A lawyer by profession, John Lawson made careful preparations for his passing. In his final days, his nieces and nephews found that he had helpfully provided a living will to relieve them of any anxiety over end-of-life decisions and had also left instructions for his funeral. He’d even gone so far as to write his own obituary.While he included a fulsome list of family members, John seemed to have forgotten to mention a few things about himself.
Those parties would always be swarming with young people – and not just with his various great-nieces and great-nephews, who delighted in racing up and down the many staircases. You would also meet students from around the world, many of them musicians, who had come to study at the University of Toronto, John’s alma mater, and for whom he provided essentially free room and board.
People first meeting John could find him gruff and brusque. But under the flinty façade was a heart of gold. John was not only enormously generous in his financial support of music and community groups, but also with his time and his affections. When his younger sister Ann’s husband, David Hughson, died in 1993, John became like a father to their four children.