By The Way I See It

Tread lightly: Every path carries a story within

Jul 23, 2018 | 5:46 AM

KAMLOOPS — There’s the benches of course. The ones that carry stories and thoughts. Someone’s loved one’s favourite place is where you stand. You see what they saw many times, what they fell in love with, what they had to say goodbye to and what lives on way beyond our passing. If it’s just me and the dog stopping the ‘memory benches’, I like to whisper hello and say their name. In a world that moves too fast around us and we are always hungry for time but scatter it mindlessly too often, these benches and their messages for eternity remind me of what’s important.

Then, there’s the unofficial memorial sites that pop up. There are a couple of them on each side of the creek, up on each side. Flowers, a couple of toys, a small cross. No name, but a powerful reminder in a place where you are bound to remember them.

Last fall I came across two roses in Peterson Creek Park, right under the highway bridge. The landscape around them was already bitten by the frost, but the two fresh flowers were telling a story of their own. You could say they fell or were thrown off from a car up on the highway, but the way they were so carefully arranged hinted to a story of some sort. Happy or sad, a life story nonetheless, and a mystery, like so many others.

A week ago, under the same highway bridge, I noticed a wooden cross with a fresh bouquet of flowers attached to it. On the other side of the path, on what almost looks like narrow shelves on the retaining wall, more bouquets and a couple of small objects. There was a letter too, but I did not read it. It is not mine to read. The universality of that pain of losing someone dearly loved that is contained in that place.

The next morning, the flowers were wilted, but there was a new bouquet next to the cross, and a heart of stones right in front of it to the side of the path, leaving enough room for people to walk. A possible tripping hazard, some thought, so by evening it was removed. Every few days, the heart reappears. More to the side of the path, as if the person who makes it is trying to find the happy medium that will allow the heart without posing a risk.

Boogie The Bridge

Boogie The Bridge Event Information

Apr 19, 2024

One Man's Opinion

COLLINS: Sorry - did you say, 'Take your old guns to the post office?'

30m ago

SOUND OFF

SOUND OFF: Police confirm diversion of government-supplied drugs

20h ago

A few days prior to the appearance of this sobering display, a woman was struck and killed on the bridge while trying to cross the highway. Maybe that’s who the small memorial and the daily fresh flowers are for. I will most likely never know, but I do know it reminds me of people I loved dearly who are now gone.

I get reminded of my own parents’ passing, of the hole they left and of how I filled it with my own memorials, be it flowers picked daily and placed by their photographs on the mantle, or cooking their favourite food, or remembering the things I learned alongside them. I also get reminded of being unexpected witness to a heartbreaking story in the park I walk every day.

It is a story I will carry with me from now on, because of how it challenged me to see people and recognize our unifying humanity before I see my own opinion of their actions. I said it then, and it stayed true, that life is never the same after you are thrown as close as possible to the gaping hole so many of us are afraid of. Yet it is not the hollowness of it that is scary, but the way we avert our eyes while we can afford it, the way we opt to not think of it, choosing instead to believe life goes on forever.

The trails I walk, the benches I see and occasionally sit on, the small memorials I happen upon, and, not in the least, that one-time startling bagpipe music that I heard one morning after witnessing the story that changed my outlook on so much, all of them have created a permanent reminder to be grateful, to value the people I meet and those I have close to me, to value time and the humbling beauty of life, with all its heartbreaking pain, joy and undeniable finality.