A dignified resting place

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/10/2023 (785 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Restlessness and melancholy drove me out of the house the other day.

I was feeling wistful about my brother and sister-in-law’s move from St. John’s to Edmonton — all those family get-togethers we’d never share again — and suddenly had a strong urge to be surrounded by relatives.

So, I went to where I knew I would find them.

An expansive green space slopes gently down into a shallow valley that meets the shores of shimmering Quidi Vidi Lake.

The bright sun, filtered through majestic old trees, cast a dappled light as the crows called raucously to each other in the canopy. The paved path was littered with pinecones, though there was hardly a breeze to riffle the tree branches.

Stepping off the trodden path to walk through the grass, I reached down to touch the glossy black granite of my father’s headstone; felt the indentation of the letters where his name was carved.

“It feels like we are scattered to the wind, Dad,” I said, thinking of my brother far away, a sister lost to cancer, my remaining two sisters living in other towns, my mom in an ever-shrinking world of dementia’s making.

I visited my paternal grandparents next, the letters fading on their white marble headstone, and then found the grey pillar marking the grave of my mother’s parents.

Other family members are here, too: an aunt, an uncle, great-aunt, great-uncle.

But while both my maternal grandparents’ names are carved on their gravestone, only my grandmother is actually resting there.

A decade before I was born, on a cold November day in 1955, my 45-year-old grandfather was the engineer on a schooner headed from Newfoundland to Cape Breton for a load of coal.

After several days with no word from the crew, the families back home were worried.

And for good reason.

The schooner didn’t reach its destination. All hands were lost at sea.

The members of the seven-man crew were never found, but not for lack of trying. The Royal Canadian Air Force, local ships and the U.S. air force searched for survivors for several days before finally abandoning hope after wreckage from the ship was found floating on the ocean. I don’t believe anyone spoke of how much the search cost.

Because my grandfather’s body was never recovered, my family will never know exactly where he is or how he died. Was there an accident or collision? Did he drown? Succumb to hypothermia?

He left a wife and nine children behind — the youngest just an infant.

Whenever I hear other stories of ships foundering at sea and crewmembers going missing, there is a common plea from those who love them: please, just bring them back home.

Everyone yearns for a semblance of closure. Grief can echo down through generations.

And so I feel for the families of murder victims Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran, whose remains are believed to have been dumped in the Prairie Green Landfill, just northwest of Winnipeg, as well as for the loved ones of Rebecca Contois (whose partial remains were found in the Brady Road landfill) and the unidentified person known as Buffalo Woman.

I know Heather Stefanson’s Progressive Conservatives campaigned on steadfastly refusing to back a search based on potential safety risks and high costs, even though experts have said it can be safely done. I know that the federal government hasn’t committed funding for the effort.

In a statement, Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Gary Anandasangaree called the situation “heart-wrenching” and “part of the sad reality of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.”

But leaving women in the garbage should never be the sad reality of anyone’s life in Canada, and we should never allow it to be so.

It is a criminal offence to commit an indignity to human remains, so surely it is a moral offense to allow that indignity to continue.

As Marcedes Myran’s grandmother, Donna Bartlett, has asked, “Where is the humanity? Where is the dignity?”

We’ve made a lot of pledges in this country about addressing the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, yet tragedy and injustice continue.

As the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls noted, “In international human rights law… people have the right to be protected from violent crime, as well as a right to justice when they are victims of these types of crimes.”

Perhaps now that the weeks of electioneering in Manitoba are over, the new administration will include a search for the women among its priorities.

If politicians require some prompting, they only need consider how it would feel to have their daughter, sister, aunt, niece, granddaughter or mother consigned to a landfill site for all eternity.

Pam Frampton is a freelance writer and editor who lives in St. John’s. Email pamelajframpton@gmail.com