On the morning of September 20, I received the sad news that my good friend and colleague, Vitaliy Shevchenko, the father of Ukraine’s ambassador to Canada, Andriy Shevchenko, passed away. I had last met with Vitaliy less than a month earlier, during the Dnipro Choir’s tour of Ukraine. He had just been diagnosed with cancer. It turned out to be much more serious than we originally thought.