Grief, grace mark memorial

Opinion

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This article was published 06/06/2017 (2796 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The place where Christine Wood waited to be found is covered in flowers now. The place where she rested is guarded with rocks. The spot where she lay is watched by the green leaves of young soybeans and a white wooden cross.

Christine isn’t there anymore. Ten months after she went missing, and eight weeks after a man was charged with her killing, she came home. Last week, a farmer noticed something in the ditch; he wondered if it was an animal bone.

So now, after months of scouring the city for any trace of her, George and Melinda Wood at last have their daughter. On Tuesday, they went to the place where she was recovered, to face what no parent should ever have to.

They did not come alone. For this ceremony, vehicles fill up the road. They bring people from all over; cousins from Winnipeg, friends from Bunibonibee First Nation, non-profit staff who walked this journey with Christine’s parents.

The fact of this place tells its own story, in pieces. It makes sense, someone points out. If you are to drive east out of the city, down Dugald Road and take a right onto the first lonely gravel and then dirt road, this is where it takes you.

In winter, an RM of Springfield resident said, the road is unpassable. So for most of the time Christine waited to be found, at least it would have been peaceful: no cars passing by and no people. Just snow, silence and flickering starlight.

Across the sprawling prairie, the skyscrapers of the city loom blue and hazy in the June heat. She was so close.

They came here for ceremony. They came to consecrate the ground where Christine was found and to pray over it, and make it beautiful. It doesn’t make the grief go away, but it can transform it into something more approachable.

For 10 months, this place was someone’s most terrible secret. For 10 months, this was a place marked by evil. Now it blossoms with flowers laid by loving hands and a butterfly ornament from Christine’s home. Now it’s peaceful.

“The family needs to make a place of peace of their own for that site, and to encourage closure and healing,” says Morene Gabriel, who met the Woods in March and helped organize the vigil. “That’s what we’re doing here today.”

Gabriel knows. Twelve years ago, her family went to the place where her sister, Eileen Mary Roulette Houle, was killed in 2001. And they left their prayers there, lifted her memory up over that place and felt it grow placid.

She is not the only one here who has also lost someone to violence. Ceremonies like these happen entirely too often in a province where indigenous girls and women are more than eight times more likely to be murdered.

There is hope for change. Because there are stories yet to be told about the search for Christine that will be told in due time; stories about Winnipeg police that moved mountains to find her, stories about the support that flooded in.

And there’s something too, that on the same day Christine’s body was found and 3,300 kilometres away, the federal inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women held its first hearing in Whitehorse.

It is an imperfect process. But after decades of pain, at least there is now more listening.

“If people keep a blind eye to it, then nothing’s affected and nothing will change,” Gabriel says. “I think the inquiry has sparked a lot of people’s awareness, and a lot of people’s desire to do something positive for the families.”

The wind at the site is so loud that it speaks clearly. The wind carries human voices away and leaves its own thoughts. The wind catches the scent of sage, from the smudging bowl that Bear Clan’s James Favel holds out.

If you listen, maybe, it speaks of community. It whispers around the sacred bundles brought by elders Thelma Morrisseau and Gramma Shingoose; it winds through the photos of Christine distributed to honour her memory.

The wind bears down on the sacred fire that supporters are building. Pauly Kleinsasser, who lives on a Hutterite colony near Anola, drives his truck into the ditch to act as a windbreak. This is what community looks like.

Kleinsasser didn’t know the family, but he followed Christine’s story from the beginning. When he heard she’d been discovered on a property he knows, he says, the pain of it hit too close to home; he has a daughter the same age.

He first went to the site to pay his respects, to pray that Christine’s spirit will rest. That morning, he explains to some of those gathered, he thought about Tuesday’s ceremony. A voice came to him and said, “bring them water.”

“So,” he tells them, and his voice catches in his throat, “I’m bringing the water.”

And off of his truck come pallets of bottled water, distributed among the 60 people gathered, a relief from the heat that the wind doesn’t lessen. And as the last words of ceremony fade away, quiet smiles spread in its wake.

Family and friends surround George and Melinda Wood, drawing Christine’s parents into a long embrace. Even the wind seems to settle as the sacred fire is doused. Even the sun takes a moment to slip discreetly behind cloud.

As she steps away from the site where her daughter’s body was found, Melinda Wood turns to a Free Press writer and puts her arms around her and says, “are you doing alright?”

This is what grace looks like. It has taken root now in a ditch where something precious was once hidden. Nurtured by the prairie sky, that grace will bloom into a lesson: we are, all of us, held under the same sky, and connected.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca