A Forever Bond
A daughter finds a meaningful way to honour her beloved father – marking the kinship they shared through caring for humans and all animals.
Jim Sharp was a pharmacist who built a chain of pharmacies, called Regency Prescriptions, throughout the Lower Mainland.
His daughter, Judy Sharp, followed in her father’s professional footsteps. She became a pharmacist and worked in her father’s company.
Dedication to people, their medications and health maintenance is not all the father-daughter duo shared.
“We always had animals at the house,” Judy recalls. “We’ve had every single kind – you name it, we’ve had it. Fish and turtles to chickens. But we always had cats and dogs.”
Judy was a child when Jim brought home her first cat, Winkie. It was a father’s lesson in responsibility and the beginning of a lifelong love of cats and all animals.
Jim passed away in February, the loss of a beloved patriarch that has left his son and three daughters feeling his absence profoundly.
So when Judy saw that the RAPS Cat Sanctuary was undergoing major renovations – and that one of the funding requests was for a medicine room – she saw a meaningful way to create a lasting tribute to the memory of her father.
“The fact that he and I were both pharmacists, it just seemed fortuitous to donate to a medicine room,” she says.
There are many good causes Judy could have chosen to honour her father. Her mother has Alzheimer’s and Jim had arthritis. These causes would have been meaningful contributions, of course.
“I just felt closer to him donating to RAPS,” she says. “We always shared a bond with the cats.
We connected with the cats.”
Jim’s last pets were a West Highland Terrier named Holly and a tabby cat named Dazy.
“Dazy was Dad’s cat,” says Judy. “They shared early morning routines together for almost 17 years. He really enjoyed and loved her.”
The family has a preexisting relationship with RAPS: Last year, Judy adopted a pair of cats, Olive and Tosh, from the RAPS Adoption Centre.
Since the RAPS Animal Hospital opened, in 2018, the residents of the RAPS Cat Sanctuary have had their own “family doctors,” no longer depending on external veterinarians for routine and emergency care. The medicine room at the Sanctuary is part of a clinical system that brings as much medical care as possible directly to the animals, reducing the number of times they require transportation to the hospital.
For years to come, animals at the RAPS Cat Sanctuary and at the RAPS Adoption Centre will benefit from the generosity of Judy Sharp.
And the memory of Jim Sharp – the devotion he had to the welfare of animals and people – will be permanently memorialized in the renovated RAPS Cat Sanctuary.
The animals that benefit from the Sharp family’s kindness may not be able to read the plaque or truly understand the story behind the humans who help keep them healthy. But thousands of lives will be saved and improved for years to come as a testimony to Jim Sharp’s life of caring – and the love of his daughter with whom he shared a deep devotion to the well-being of both animals and people.
