Joyce Chrunik-Rudiak is hoping someone can help her reunite a very special set of shirts. Wednesday was the anniversary of her brother Jerry Chrunik’s death, and it got her thinking again about a long-lost family heirloom: a Ukrainian shirt embroidered for him by her mother Anne Chrunik. The shirt, Chrunik-Rudiak said, was accidentally donated along with Jerry’s other clothes to Value Village in Sherwood Park after he died in 2014. “Jerry passed away very suddenly, and I didn’t think about the shirt until like two years later,” she said. “It was a shirt that my mother embroidered. She embroidered shirts for all of us, and so it’s an heirloom. It’s something near and dear to my heart,” Chrunik-Rudiak said. Chrunik-Rudiak went to the store in 2016 but said staff at the time couldn’t tell her what might have happened to it. She knows it’s a long shot, but she’s never stopped thinking about it and hopes the public can help bring the shirt home. “It’s always been on my mind,” she said. “Especially on August 19, on the day that he passed away.” “There’s always the outside chance that maybe somebody’s listening and maybe did buy the shirt and I could get it back,” Chrunik-Rudiak said. Should Jerry’s shirt be found, Chrunik-Rudiak said it be handed down to her son, and then to his son. “He (Jerry) was my son’s godfather,” she added. “It is to be passed on to somebody within the family.” “I know my mother would be very pleased if we got the shirt back, but she’s not with us anymore,” she added. Any information about the shirt can be sent to edmontonnewstips@bell.ca.
