-Guy Champagne, and Monique married Réal Poirier. These unions gave Marie-Rose eight grand-children and six great-grand-children during her lifetime.
In 1968, Monique's husband Réal purchased a two-dwelling house in the Ville Saint-Laurent suburb (now a borough) of Montreal. Wilfrid helped finance the purchase, then sold the NDG house in 1969, and moved with Marie-Rose and Laure, to the dwelling above the Poirier household. Sadly, Wilfrid soon passed away of a heart attack on October 29, 1969 having spent the summer feeding corn on the cob to his four year old grandson Vincent.
The seventies were a surprisingly active time for the widowed Marie-Rose. She had some savings and decided to travel. She took a cruise to Bermuda on the Soviet liner Pushkin, she travelled to Spain and Morrocco, where she rode a camel, and she went to France and Italy.
Marie-Rose lived with her sister Marie-Laure until 1976, when Marie-Laure developped Alzheimer's disease and moved first to her son's home and then to a nursing home in Trois-Rivieres, where her son was now a prominent car dealer. Marie-Laure died the following year. Though Marie-Rose was in fine health, the family deemed it prudent to move her early to a retirement home, which only accept initially autonomous tenants. So in early 1980, Marie Rose moved to Résidence L'Amitié. In May, the family held a large gathering at the residence to celebrate Marie-Rose's 80th birthday.
On April 12, 1981 while visiting her daughter Monique for the weekend, Marie-Rose, born before the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, watched the televised launch of the space shuttle Columbia.
In 1987 Marie-Rose slipped while taking a walk and broke her hip. She recovered, but needed the help of a walker. In 1992 she slipped again, in her apartment, and knocked her head. While she sustained an apparently minor injury, the shock hit deep and the family realized Marie-Rose was no longer autonomous. Marie-Rose moved to the Manoir Cartierville, a nursing home, where she lived for the next two years. In May 1994 the family held a Mother's Day celebration in the Manoir's reception room. There Marie-Rose held her last great-granddaughter, Sophie Lesage, who was only a few days old.
At the end of her life, Marie-Rose seemed content and happy, not at all bitter or regretful at having lost her health. While her condition kept her bed-ridden most of the time, she was nevertheless free from pain and discomfort. She had taken to the bed-time habit of telling her nurses "I'm ready; the Lord can come and take me anytime now". Marie-Rose died in her sleep one night in June 1994, a few weeks shy of her 94th birthday.