The Viactive group in Bury in 2011, showing (left to right) June Morrison, Irma Chapman, Theresa MacLeod, Judy Statton, and Martha Levesque.

“I really don’t like to be in the limelight!”
Irma Chapman really, really means that.
Irma comes in a petite package, full of energy and willingness to do whatever needs to be done. Can I say she is somewhere around 85? That for the past four years or so, she volunteered as a caregiver for a good neighbour, even during the pandemic.
“I was getting meds and groceries, doing a lot of household things. If anything went wrong, I’d get an SOS. That was quite a little experience!”
I first met Irma 10 years ago, a few years after she founded the Viactive exercise group in Bury. For about a decade, she co-led the weekly group with June Morrison. As an employee of the Centre d’action bénévole du Haut-Saint-François, I was able to watch Irma at work.
She was the model of constancy, caring, and good cheer. Her enjoyment was contagious, and she reached out to every member of the group, whether English-speaking or French-speaking.
Irma Chapman has been involved in so many volunteer activities over the years, even she has difficulty remembering them all. She’s outlived some of the organizations she worked for, some of them victims of the Covid pandemic. She was secretary of the Jolly Seniors, for example, a social and support group for seniors.
She was the agricultural reporter for the Women’s Institute. Her parents were farmers and, she joked, “I grew up on a horse’s back. I always loved horses. I had a workhorse; she was a big horse, a good horse for me to ride. I rode bareback, and I’d take her to twitch logs out of the forest for my father.”
(I had to look that up. “To twitch a log” means to hitch a log to a horse and drag it out of the forest.)
Irma Coates Chapman was born near Gould Station, when it was still a village. “When I was 14 or 15, I went out to work, looking after a little girl for a family in Huntingville. I wanted to earn money to help my family.”
After that, she went to work in Sherbrooke, first at a laundry, then at a glove and hosiery factory.
“And then I got married to Dennis. Haven’t I done well all these years! It’s been 60-some years. We were married in Canterbury in the little church there.”
They kept on living and working in Sherbrooke, where she had her first baby, daughter Joanne. They moved back to Canterbury, and “along came two babies, two boys. Randy and Steven,” she said.
She waitressed at a restaurant, while tending the gas pump. “Bury was a booming place, then.”
After that, they lived in Hardwood Flat for a number of years before moving to “the old Bob Mayhew house,” across the street from the St. Paul’s Home where Irma worked as a caregiver.
“I must have been there 12 to 15 years. At the same time I had my own Home in our house. I had about six residents.”
Irma and Dennis still live in the heart of Bury. They’ve been long-time volunteers and members of the Bury Historical & Heritage Society and the Bury’s Image de Bury. Irma was a warden for the St. Paul’s Anglican church, and more lately, a volunteer for the Trinity United Church in Cookshire.
I asked if she had any advice for those of us aging after her. “Oh no. I’ll just say – I’ve had a good life, good friends, good neighbours, a good family!”
Who needs the limelight when they’ve surrounded themselves with so much grace?