Baby Das Chaklader

Radha Chaklader’s kind, gentle soul departed after her body died suddenly of natural causes at home during the early morning hours of October 13, 2024 at 87. It may have been a case of the proverbial broken heart, as her husband of 65 years, Dr. Asoke Chaklader had passed 7 weeks earlier. She is survived by sons Anjan and Aloke (Chuck). She was the 7th of 9 children, born to a police chief and homemaker in Calcutta, India, and outlived all of them. She often talked about the culture shock of a young Indian woman, speaking no English, coming to an obscure Western Canadian coastal town with a new husband in 1960. But within a decade or so she earned a diploma in education, while mothering two boys, from University of British Columbia and came to love Vancouver and consider it home.

Radha was part of a generation of North American housewives in the 1950’s and 60’s who devoted themselves to supporting the ambitious career objectives of their husbands, in her case very successfully. This would often occur at the expense of their own potential career ambitions, as was the case with her. Hers was also a well told story of a Canadian immigrant mother, from a far away land, trying to wrap her head around the idea that one son played the, at times, ferocious sport of ice hockey and another son playing very loud electric guitar, with odd looking friends, in a rock and roll band. But she had no regrets about letting her sons develop their own interests, even if she never fully understood them. She loved all children, and used her education diploma skills to work in day care centers, often on a volunteer basis.

She was a deeply spiritual person believing in the eternal soul, continuous reincarnation and karma. Although Radha lived a mostly happy life, she suffered from depression the last few years and leaned on her faith to deal with this issue, some days more successfully than others. But Radha didn’t burden others with her moods and was always trying to be uplifting and cheerful to anyone she spoke to. During this time she also suffered from vascular dementia and the ravages of this horrible disease left a shell of a person, physically and mentally, at the end. But she never complained about her fate and always believed that God was with her every step of the way. Her favourite pastime at the end of her life was to pass on blessings to others and, as limited as she was, had the power to touch people deeply. As someone who saw Radha regularly in her building recently remarked, “she acted as if she was everyone’s mother”. If there is one message she would like to leave us with, it is that ‘it is never too late to tell someone to their face that you love them, for the first time’.