LEBANON — Dick and Gerry Cyr traveled frequently between their home in Hartland and Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital — then in Hanover — in the three years and nine months their young son David Cyr was sick with acute lymphocytic leukemia before he died in 1984.
During David’s illness and treatment, the Cyrs observed the myriad challenges families with sick children faced at the time.
“The hospital will let a mother stay overnight in the room with her child, but they have no provision for fathers,” Dick Cyr told the Valley News after David died. “It’s not the hospital’s fault; it’s that they are set up to take care of patients, not parents. I’ve seen fathers trying to sleep in chairs; parents who didn’t have enough money to go somewhere and eat while they were waiting; parents who didn’t even have a dime to make a collect call home to tell their families what was happening.”
Amid their grief following David’s death, the Cyrs sought to create a place where families could go between cancer treatments or stay overnight while their child was being treated at the hospital. They raised money and awareness, resulting in the creation of the nonprofit David’s House, which first opened in Hanover in 1986 and then moved to Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center’s campus in Lebanon in 1994.
As of June of this year, the nonprofit home away from home had housed a total of more than 16,200 families overnight. The 13,700-square-foot house has 14 bedrooms, two kitchens, nine bathrooms, three playrooms and laundry facilities.
Dick Cyr, who died July 24 at the age of 85, remained a vocal and active advocate for David’s House until he became too frail to do so in recent years, Jaye Olmstead, the executive director, said.
“David’s House was this labor of love,” said Olmstead, who first met Cyr in 2007 when she interviewed to become development director at David’s House.
Dick himself was “one of the most grateful people I’ve ever met,” she said. “When he said thank you, you just felt it. He never took individual credit for everything David’s House has become.”
For her own part, Olmstead said she counts Cyr as an “incredible mentor” who was inspiring in his selflessness.
Born April 24, 1937 in Old Town, Maine, Cyr was the third of seven children of Walter Cyr Sr. and Florilda (Cyr) Dumont. The family moved to Milford, Mass. when Cyr was 4. Walter Cyr Sr. was in the Army, but he was released from the service because at the time the couple had five children, Eugene Cyr, one of Dick’s two older brothers, said.
After the Army, Walter Cyr Sr. got a job through the G.I. Bill working in a quarry as a stone polisher. The family moved into a home on the quarry property. The children grew up swimming in the quarry.
“We became the “fish family” because we were such good swimmers,” Eugene Cyr said. In addition to swimming, the brothers played football in their spare time.
They all attended the local Catholic school, St. Mary’s School. While Eugene Cyr said he had a couple of good friends, “Dick was like in charge of a platoon (…) These kids, they would cut their arms off for each other.” Dick was the last surviving member of the 20.
Dick also was “My mother’s favorite son because he was cross-eyed like her,” Eugene Cyr said. “Later on they both had the operation to correct it.”
Their father struggled with alcoholism and the three older boys tried help their mother by picking up jobs to earn money to pay for necessities such as milk, Eugene said.
It was a “high-pressure life; never having a pair of clothes that were decent on us,” Eugene Cyr said.
The three brothers all enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1954. When they got out Eugene and Walter started a construction company, but Dick found himself “in trouble with the police and stuff.”
“He was always a rebel,” Eugene Cyr said. “God bless him.”
Cyr married Gerry D’Arcangelo and they had two sons, Ronald and Richard, who they raised in Massachusetts. In 1976, the family moved to the Upper Valley, where Dick’s younger brother Jack was already living.
“When he moved to New Hampshire he became a different person,” Eugene Cyr said. “Up there he was Saint Dick.”
In the Upper Valley, Dick took a job as a salesman with Irving Oil. He and Gerry decided to follow in the footsteps of his brother Jack and his wife, becoming foster parents.
David, malnourished, neglected and abused, arrived at the Cyrs’ home in Hartland as a 1-year-old.
“We had him about two months and we knew we wanted to adopt him,” Cyr told the Valley News in 1984. “We were worried that some judge might decide to return him to his family.”
