When Christina Cheung packed her bags to emigrate to Canada from her native Hong Kong in 1967, she wrote that she was “sad and miserable.”
It wasn’t just her family that she was leaving behind to join her brother in Edmonton. Only a few months before she departed, while still training as a registered nurse, she met a patient who would forever change her life: a young medical resident named Vincent Cheng.
Hospitalized with a spinal tumour, Vincent had a series of invasive operations before his doctors – and Christina – realized they had misdiagnosed him. He recovered and eventually became an anesthetist.
The two dated casually, Christina’s father advising her not to go steady with anyone unless she was serious about him. He also advised her to consider marrying a Canadian or Italian man, since she had a particular fondness for cheese.
But once Christina arrived in Edmonton, she continued to write to Vincent regularly, and ultimately asked him to join her. Just weeks after Vincent’s arrival, the two were married in Halifax. They soon moved to the Toronto area and had three children: Michael, Maria and Joseph.
Christina ran her household with razor-sharp efficiency. To ensure that everyone would always be punctual, if not early, she set all the clocks 15 minutes fast – a fact that greatly alarmed visitors who had to be reassured they were not late for their next appointment. She insisted her children be well-rounded, forever shuttling them to and from music and sports lessons and patiently waiting outside knitting blankets.
Although Christina battled dementia and Parkinson’s disease in her later years, her devotion to her family never diminished. Last year, she became a grandmother to Alexander, who was born to her son Joseph and his husband Andrew. Recovering in hospital from the operation that discovered her terminal cancer, she told Joseph how strange she had first considered the idea of two men starting a family. But she told him that afternoon that “all children are blessings from God, and your son will be too.”
In the end, despite the fact that Maria now lives in Britain and Michael in Ottawa with his wife Mireille, Christina somehow managed to delay her passing until the moment when her entire immediate family were by her bedside.
In a letter Christina had written to her children years before her illnesses took over – which Vincent found two days after she died – she wrote these words of comfort: “Whoever I leave behind should not mourn for me too much, but should try to do your best to perform your duty as long as you are on earth.”
Joseph Cheng is Christina’s son.
