Doreen (Nicholson) Lanthier

In Celebration of

Mrs. Doreen Lanthier (nee Nicholson)

December 24, 1935 – March 10, 2025

At the age of 89, after a long and well-lived life, Doreen Lanthier gently slipped away on March 10, 2025 at the Rideaucrest Long Term Care Home in Kingston, Ontario. 

Her ashes will find their way home to Cochrane where she will be buried beside her husband Louis.  There will be no funeral service or viewing, but the Lanthier family wishes to pay tribute to, and celebrate, Mom’s life and career as a teacher, in this Obituary.

Doreen was an awesome Mom and terrific mother-in-law to her children David Lanthier and his wife Kathy, Randall Lanthier and Louise Vallée, and her husband Richard.  She will be missed but remembered with an intense love and pride by her four beautiful granddaughters: Kaitlin Lanthier and her spouse Corey La Joie; Carly Lanthier and her wife Cassie McDougall; Kelsey Vallée; and Madison Vallée and her fiancé Jesse Georgopoulos.  Doreen’s husband Louis passed away almost 30 years ago.  Doreen will also be missed by her surviving sisters Maureen Wall and Carol McLaren, her sisters-in-law, Cecile Willars and Carole Lanthier and her many nieces and nephews.

Doreen was born in the small town of Barry’s Bay, Ontario but as World War II was breaking out, her parents Leonard and Kathleen Nicholson moved to the rapidly growing town of Cochrane where her Uncle Eddie Etmanski, one of Cochrane’s longtime firemen, and Aunt Leona Etmanski, also resided.  She remained in Cochrane most of her life.  Doreen grew up with her four sisters Charlotte, Judy, Carol and Maureen, attended the English Catholic School and Cochrane High School, sometimes worked at The Spinning Wheel Restaurant, established by her parents in 1964, and lived in the family residence where Kay and Len also took in boarders.  It was there that she met her future husband, Louis, but before meeting him, Doreen had decided that the then bustling town of Cochrane, filling up with lots of new little Cochranites of school age, needed more teachers.  She headed off to teacher’s college in Ottawa at the very young age of 16. 

Mom started practice teaching in Ottawa when she was only 19 years of age and returned to Cochrane where her first job in the mid 50’s was as the sole teacher at the little one-room schoolhouse out in Hunta.  She recalled the school board sending a taxi to pick her up each morning, picking up a couple of her students on the way in, and continuing to the schoolhouse where one of the local boys was assigned to start the fire in the wood stove to heat up the room before she arrived.  Doreen next taught at the English Catholic School which, at the time, was still under the iron-clad and stern control of Sister Bernadette and the nuns. One former student remembers the good-looking, stylish and rather “hot” new single teacher who drew the attention of all the boys in school. From 1961 to 1973 Doreen taught at St. Patrick Catholic School in Kapuskasing.  When the family moved back to Cochrane in 1973, she continued teaching Grades 1, 2 and 3 at Ferguson Public School until she finally retired in 1990. 

Doreen was very proud of her career as an elementary school teacher.  Andy Rooney, of CBS’ 60 Minutes, once said, “Most of us end up with no more than five or six people who remember us. Teachers have thousands of people who remember them for the rest of their lives.”  Many of us always remember our teachers in high school who are formative in shaping us as adults, but less so, do we always remember those educators who first focused us on the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, and mundane things like being polite, tying your shoes, colouring inside the lines and learning the Lord’s Prayer or our National Anthem (something more important than ever these days).  In her lifetime, when classes often contained more than 30 students, Mom taught well over a thousand children at the English Catholic School and Ferguson Public School in Cochrane and St. Patrick Elementary in Kapuskasing. 

As any child of a teacher will tell you, it is sometimes tough to grow up having to share your Mom or Dad with hundreds of other kids. A well-known public educator once said that teachers are the only people who lose sleep over other people's children, and another said: “It takes a big heart to help shape little minds”.  Both statements were true of our Mom.  She worked incredibly hard to make sure her lesson plans were complete, her classroom neatly organized and beautifully filled with educational displays, and that her little students left each year with the basics necessary for their next grade.  For Mom, teaching younger students meant that printing and writing had to be neat and meticulous, good spelling and grammar were of primary importance, a love of reading was to be fostered, and every child needed to be well-mannered, polite and respectful.  This was well before the age of the internet and social media when teachers did not compete with iPhones or Tik Tok for the attention of their students, and Mom observed that she would likely not have been able to do what teachers do now.

