A few months ago, a funeral director from Winnipeg called me to chat. Not because I’m a journalist, but because I’m a daughter who lost a father. More specifically, she called because I’m the daughter of a father who had chosen, long before the sudden sickness that claimed him, to have a green burial.
Green burial is still relatively new in Manitoba, or at least it is outside the Jewish and Muslim communities, which observe broadly similar procedures in how they lay their dead to rest. It’s pretty simple. There is no embalming, and no fancy casket. The body is wrapped in plain linen and lowered on a plywood bier, or in an unadorned wooden box. Nothing goes in the grave, that will not be reclaimed by the earth.
The funeral director, who is now offering green burials, wanted to get a sense of how families had found the experience. Was it difficult for us to bury our loved one in that way? Was it more challenging to witness, than a casket burial might have been? Did it have some effect on how we worked through our grief?
I knew why she was asking. I remembered standing at the cemetery, waiting anxiously for the hearse to arrive. I was terrified then, frightened that the sight of my dad’s body wrapped only in linen might be too painful and, for lack of a better word; too graphic; in North America, we’ve become so disconnected from death.
But it wasn’t too painful, or too graphic. In fact, as we lowered him into the grave and scattered him with the season’s last prairie wildflowers from my sister’s garden, it felt peaceful, and perfect. I was not consigning my father to the cold and the dark beneath the ground; I was giving him a place to begin his transformation.
I thought of one of the many beautiful teachings on death by the late Zen Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh. In the Buddhist view — which isn’t so much a belief but rather a fact of how matter works — nothing is destroyed, it’s only ever changed. A cloud becomes rain, and rain becomes rivers and trees and the water in the cells of our bodies; so the cloud is gone, but the cloud’s essence remains, and life and death are the same.
“Tomorrow, I will continue to be,” Nhat Hanh taught. “But you will have to be very attentive to see me. I will be a flower, or a leaf. I will be in these forms and I will say hello to you. If you are attentive enough, you will recognize me, and you may greet me. I will be very happy.”
I have been to my father’s grave just twice. The first was the day we buried him, and the second was the first anniversary of his death. The location holds little emotional resonance for me. He isn’t there, but I know where to find him: he is the flowers, the grass, the leaves. I do not need to search for my father in one place. I know where he began his transformation, and now he’s everywhere, and that brings me peace.
If I didn’t know where his journey of change started, though? I can’t imagine. I can’t imagine the ache, or how I would begin to find him in the world. I really don’t know.
— — —
One of the expected consequences of being far from home is that what happens there begins to feel like a dream. I haven’t followed the news from Manitoba much; it’s hard to find it important, when it’s half a world away. But there is one story I have followed closely, and that is the protest camps calling on Winnipeg police to search the landfill for the bodies of Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran.
Over the last month, I have written and deleted a lot of things about these events. I’m not able to see them as clearly as I would wish; I’m too far away. I’ve always found my inspiration springs from being present to witness events, to meet the people affected; being present is how you get wonderful pieces of journalism documenting the camps such as this. You have to see things, to know them. All I have is a very distant opinion, and my opinion isn’t important.
I will say that, in a way, I can understand the decision not to search, from the coldest logistical perspective. The resources required would be massive; this Globe and Mail piece has very balanced reporting on those challenges. But I also know there are much deeper and more important currents powering this moment. Whatever happens going forward, I hope the general public can hold those central in how we respond.
The first thing to remember, always, is that we are not just talking about searches and bodies; we are talking about what is sacred. I’ve written this many times before, but it always strikes me that one of the most universal rituals of our species, found in nearly every culture from prehistoric to modern and all over the world, is the importance we place on caring for our dead, and giving them a dignified rest.
At war, soldiers will risk their own lives to bring back their fallen comrades. In New York, over 20 years since the World Trade Centre fell, lab technicians are still trying to salvage DNA from scraps of human remains recovered from a landfill, so that even the smallest fragment of bone may be returned to a family for proper burial. By 2016, the cost of that forensic work had surpassed $80 million USD; it’s notable to me that few articles about that effort even mention the price tag. It certainly suggests a broad societal agreement about its value, that there’s little interest in that question.
So yes, if it was your mother lying somewhere in the landfill, you would fight to bring her home too; and if the state and society around you grieved her death enough, they would undertake those efforts with relatively little debate, as we see in some of those other instances of tragedy. What Harris and Myran’s relatives are fighting for is what is human, sacred to us across eons. Let nothing that police do, or don’t do, distract us from holding that fact with our recognition, and our compassion.
Then there is this: this conflict is about the search of Harris and Myran, but it stands on a foundation of everything that came before. The chasm from which their families’ pain and frustration emerges is an old one, opened in the way Canada was formed. If Indigenous people could trust that police and the nation itself cared about their lives, then maybe moments like this might be easier to navigate. But they cannot have that trust, because those things have not historically been true. Perhaps the police have a logistical argument of why they won’t search; but so long as we’re still far away from healing the fracture between Indigenous people and the Canadian state, there is no reason Indigenous folk should trust, respect or accept such explanations.
