Life goes on, but Cooper will still be in their hearts

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This article was published 22/02/2016 (3747 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On Thursday afternoon, Corie Siddle, a longtime friend of Cooper Nemeth’s parents, sounded so sure the missing 17-year-old would come home.

“Coop’s coming back,” she said, her voice hard and determined. “We’re feeling defeated today, but that doesn’t get us down. Because he’s coming back.”

It was hard not to be buoyed by her unflagging hope, a hope shared by an entire community of friends, family, teammates and strangers who spent hours — days — searching. But late Saturday night, hope gave way to heartache as any parent’s worst fear was realized. Cooper’s body was found, concealed in a recycling bin.

Nicholas Bell-Wright, 22, has been charged with second-degree murder. The charge has not been proven in a court of law so he is presumed innocent.

Online, the hashtag #findcip became #ripcip, with mourners expressing their sadness — and outrage — about the loss of the River East Collegiate student and River East Marauders hockey player whose life was cut tragically short. There are tweets upon tweets from his peers, many of them grappling to find the right words to express their grief, a grief unlike anything most of them have likely experienced. Many of them read, poignantly, like something one might write in a yearbook: “I had Drivers Ed with Cooper when we were both in Grade 10. He was always making the class laugh.” Someone else posted a photo of hockey sticks, with #ripcip written on the tape, taken before his teammates took the ice Sunday night without him.

Because that’s the thing about life: it goes on. On Saturday night, roughly 100 people gathered at Gateway Recreation Centre to mourn.

Gateway has been the search party’s HQ all week, with well-stocked tables of coffee and doughnuts for searchers and stacks of posters to be hung on posts and put in mailboxes.

By Sunday afternoon, the centre had returned to being a regular hockey rink, with the smell of canteen french fries and the sound of cheering parents at a girls’ hockey game. Two little boys played where the tables were set up, too young to know or understand what had happened in the same space the night before.

And today will be a regular school day for River East Collegiate students — except it won’t be, not really.

Principal Diana Posthumus sent out a letter to parents Sunday, thanking the community for its compassion and reassuring students, staff and parents support personnel will be available to them during this difficult time.

“During this difficult time.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

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The language of grief is imperfect and imprecise. People always mean well with their “at leasts.”

At least his body was found. At least he’s not still out there, somewhere. At least an arrest was made. But this — this is the worst kind of closure. And for Cooper’s family, it marks the beginning of a long, painful process of grieving their boy while finding him justice.

But perhaps there’s some comfort to be taken in the fact Cooper had a city behind him. At a news conference Sunday, deputy police Chief Danny Smyth commended the remarkable effort of the community.

And indeed, it was remarkable. We don’t yet know exactly what happened the night he went to a party and never came home. But we do know this: Cooper Nemeth was loved.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @JenZoratti

Jen Zoratti
Columnist

Jen Zoratti is a columnist and feature writer working in the Arts & Life department, as well as the author of the weekly newsletter NEXT. A National Newspaper Award finalist for arts and entertainment writing, Jen is a graduate of the Creative Communications program at RRC Polytech and was a music writer before joining the Free Press in 2013. Read more about Jen.

Every piece of reporting Jen produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print – part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.