The adoption was completed before David turned 3, at which point he had already been diagnosed with leukemia. He went through eight relapses during his illness.
During his treatment, David befriended some of the other children at the hospital. David asked his parents to take the other children home with them. At the hospital David found a best friend in Shelley, a girl who was navigating treatment at the hospital largely alone except for some weekend visits, Dick recalled in a 2011 interview with the Valley News.
“…David would always make sure he went and got her and brought her back to his room …Half the time you couldn’t tell them apart because neither one of them had any hair and they were about the same size,” Dick said in 2011. “He just looked out for other kids.”
When David’s oncologist told Cyr that David had just a couple of months left, Cyr found himself laying out the plan for the home away from home for families like his.
“And, not out of my mind but out of this mouth, came the words, …‘We’re going to build a house and call it David’s House,’ but I didn’t say that it just came through me. …So that night, about two in the morning when I was driving home, it dawned on me that I had made this statement …and then (I thought), how are you going to do this? I’d never been involved in fundraising or on a board or anything like that.”
After David’s death, the Cyrs used David’s $300.78 saved from birthday gifts and spare change from Cyr’s pockets as starter money for the house. Less than a year after David’s death they had $175,000 to purchase a home at 1 Prospect Street in Hanover, which after renovations became the first David’s House. It had seven bedrooms and was located a mile away from the then-Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital.
The Cyrs later divorced, but Dick remained committed to David’s House. He helped fundraise for the construction of the new and current house on DHMC’s campus, as well as for expansion efforts in 2003 and 2013.
Olmstead said she watched Dick do a presentation about David’s House on her first day as the organization’s development director.
“I couldn’t have asked for a better day,” she said.
In the presentation, which she later saw him give many more times over the years, Dick outlined his journey with David and described “how he turned his grief and sorrow into this amazing organization,” she said.
Donna Maron, Cyr’s younger sister, said her brother’s skills as a salesman came in handy as he advocated for David’s House.
“The one thing I can say mostly about Dick … He was a salesman,” she said. “I don’t know where he got that. He was a good salesman. He was a good brother.”
The way that Cyr transformed his grief about David’s death into David’s House inspired Dan Gauthier to do the same after he lost his 6-year-old daughter Taylor to cancer in 2006.
Gauthier, who now lives in Savannah, Ga. but lived in Concord until 2021, experienced the value of David’s House firsthand when Taylor was being treated at DHMC. While “the hospital tries to heal the child as much as possible, David’s House heals the families,” he said.
At David’s House, he could come back to have a cup of coffee, have a conversation or not, take a shower or do laundry. He sometimes played video games or watched a movie with his then 8-year-old son at David’s House. He and his wife at the time would take turns staying in Lebanon and staying at their home in Concord.
“It’s underestimated the power that David’s House has on families,” Gauthier, a former member of the David’s House board, said. “The only thought you want is with your child (but) you have to take care of yourself too.”
There were several similarities between Taylor and David, Gauthier said. Both had been adopted, they were about the same age when they died and they both died of cancer. Both kids befriended other children easily and Gauthier said he thinks they both knew their time was short.
“Dick and I just kind of hit it off,” Gauthier said. “…I would go anywhere and do anything for David’s House and so would Dick.”
One year, Dick told Gauthier to pick a day and for that day only the house would be named “Taylor’s House.” They had a sign made up that they hung over the David’s House sign that day. Also, when the current house was expanded, at Cyr’s urging there was a bathroom decorated with ladybugs, which were Taylor’s favorite thing.
When a parent loses a child, Gauthier said their biggest fear is that their child will be forgotten.
“Through my connection with David’s House, Taylor will always be remembered,” Gauthier said. Also, “she’s a part of me everywhere I go. Just like David was a part of Dick.”
Though Gauthier still grieves things such as never having the opportunity to walk Taylor down the aisle at her wedding, he saw through Dick that there was a way to work through that grief.
“Dick showed me this is what you do,” he said. “He was a pretty powerful influence for sure.”
Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com and 603-727-3213.