And just this week, when Winnipeg Police twice summoned their Major Crimes unit to investigate graffiti urging them to search the landfill, it emphasized the rupture. I am, to be blunt, disgusted by that decision. From a resource perspective, it’s a waste; it’s just paint on the sidewalk, it doesn’t require an investigation. (Nor, in almost any other situation, would a few tags of graffiti receive it.) Worse, from a public relations standpoint, the announcement is so inflammatory to an already painful situation, it’s hard to see it as anything other than a deliberate provocation; if it’s not that, then it’s just foolish. Either way, it certainly undermines any claim to valuing reconciliation.
Ultimately, however this particular situation resolves, we ought to remember this: the cost of healing these wounds today is great. The cost tomorrow will be greater. So it’s been since Canada was founded, and in that light, the fight to search the landfill isn’t just a fight to find Harris and Myran. It’s also another moment where we are called to look at the fractures, and try to heal what’s been torn asunder. It is, in other words, a fight for a better future; I hope the general public can see it as such.
Above all, I hope that somehow and someday, Myran and Harris’s families are able to give their loved ones a dignified rest. And I hope that all others lost and stolen in that way are found. May we someday know a world where no families have to search at all.
What I’m Reading
Ricochet continues to do fantastic work investigating illegal Air B’n’B rentals in Montreal, and their impacts on long-term tenants and housing overall.
The Free Britney movement is a really interesting study in Internet conspiracy theories, because the gist of it turned out to be true; now, it’s also becoming a cautionary tale, as some fans refuse to let go of their once-validated suspicion.
The Greatest Scam Ever Written. Kind of a wild ride through a Canadian crime story I wasn’t personally familiar with.
One Photo, One Story
If you hop on the subway in downtown Kyiv and ride the tracks to the very end of the main line, seven stops east, you will emerge at the Lisova station. It’s a confluence of sorts, the juncture where village meets city. Outside, rickety yellow buses sit waiting, bound for the nearby suburb of Brovary, while farmers pull up in small vans, hauling produce to the market that surrounds the station.
The Lisova market has had a few brushes with tourism fame. Once, its dark warren of secondhand clothing shops was featured in Vogue, and if you have the patience to dig through unsorted mountains of cheap polyester junk, you might every now and again pull out a brand-name dress for less than a Canadian dollar. But clothes aren’t what’s on my mind, as I emerge at Lisova. This time, I’m here for the fruit.
To an urban Canadian, the street markets of Ukraine are a wonder. Outside the main building — which is filled with butchers and fishmongers and shops selling near any variety of goods one can imagine — the narrow sidewalks around Lisova are crowded with vendors, hawking the gifts of their gardens. Elderly women in floral headscarves stand behind folding tables or sit cross-legged on blankets, surrounded by buckets of cucumbers and recycled glass jars filled with honey. They call out the quality of their goods as potential customers squeeze past: their tomatoes are krasivyye, they promise in Russian, which is still the predominant language of elderly working-class folks in Kyiv. They’re beautiful. Their radishes are krasivyye too. Their apricots, their apples, their fresh farmer’s cheese: all of it beautiful. The bounty of the land around Kyiv is vast; the prices, to a Canadian, almost unfathomably cheap.
At one table, a middle-aged woman laughs as she chats with the vendor beside her. I notice she must have sold most of what she brought to the market: all that’s left are a few bags of purple plums, so perfectly ripe they have split down their sides, revealing tender golden flesh. The vendor notices me gazing at them, and asks if I want to try — taste-testing is common practice in Ukraine, as the wide availability of local produce inspires a certain discriminating taste — but I shake my head: khochu kupiti, I tell her. “I want to buy.” I ask for 500 grams.
She weighs out the plums. No price is posted. Elsewhere, plums sell for about 25 to 40 hryvnia per kilogram, so my bag should cost, at most, less than $0.70 CAD. I take out a wad of cash, peeling off a few smaller bills. “Skilky koshtuye?” How much?
The woman laughs. Ni nada, ni nada, she says, waving me away. No need.
I stare at her, blinking. I don’t have enough words in a language she knows to argue too much, so instead I just hold out my cash and stutter, in English: “Are you sure? No, please, let me pay.” It’s pennies for me; for her, part of a needed day’s wage.
She smiles, and touches her hand to her chest. “From my heart,” she says, or at least what I gather she says from the few Russian words I’m able to pick out, “welcome to Ukraine.”
I wander back to the train station, popping plums in my mouth the whole way. They are sweet and juicy and remind me of childhood summers. I feel guilty I hadn’t paid her. But if there’s one thing true in the world, it’s that everywhere you go, the people with the least give the most; and usually, the best way to honour that generosity is to simply accept it, knowing there’s a well-earned pride instilled in the giving.