Charlotte Royal, née Cassidy, died May 23, was born March 15, 1929, in Chicago to Thomas and Anastacia Cassidy. She graduated with high honors from Barat College in Lake Forest with a B.A. in literature where she forged a lifelong love affair with the written word and where she met her husband William Royal at a tea dance. She had seven children with him and instilled a reverence for poetry and classical music in each of them.
She lived much of her adult life in Wilmette, Winnetka, and Evanston, traveling extensively, most often to Paris, pursuing her passion for art and beauty throughout the world. Raising her children on the North Shore of Chicago with love and care, working at a travel agency, writing poetry, Charlotte was a wonderful listener and also a profound conversationalist with an irreverent sense of humor. She had a wide-ranging intellectual curiosity, was an avid reader, a prodigious writer of letters, a tender and attentive mother and grandmother, and she found inspiration and wonder in most everything connected to this mortal coil. In her poem Sans Toi she reflects: “Spring is a burden of beauty/forsythia and yellow dawns/ I carry brilliance in my days/ and some few nights/ but only for so long.”
She is pre-deceased by her sister Rita Wiggins of St. Helena, Calif., her baby brother Thomas Cassidy, and is survived by her sister Mary Denigan of Cathedral City, Calif., who said, “She had a consuming interest in others; people gravitated to her and wanted to be in her presence.”
She is also survived by her seven children, William Jr., Madeleine, Anastasia, Mary Therese, Mark, Barbara, and Charlotte, 20 grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren. She was a celebrated beauty until the day she passed away at her son Mark’s home in Northbrook, where he cared for her in the last years of her life.
Charlotte will be honored in a memorial service in July.