Knowledge trumps verdict for girl’s mom

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This article was published 18/02/2011 (5379 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Wilma Derksen says the verdict in the Mark Edward Grant trial is irrelevant to her.

The mother of slain teenager Candace Derksen says spending almost five weeks at the trial has more meaning than its legal conclusion.

“It doesn’t change anything,” Derksen said Thursday morning. “It’s not only about him. It’s about us too.”

By us, she means her husband Cliff, their children, their extended family and their friends. These are the people who cried with them, held them and prayed with them over the past 26 years. The Derksens wanted to know exactly what happened to their 13-year-old daughter.

Now they do and there’s peace in that knowledge.

“We can’t let the verdict override the whole experience. We can’t let it take away what we’ve always focused on. We can’t control the verdict. You can control what you choose to remember, what you believe in.”

She has sympathy for the jurors.

“Based on the science I think this is really difficult for a layperson to understand. I think it’s a complicated case.”

Wilma Derksen doesn’t use the word closure, a word intended to pretend you can seal traumas in a tight box and move on. Candace has been alive to her mother these past 26 years. In some sense, she always will be.

“I think Candace never really left us. Candace has been a presence. She has been a part of our identity,” she says.

“I can’t believe that after 26 years someone can seem so real.”

The trial has helped the Derksen family immensely.

“I think I’ve really been in a place of appreciation,” she says of the trial. “We’ve lived with the mystery for 26 years. We didn’t have any sense of what really happened.”

The passage of time has made sitting through the trial much easier.

“We’re not in the raw grief anymore. The grief does come in waves.”

And then she says something astonishing:

“All of this (the trial) has been wonderful. It’s been like a million-dollar therapy. There’s been this huge learning. ‘Oh! That’s what happened!’ We’re having it explained to us.”

She feels the trial has been therapeutic for the whole city.

“It traumatized the community, the parents and the children. People developed fear traumas around this. Now there are some explanations and answers.”

Many of the Derksen’s friends and Candace’s friends have attended the trial. Wilma Derksen went on to found Child Find Manitoba and an advocacy group for people who have lost loved ones to homicide. Many of those friends have attended the trial.

“They find it healing to be with us at this time,” she says. “It helps them.”

Whatever the verdict, Wilma Derksen says her life will change when the trial’s over.

She and Cliff have always visited their daughter’s grave and asked that it be kept clear of snow so other people can visit too. They know others find solace there. They’ll mark the verdict and the next stage of their lives with a simple ceremony in the graveyard.

“We’re going to go to the cemetery with our friends and family and lay down white roses and cry. I always cry at the cemetery.”

She pauses, unshed tears thickening her voice.

The white roses, she says, are for purity and forgiveness. Candace’s purity, their forgiveness.

And after that?

“It’s time to start afresh. It’s time for a new beginning.”

They’ve waited 26 years for this new beginning, one that will always mark the loss of Candace but will honour her with the strength and kindness shown by her parents to others in need.

This trial was never about Mark Edward Grant. It was about a lovely young girl always caught in adolescence, about her family and about the soul’s remarkable ability to heal.

lindor.reynolds@freepress.mb.ca