Her eyes were open, so she saw hope

KRISTA Campbell's husband Brock thought she needed to go for a walk last Saturday morning. They were lying in bed, where the 26-year-old mother of three had been spend­ing a lot of time lately. She'd been depressed.

In fact, she has struggled with depression -- even thoughts of suicide at times -- since she was 12. Going for a walk, her husband thought, might help her.

"Don't look at the ground when you're walk­ing," Brock told her. "Look around. Be aware of what's going on."

***

It was just after 10 a.m.

Krista had been walking for about five minutes, and looking around, when she saw something just off a park path near the corner of Bishop Grandin Boulevard and St. Mary's Road. Something no one else had noticed.

Kathryn Sawatzky, a 37-year-old jogger who had passed by the body like all the rest, was returning along the same path when she heard a woman crying out.

It was Krista.

"Oh my God," she said.

"Is that real?"

It was real, and unreal.

The body of a 15-year­old aboriginal girl was hanging low in the branches of a small, lonely tree. A tree that once hung heavy with apples that were the joy of the neighbourhood children, but now slumped empty and grotesquely twisted. Per­haps dead.

Kathryn called 911, but someone had already reached the operator and soon a paramedic was on a cellphone instructing them to get the girl out of the tree. Perhaps she wasn't dead.

Kathryn's jogging mate, a woman named Jean, quickly climbed into the tree and lifted the body free while Krista removed the orange extension cord from around the girl's neck.

Then Kathryn and Krista gently lowered the girl to the ground. Kathryn cradled her, rub­bing her head, praying for her soul.

Then Kathryn wept and asked the girl a ques­tion without an answer.

"How could your life have gotten so bad for you to do this to yourself?"

On Sunday, Kathryn would return to the tree with a beaded cross that her priest had given her.

By that time others had al­ready been there, building a shrine of the girl's favourite things, flowers and a mem­ory box.

Kathryn would learn the girl's name at the shrine.

Samantha Jensson.

What Kathryn still didn't know was who she was.

Samantha's aunt Brenda Barnes knew who the girl was. "Sam," as she was called, was a sister, sand­wiched between two broth­ers and a father who lives in squalid Manitoba Housing, near the tree where she died after two attempts at overdosing.

As for the mother, she left nine years ago.

One day she went into the bathroom, wrapped a blow-drier cord around her neck, and hanged herself. "Samantha was the one who found her," the aunt said.

Sam was six years old.

There was counselling for the kids, and the staff at Victor Major School tried to help.

"But," Sam's aunt said, "her life has never been the same."

The Free Press photo archives has a picture of 10-year-old Samantha Jensson, her face painted, smiling happily. The girl smiling with her in the photo, Ashley Gauthier Souli­er, was nine at the time. I asked Ashley, who's now 14, what Sam was like.

"She was a really quiet girl. She was shy, I think. She seemed really happy, but she wasn't."

I wondered how she knew Samantha was unhappy.

"She just told me she missed her mom lots."

***

There's something I haven't told you about Krista, the depressed, at-times suicidal young mother who saw Samantha's body in the tree when others didn't.

Krista is also aboriginal.

And she believes the small, lonely tree Sam­antha chose -- with fruit that once brought so much joy to the neighbourhood children -- is symbolic of Sam's life.

She sees metaphor, too, in how so many other people were blind to the aboriginal girl hanging in full view near one of the city's busiest inter­sections. While Krista -- an aboriginal woman -- saw her.

Here's what's more important.

"It has opened my eyes," Krista said, "It's not as bad as you think."

Then she said this: "I just feel like she chose me. And she chose to save my life."

Somehow, it seems that by finding Samantha, Krista has found herself.

Strange, isn't it?

How hope can be harvested from hopelessness.

Just by looking around you.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca