Is this the closure we were waiting for?

Yesterday, in the late afternoon, I received a call from the media asking whether I had heard the news: Mark Edward Grant—the man accused of murdering our daughter—was being held in custody in Vancouver.

Apparently on January 8, Grant had been arrested for taking a young woman against her will - and was now being charged with unlawful confinement, sexual assault, and uttering threats. It was the phrase “unlawful confinement” that undid me. Those words carried me back forty-one years, to the moment we were told that our daughter had died while being held against her will. “Unlawful confinement.” And if a person dies - it is considered first degree murder,

I remind myself that an arrest is not a conviction. The case has not been proven. Nothing is certain; these are allegations. And yet, for the first time in many years, there is a quiet, cautious hope that we may be closer to the truth. Truth—though it must always be discerned carefully—is beautiful, and it has the power to heal.

And then the tears came.
​
Those words--unlawful confinement—opened the door to memory. I felt again the loneliness Candace must have endured that night so many years ago. The isolation. The terror of being threatened. Grief, it seems, does not fade with time; it waits, and when named, it speaks.

Now another girl had experienced the same. I ache for her - I ache for her family.... I just ache,

​

Just when we thought it was over and that we could lay Candace’s murder and search to rest, something would come up holding our attention. Cliff called animated suspension – I called it a never-ending story.

In early February, two detectives came to our door to deliver the final autopsy report. 

We invited them into our living room. They spoke slowly, carefully setting the scene.

Apparently, Candace had died of exposure—hypothermia – they said. The toxicology tests showed that she had not been drugged or poisoned. Her hands and feet had been tied, and she had been abandoned in the shack to die in the freezing cold. The crime scene was disorganized. Some of her belongings appeared to have been partially buried which made no sense because the body had been left in plain view.

Then they offered some details—how they had found her belongings hidden, yet the body had lain in full view.

Candace’s vocal cords had not been swollen. She hadn’t tried to scream. "In fact, it doesn't look as if she was alone. We feel because of this evidence that she was with someone she knew, In fact. it looks now as though someone had spent some time with her.”

I was shocked. No struggle and no screaming spelled terror to me, I remembered the other times she had been threatened. There was the storm on Lake Winnipeg when we had faced waves that could have capsized our boat. She had slept. When she didn’t know how to stop the bike, she just continued peddling. When she was skiing and didn’t know how to glide into shore, she just hung on with admirable resolve.

I wondered who had terrorized her so completely? Was it a knife or a gun or the face of a deranged man that had immobilized her so completely that she hadn’t even cried out for help? My heart twisted painfully, as my mind examined all possibilities.

Or had she been remembering our conversation about murder and accepted her fate? I wasn’t sure what would be worse – her shutting down because of fear – or her focussing on God– waiting for God to leave heaven’s doors wide open.  All I knew was that I was feeling her pain.

The officers continued their report. “Because we believe it was someone she knew we are starting to question people who she knew.” they said.

They had arrived at a different conclusion than I had.    — a perspective probably based on the difference between being a woman or being a tall, well-built male.

Then one of them dropped another bomb shell. "And she was a virgin," he said. The top button of her “tight” jeans – which had been reinforced with a safety pin was still in tact. It had not been tampered with….:.

I remembered those jeans – she had other jeans , newer jeans, but she liked this old pair the best.

“She wasn’t sexually assaulted?” I asked tentatively.
“No.”
“Was she hurt in any way?”
“No.”
“What could the motive have been?”

They shrugged, watching our faces as if waiting for something to surface.

Their whole presentation that evening had been distant, polite, professional – just the cold hard facts with that slight edge of – something.  I couldn't put my finger on. Suspicion? Perhaps? Totally understandable - we pay them to be suspicious. We need them to search for truth.

Then they assured us again that they would be doing their utmost to find the guilty party and that they were positive that they would find him.  I wasn't so sure.  The police didn't always find their man.  The police in Edmonton had never found Jake Plett's wife's murderer.  How could they be so sure they would find this one? 

As they shut their notebooks, we thanked them for their hard work.

But then after shutting the door behind them, Cliff and I both looked at each other. “She was a virgin?” This meant she not been raped. I had prayed she wouldn’t be violated. Could I consider this an answer to prayer?

It also laid to rest another question. We had heard about another fellow who had insinuated that he had “been with her.”

I didn’t believe him. But do we really know everything about another person. maybe – she had experimented?  I didn’t know – but now I knew, she was a virgin.  She really had been an innocent little girl— half woman, half child— who had been forced off the street that night and terrorized. 

But those stark words, "She was a virgin," also drove home another reality Candace had died before she could even begin to live.  Instead of a beautiful white wedding dress, we had been forced to buy a cold, white coffin.  Would I ever be able to accept the injustice of that?

I looked at Cliff; he looked drawn, torn...and old.  Both of us must have aged ten years in a space of two months.  I had lost fifteen pounds.  Cliff had grayed.

*****
And then there was the Search Committee.  We thought they had done their work – Candace was found

When the Search Committee met four days after the funeral, we thought it was to say good bye.

Cliff and I were dreading it…this remarkable group of people had supported us so faithfully. No amount of money could ever have purchased what they had given us at the moment of our greatest need. We could never have hired others who would have acted so quickly, so intuitively—anticipating our needs, knowing what mattered, and finding the energy to do what had to be done without being asked.

Perhaps the greatest gift they gave us was the assurance that, together, we had done everything possible to find Candace. We were told that the city of Winnipeg had never before seen such an extensive search. Knowing that we had not left one stone unturned, made Candace’s death easier to live with. Nothing had been left undone.

But now was it over? Now that the search had ended, was their mandate finished?

They decided there was still work to do. There were loose ends that required coordination. MBCI still needed help navigating its relationship with the police. Crime Stoppers wanted to reenact scenes for broadcasts planned for late February and early March. There were business and financial matters remaining from both the funeral and the search. And many organizations—Glen Eden, Klassen's Funeral Home, River East Mennonite Brethren Church, and Portage Avenue Mennonite Brethren Church—had donated generously and needed to be thanked, both informally and formally. We were overwhelmed by their generosity.

I did a quick calculation, comparing the funeral expenses with the gifts and donations. We had broken even. We hadn’t benefited a single penny from Candace’s death—but, miraculously, we also hadn’t lost.

Len DeFehr reported that approximately six thousand dollars had been received for the memorial fund designated for a swimming pool, and that there were still four thousand dollars remaining from the search committee’s funds. We also learned that the man who had found Candace’s body had declined the two-thousand-dollar reward, and that the police were deciding where that money should go—most likely into the memorial fund.

The final line in the meeting minutes was the most revealing: “The perpetrators are not a priority project for us at present.” We had chosen other goals.

Then the February 11 meeting was supposed to be the last one—but it wasn’t either.

We met in the Christian Press boardroom. I looked around the table at Harold Jantz, Henry Wedel, Dave Teigrob, Dave Loewen, and Len DeFehr. Len reported that the memorial fund had grown to ten thousand dollars. None of us had expected it to increase after the funeral, yet weeks later, cards and letters were still arriving at our home and at the Camp Arnes office—some with large donations, others with only a few dollars, all marked for the pool.

The committee also expressed concern that the police investigation had begun to focus on David Wiebe. He had been asked to take a lie detector test. We were baffled. David had been in a driver’s education lesson at the time Candace disappeared; there was no possible way he could have abducted her. Other friends had also been questioned. We decided we needed to meet again.

Our final meeting was held on March 5. By then, the memorial fund had reached $16,200. One young girl had donated her entire piggy bank—2,887 pennies. There was a growing sense that the giving had, in some way, only begun.
“When the public gives this much,” someone said, “the business community will want to get involved too.”

The swimming pool had received a quiet but unmistakable vote of confidence from the community.

With gratitude, we disbanded.

But that was not the end. The money kept coming. People who had donated began visiting the camp, asking where the pool would be built. Dave Loewen suggested that it might be helpful to create something people could see—a memorial of some kind. He wondered if a plaque might serve as an interim marker and asked whether we would help design it.

We agreed, but a plaque felt cold. Candace already had a gravestone. We wanted something worth looking at—something that would tell her story. So we asked Dave whether, instead of a plaque, we could design a permanent storyboard: a collection of newspaper articles and photographs, arranged in a durable, historical-style display. That way the camp visitors- who might not even had never heard of Candace could understand why this place existed. It was the story that mattered.

Dave agreed. We designed it and stationed it near the Lodge where the pool might be built.

Maybe the plaque was enough. I remembered again the conversation I had with Candace—when I had told her that committing her life to God meant trusting Him with its impact. Was God going to honor that commitment now? Was a swimming pool going to be part of it? Would there really be a pool at Camp Arnes someday?

The Candace Derksen Memorial Pool was built at Camp Arnes a little more than a year after Candace went missing. On October 26, 1986, we cut the ribbon.
 
*****
Then there was Child Find.

I remember how at the very first search meeting, I met Ester DeFehr. Dave had invited her to be part of the committee because we would need someone to represent the “mother.”

She had reported to the committee that she had contacted Child Find, as well as the Tania Murrell Missing Children's Society in Edmonton. She had also been in touch with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and we were given the necessary forms to register with them. At that point, the research and contacts Ester was making was exactly what the committee needed.

It was the only meeting I attended and having her there gave me full confidence in this committee. I could let it go and tend to the house functioning which had become the headquarters for the search in other ways.
 
Soon the search committee were meeting daily and Ester was in constant contact with provincial Child Find offices, coordinating the distribution of Candace’s photograph to be aired across Canada through Child Find publicity programs.

When the public response was not garnering the response the committee was looking for, the director of Child Find Alberta told Ester that she believed that a direct appeal from a mother would be powerful. People, she said, respond to the pain of a mother and her plea for help.

Because of that advice, I became involved. I became the “mother.”

And it never really ended.

As I stepped into that role, I began to sense how vital this Child Find organization was to the search…  and was surprised that we didn’t have something like this in Manitoba—and how necessary it was for Manitoba to have its own provincial branch. I began working closely with Ester to help establish one.

On January 29, we met with other community members—who were also interested in this cause and formally organized an interim board to begin the work of creating a Manitoba-based Child Find. We decided that the most logical first step would be to attend the annual Child Find conference in Calgary, Alberta. Five people were chosen to go.

We worked steadily. By April 16, the organization was officially incorporated. By June, we had assembled a full publicity package. By summer, we were beginning to hear from distraught parents—families who were suddenly walking the same terrible road we had walked.

In time, Child Find evolved into what is now the Canadian Centre for Child Protection and Candace was credited with its beginning— “All that we are able to do today for children in Canada, and around the world, is part of her legacy,” said director Christy Dzikowicz in April 2015, when a plaque honouring Candace was unveiled to mark the Centre’s 30th anniversary.

As Cliff and I watched these two projects grow—the Child Find organization and the swimming pool—we would look at each other and smile. Anything that carried Candace’s name, anything touched by her imprint, seemed to take on an otherworldly momentum and flourish far beyond what we had imagined.

I remember meeting with the director and staff of Child Find to offer our emotional support if nothing else, and then apologized for not being more involved.

That was when one of the staff paused to assure me that even though we hadn’t been involved all along – Candace’s presence had been with them and guided them.  “It’s as if Candace has an active role in our organization,” she said. “We call her our pixie dust.”

They all laughed—and then started to describe this “pixie dust.”

Apparently, pixie dust is a magical, glittery powder from folklore stories that grants flight or other magical effects. In modern usage, it means unexpected magic, kindness, or special moments often through random acts of goodwill like gifts or treats. Metaphorically, it can also describe anything that magically solves problems or adds wonder.

When they described the role of this pixie dust, it did sound like Candace.

Who would have thought – that our little baby would have such an impact,

She entered our world with eyes already sparkling, and by six months had become a walking marvel—alert, radiant, unmistakably alive. Even then, she seemed awake to joy, as if joy had been expecting her.

By grade one, an uncanny gift revealed itself. She was a bully-whisperer, able to disarm cruelty not through confrontation, but through the quiet authority of innocence and goodness. Meanness simply lost its footing around her.

A few years later, she blossomed into a friend-magnet extraordinaire—the kind of buoyant spirit whose laughter lifted a room without effort, whose presence felt like an open door. Joy followed her naturally, as though it recognized its own.

As a young teenager, she surprised us yet again. She carried an uncommon social awareness, lingering in deep conversations, offering insights that felt far beyond her years. She spoke of God with a rare intimacy—personal, thoughtful, unforced—a faith not handed to her, but something she had quietly discovered and chosen.

When she disappeared, she ignited the largest missing-person search the city of Winnipeg had ever known.

After her death, we watched as she became a story—told aloud for the first time to an audience of two thousand, broadcast live across the city. Her life, once intimate and ordinary, now carried weight in the public imagination.

Then mysteriously the vivid memory of her victimisation inspired Child Find Manitoba and a swimming pool at Camp Arnes. Both program’s maon purpose is to help children.

She lived only thirteen years—yet her love was vast and uncontainable, reaching beyond time, beyond circumstance, far beyond herself.

I watched… and now they were calling it her pixie dust.
​
I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.  Robert Fulghum  

Having experienced such a strong circle of care at the funeral, I didn’t want life to resume right away. I knew the real emotional pain of grief was waiting just around the corner—the moment when I would have to learn how to live without Candace, to accept that she wasn’t coming back.

But then I learned something unexpected.

She wasn’t about to leave.

It was almost as if Candace was standing in the wings of our lives, continuing to orchestrate a circle of care for us.
For one thing, my sisters, Luella and Pat, decided to stay a few days longer. As they settled in, they asked what they could do to help.

I didn’t want them to clean for me—mainly because I didn’t want them to see my mess—so instead I brought up the first large box of unanswered mail that had taken up residence in the basement. Letters, cards, and notes from strangers and friends alike. I set it on the table.

They groaned.

“What do you want to do with these?” my oldest sister, Luella, asked.

“Answer the whole lot of them,” I said, smiling.

Always ready for a challenge, Luella immediately began sorting the pile into cards and letters. “I can answer the cards,” she said.

I handed her the memorial thank-you cards we had prepared.

A few minutes later, she held up the first one she’d written. “Here,” she said. “Is this how you want them?”
I recognized the name on the envelope and paused.

“It’s great,” I said slowly, then hesitated. “But you can also thank that family for the casserole they sent over… and the letter… and the phone call… and—well, I don’t even know what else.”

“You mean—”

I nodded.

Some people had first responded to Candace’s disappearance seven weeks earlier with a note. Then, a few weeks later, they checked in again—with a casserole. Some had sent a Christmas card, and then another card when the news of Candace’s death reached them, often enclosing a cheque for the memorial fund.

Even though the money itself was being handled by Camp Arnes, the office forwarded the accompanying notes to us so we could respond, if we wished. As I explained this to Luella, I realized that unless we coordinated the process carefully—unless we somehow tracked each gesture—responding to every piece of mail individually, every gift and kindness, would mean that some people might receive five thank-you notes.

“Is this the only box?” Luella asked.

I shook my head.

“We’ll never be able to sort them out by memory,” she said.

“I know,” I agreed.

Meanwhile, my younger sister, Pat, who had been quietly reading some of the letters, let out a soft sigh. “This good friend of yours has written you a beautiful letter,” she said gently. “This one only you can answer.” She handed it to me.

I glanced at the name and shook my head. “I know—but she’s not really anyone I know. I don’t know her any more than you do. It honestly won’t make much difference who answers it.”

Pat looked up, surprised. “You mean you don’t know who these people are?” She gestured toward the boxes brimming with notes.

“Some I do,” I said. “Some I’ve never met. Sometimes we may have only had one kind conversation over the telephone.”

So we pulled out a stack of index cards and began to organize—carefully tracking names, gestures, letters, meals, calls—trying, in our small human way, to honor the vast and tender web of care that had gathered around us.

Many of the letters began with the same quiet theme—connection without acquaintance. One, from southern Manitoba, opened with the words: “Although our paths have never crossed, we feel that we have known you people for some time.”

Someone else enclosed a quotation from Elisabeth Elliot:

“Only by acceptance lies peace—not in forgetting, not in resignation, nor in busyness.”


There were many who spoke of being amazed at our stand, at what they called our courage.
“My deepest condolences to you and your whole family,” one wrote. “I must commend you for your bravery.”

A girl a few years older than Candace wrote honestly and without polish:
“During the time Candace was missing, and after she was found, I seemed to be fighting with God. I couldn’t see why He took her life away—why it had to be Candace. She was a Christian, and a darn good one. How could He let this happen to her—and to us? But you just can’t stay angry at God forever. He’s God, and He’s forgiving. Still, I wonder why.”

Her words echoed questions we ourselves had not yet found language for.

A boy who had never met Candace—or any of us—wrote:
“At first I wasn’t sure exactly what this feeling was, and maybe I still’m not. But you see, I believe that I love Candace. I love her as a fellow human being, and I would like to aspire to be more like her—to be able to love and care as much as she did. I’ve cried a lot over this.”

It was hard to understand how people could be so deeply affected by a tragedy in which they had played no part. And yet, I held onto one sentence with particular tenderness: “I aspire to be more like her.”

Inmates at Stony Mountain Institution—a federal maximum- and medium-security penitentiary—wrote to us as well. One letter began, “My greatest and deepest apology for your dear daughter. I am a prisoner convicted of murder.”

Others, in their efforts to comfort us, sometimes said things in ways I don’t think they intended:
“I thank the Lord that He did not test me the way He has tested you. No evil will befall those who trust the Lord. My heart reaches out to you.”

There were homemade cards from children. One showed a child’s idea of heaven, complete with “sun tables and umbrellas”—so close to Candace’s own descriptions that it made me smile through tears. Entire classrooms sent envelopes filled with small notes, telling us they were thinking of us, sharing our loss, remembering.

Some letters told stories of unbearable pain: “Our only son, three and a half years old, was run over by a half-ton truck and instantly killed. Our second daughter was killed when she was fifteen.”

Another wrote: “Our fourth son was stillborn, and our four-year-old daughter was sexually assaulted by a young relative.”
And another: “I have a daughter who has struggled with drugs and alcohol for the past four years. She has been through many treatment centers, all without success. Somehow, through our experiences with our daughter, I could almost associate with your heartache.”

At first, these stories felt overwhelming—too much suffering piled upon suffering. But in time, we comforted ourselves by remembering why people had sent them in the first place: not to burden us, but to comfort us.

And as I shared the letters with my sisters, something unexpected happened. They, too, were encouraged. We were all comforted—immeasurably—simply by reading them aloud to one another.

It took the entire day just to sort the mail.

There could not have been a better way to spend the day after.

Only then did I truly understand why we send cards at all.

They are not for the day of the tragedy.

They are for the day after.
 
*****
It didn’t stop after my sisters left.

Around Valentine’s Day, a poster-sized valentine arrived at our door from the Ridgeland Hutterite Colony. About the same time, a very official letter came from Brian Mulroney and his wife, Mila Mulroney. Another followed from the federal health minister, Jake Epp, and his wife.

By the end of February, the flood had slowed to about ten pieces of mail a day. I kept filling out index cards, coding the gifts and gestures, trying to keep track. Once or twice I attempted to answer letters.

The official letters of thanks were the easiest. I could sign them simply: Cliff and Wilma Derksen.
But the personal letters—the casual, heartfelt ones I would normally have signed with all our names—stopped me cold. For thirteen years, I had written Cliff, Wilma, Candace… and there was no way to break that deeply ingrained habit.

Was it that I wasn’t ready?

Or that I didn’t want to be?

I honestly didn’t know.

There was also a strong response to our public statement about forgiveness, which had appeared in the newspaper. One letter put the confusion bluntly: I am unsure of your feelings exactly, because I have not experienced the death of someone very close to me (knock on wood). All I can do is send you and your family my deepest sympathies. I hope, in time, your hurting stops.
I still do not understand how you can send out precious love for the killer of Candace. He—or she—has stolen something very precious from you, and you send out love? In the Bible doesn’t it say, “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth”? I feel much hatred for that person and cannot forgive what he has done to a sweet, innocent thirteen-year-old girl. I do not understand your feelings…

I could feel the pain in those words.

I understood the anger.

An article in The Toronto Star on February 16, 1985, also explored our response. A sociologist was quoted as saying that “the ‘turn the other cheek’ belief is more deeply embedded in those whose religious convictions are strong—especially in the case of Mennonites.”

“I understand the Mennonite religion quite well,” he added, “and I would expect this reaction from them. But I wouldn’t expect it from anyone else without those beliefs.”

I was quietly horrified.

I did not believe forgiveness came more easily to us because we were Mennonite. I didn’t believe it was easier for anyone. Forgiveness is not a cultural reflex; it is a universal human alternative.

We chose forgiveness because we wanted to survive our tragedy. It wasn’t for public approval. It wasn’t for anyone else’s benefit.

We knew—deep down—that forgiveness was a way toward healing.

At the same time, we began to see how the attention and publicity were affecting Candace’s friends. After the initial shock and terror, something unexpected happened: Candace had become almost a heroine—a symbol, even a kind of celebrity.

One of her friends, Kiersten Loewen, wrote a poem that was published in The Free Press:

“I knew her,”
I claim.
But did I really?
Candace, always smiling, laughing,
Giving of herself,
To strangers and friends alike.
Candace, the one who didn’t seem to need anything.
No one thought that anything would happen to her.
“Not to Candace,”
They say.
“She’s so sweet, kind and giving.
Not to her.”
Well, they were wrong.
Something did happen to her.
No more to see the sun again,
The rain again,
Feel pain again…
No more to cheer me up again…

They continued to send us poems.
They continued to send cards.
They continued to visit.
​
And somehow, in all of it, Candace’s life—her kindness, her faith, her presence—kept reaching outward, still gathering people, still shaping hearts, even after she was gone.
*****

It didn’t stop there.

One evening, I received a call from Michael W. Smith himself. He had heard our story and wanted to give our family complimentary tickets to his upcoming concert. He also invited us to meet him backstage afterward.
We could hardly believe it. Michael W. Smith—the singer of Candace’s favorite song, Friends Are Friends Forever—was scheduled to perform on March 3, and he had personally invited us.

It felt like a spectacular moment—a gift from heaven—with Candace written all over it.

We learned that Michael and his wife had written the song when a close friend, Bill Jackson, from a small Bible study group they belonged to, was preparing to leave town. As plans were being made for a farewell gathering, Debbie suggested they write him a song.

“That’s great,” Michael said. “We’ll write one and send it to him.”

“But what if we wrote it today?” she pressed.

Michael brushed off the idea, thinking, That’s just not possible.

Less than half an hour later, Debbie came outside to the backyard where he was resting and handed him a page of freshly written lyrics.

“I just looked at it and thought, Wow,” he later said. “We walked straight into the house. I sat down at the piano and started writing the music. Three minutes later—it was there. We just looked at each other and said, Wow.”

He sang the song for their friend that very evening, and its impact was immediate and profound.

“It just connects people,” Michael said. “I see it every night. I’ll be singing, and someone over there is crying. Three people over here are holding each other. It’s crazy.”

And friends are friends forever
If the Lord’s the Lord of them…

The lyrics affirm that shared faith in God makes friendships eternal—stronger than distance, stronger even than loss. The song speaks directly to the pain of goodbye, whether caused by moving away, by death, or by the irreversible changes of life. It roots friendship in something larger than time, offering comfort through the belief that even when friends part, the bond remains—held together by God.

But my reaction to the invitation was complicated.

I was thrilled for everyone else—for their excitement, their delight—but I dreaded it.

I was traumatized by the song.

It always made me cry.

How could I possibly sit through hearing her song live, when I couldn’t even listen to a scratchy, faded recording without falling apart?

There was only one way to survive it.

The morning of the concert, I put the tape on and forced myself to listen to Friends Are Friends Forever.

The song had lost none of its power to resurrect Candace’s presence. I could feel her swaying into the room in time with the music, that bright, unmistakable smile on her face—the same smile she wore every time she listened to her song.

I played it again.

And again.

And again.

I tried to replace her memories with my own—memories of my friends—hoping that if I made the song mine, her absence wouldn’t hurt so much. But I couldn’t. It was her song. She had loved it too deeply, played it too often.
The pain in that music would reach out, wrench my heart from its place, and crush it like wet clay.

Then I tried to work through it while doing something ordinary. I dusted the house. But every time the chorus began, the room blurred and I started sobbing.

When Cliff came home, he took one look at me, walked into the living room, and turned the tape off. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m listening to it until I don’t cry anymore.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “Don’t you know that song will always make us cry? You’ll never get over it. Doing this will make you sick—and you have to go tonight. You can’t make yourself sick.”

With that last sentence, he uncovered my secret hope.

I didn’t want to go.