Doreen had an impeccable sense of style and fashion.  As a teacher she of course had the benefit of class and staff pictures taken every year which provided a chronological portrait of her ever-present style over decades of trending fashion.  Back in the 60s, at a Catholic school, teachers who were expecting were strongly discouraged from showing their pregnant tummies for fear of corrupting young minds and were told to delicately hide their expectant mounds in loose clothing.  Mom complained how difficult it was to do that when fashion demanded such things as flared skirts, mini-skirts, hot-pants, and bell-bottoms.  She ignored the directive.  Doreen never went out of the house or to school unless she was dressed up, her hair done, and jewellery and make-up applied.  She passed her sense of fashion and style, and the importance of always looking your best, onto her children and grandchildren.

Doreen had a genuine love of summer.  When asked why she became a teacher, she borrowed the teacher’s joke: “Two Reasons. July and August”.  While her love of teaching was a passionate one, she always looked forward to her downtime in the summer.  A teacher recently shared a meme about that:  "Teachers are solar-powered. They charge during the summer and discharge during the school year."  That was certainly Doreen, and we remember that she was slightly more relaxed and at ease in the summer but always disappeared a few days before the start of the school year to get her classroom ready.

After a busy life of juggling a teaching career and raising a family, Doreen’s retirement was both quiet and active.  We called her the Gallivanting Granny as she was always planning, or enjoying, her next vacation with her travel buddies Cecile and Randall, or off to visit her sisters. As Louis didn’t like to travel, Doreen made up for lost time after Dad passed, striking out to Italy, Ireland, Greece, Hawaii, Florida and across the Caribbean.  When she wasn’t travelling, Mom was spending time with her granddaughters, baking, or volunteering with the Cochrane Food Bank where she was well-known as “The Christmas Lady” who organized the annual Christmas sale.  Doreen also loved her family traditions of Christmas many of which, (including going overboard with gift-giving) remained unchanged for decades. In her last few years, when she often lost track of the time of year, she would regularly ask: “Is (insert name of child/grandchild) coming for Christmas”, even if it was in the hottest months of July and August.

After years of rising early to get her three children, and then herself, off to school, Mom in retirement usually slept in until 10 or 11 each day.  That pattern continued when she later went into her retirement residence in Kingston and thereafter, her long-term care residence.  Staff at each place noted that Doreen was one of their nicest and most pleasant residents – except if you tried to get her up before 10:30 when they saw her feisty side.  If you asked Mom if she had eaten breakfast, her response was always the same: “Breakfast? What’s that?”. 

When her mobility and slowly fading memory required her to go into assisted living and long-term care, even though her favourite expression was “It Sucks to Get Old”, Mom always maintained a positivity and happiness.  She was seldom in her assigned room, always preferring the company of others and joined every activity there was at her residences. Even after some falls, hospital stays and the isolating lock-down of the Covid pandemic, Mom always remained upbeat and genuinely happy each day of her life. It was only when two recent devastating strokes robbed her of her remaining mobility, function, vision, memory, and ability to communicate, that Mom’s shining positive personality was finally quelled.

The hundreds of children that Doreen taught over the course of 38 years, including her own children and grandchildren, may not know exactly how she impacted their lives, because as we grow older, we forget the small things that started us down the educational road to what we eventually become.  But if we know our alphabet, learned to read, count, print and write, colour between the lines, and spell and articulate properly, we likely owe all of that, in part, to Mom and the many other primary teachers in Cochrane and Kap just like her.  

And it is a certainty that the importance of being nice, treating people with respect, being happy and positive, having a sense of humour, and making the most out of life – which described Doreen “to a T” – are also things that she taught us, just by being herself every day of her life.  Her bright spirit, quick wit, grace and charm will be missed but hopefully honoured by replication in the lives of all the children she taught and raised in her lifetime.

And as is often said – If you could read this, you can thank a teacher.

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