'A very caring individual:' Vaughan Coun. Carella talks about deceased daughter

YorkRegion.com
Sept. 7, 2017
Tim Kelly

Still mired in the depths of grief, Vaughan Coun. Tony Carella spoke over the phone Sept. 6 about the death of his daughter, Dawn Carella Petrasso, from cancer at age 44 on Aug. 18.

"She could be stubborn, but she didn't have a nasty bone in her body," Carella said in a halting voice.

He remembers Dawn working a part-time job at one of the local community centres and helping someone who "was going through a rough patch."

"One of the people who worked with her told her mother that Dawn was a real help to him. She was just a very caring individual," Carella said of the married mother of two teenage sons, Anthony, 17, and Michael, 13.

His daughter's four-year-long battle with cancer took a toll on everyone in her family, Carella said. It was a particularly awful journey.

"It started with breast cancer, a double mastectomy. She was in remission and then it came back and never let go, spread to the lungs and bones," Carella said.

With just about every effort to cure her cancer exhausted locally, Dawn went to a clinic in Germany last spring intent on trying anything that might work.

"We heard about a woman who was successfully treated there, she was very high on it so we decided to try it in April," Carella said.

He said there were some positive results, "in terms of the cancer of the bones, but not the cancer of the lungs — it was just too far gone."

Carella gives Father Claudio Moser of St. Peter's Parish in Woodbridge credit for helping his daughter become "well-prepared."

"He (Father Moser) first met her when she was three or four and my daughter was in a daycare program at Villa Colombo. We left them alone to talk and we could hear tears, but there was also laughter too.

"On top of that three of my siblings came up from the States. I think it communicated the love they had developed for Dawn over the years and I thought that was a real gift," Carella said.

For more information, visit https://www.gofundme.com/donatefordawn.