But then Cliff said something that stilled me. He said Candace would be there—that one way of keeping her close was not to resist, but to enter in, to let ourselves be gathered into the circles of care she kept weaving around us, even now.

The concert was beautiful.

And when Michael W. Smith sang Friends Are Friends Forever, it became more than music.
It was art—true and luminous.

A celebration of agape love.

It felt like greatness meeting greatness: love meeting loss,
heaven brushing earth,
God present among us, gently unraveling what we had tied too tightly in our grief.

I cried—and so did everyone else. But it was dark. There were no cameras, no eyes upon us. And it was good to cry.
Candace was there with us all--not as absence, but as comfort--moving quietly through our tears.

The funeral home’s limousine pulled up in front of the house precisely on time. Cliff, Odia, and I rode in the first car with our parents; the rest of the family followed in another. The sun was brilliant, almost defiant, and a fine haze of snow drifted through the air as we pulled away from the house.

As we neared the church, traffic thickened. For a moment I wondered if we might get stuck in traffic jam—and then, almost ceremonially, the cars parted to let us through. As we approached the parking lot—already overflowing—I understood. It was the funeral itself that had created the congestion.

Inside the church, we were guided first to a private room, then into the foyer. Finally, we began the slow walk down the aisle, following Candace’s white coffin. It was covered in red roses, and draped across the front was a banner that read: Friends Are Friends Forever. Faces along the aisle blurred together—drawn, pale, silent. We took our seats on the front bench, and the service began.

The MBCI choir filled the loft above us. We tried to smile at the students we recognized. David was there, seated in the very last row, at the far end. To our left, much closer than I had expected, the media had already taken their places. I felt a flicker of unease and wondered why we hadn’t asked them to sit farther back.

Keith Poysti, our assistant pastor, stepped forward and led the congregation in the opening hymn, “We Praise Thee, O God.” I mouthed the words, uncertain whether my voice would hold.

Keith then introduced Dave Loewen. Dave had been asked to speak on behalf of the search committee—to thank the public, the police, and the media for their tireless efforts.

“By God’s hand, Candace has become a sacrificial lamb,” he said. “This event has brought into sharp focus both the worst and the best of Winnipeg. While evil has run its course, good has triumphed.”

The choir, directed by Peter Braun, rose to sing.

I was acutely aware that nearly two thousand people filled the building. Later, I would be told that many more had been turned away at the doors. I was surrounded by a vast crowd that had come to hold us up in our grief—and yet, in that moment, I felt utterly alone. It was the loneliest moment of my life.

Ruth Balzer interrupted my thoughts as she stood and began to tell Candace’s story.

We had chosen Ruth carefully. She had known Candace through the Camp Arnes Follow-up Program—a winter ministry designed to offer spiritual support to young people between camp seasons. Every Tuesday, Ruth picked Candace up and brought her home again.

Candace always returned from those evenings visibly renewed, lighter somehow, more herself. We knew that much of that transformation had to do with Ruth. I don’t think Ruth ever fully understood what a model she was for Candace—but we did. And it mattered deeply to us that those who had shaped Candace’s inner life, those she loved and trusted, were given a place in this service.

We hadn’t wanted an obituary or a eulogy. Candace was too young for something so staid, so final. Besides, she didn’t have a list of accomplishments—at least not the kind that fit neatly into formal language. What she had was a way of being.

We wanted Ruth Balzer to offer something simpler: a living description of who Candace was, what she was like, and how it had felt to know her.

“To know Candace was to love her,” Ruth began, “not because she was more special than anyone else, but because she knew how to love.”

She spoke about Candace’s joy in swimming, running, playing basketball, riding horses. She told how Candace instinctively drew out the shy, how she noticed the newcomer and made space for them. “I often saw her make people feel welcome,” Ruth said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

She described Candace as a gentle spirit—cheerful, enthusiastic, unpretentious—and as someone with a generous, giving faith. One of her stories sparked a ripple of laughter through the sanctuary, and I smiled through my tears. Candace would have loved that.

A conversation drifted back to me—one I had once had with Candace about funerals.

Back in North Battleford, our church had been involved in two funerals held only days apart. The first was for a powerful man—well known, respected, influential. Yet we were all startled by how few people attended. The atmosphere was polite but detached, marked by courtesy rather than grief. There was little sense of loss.

The second funeral was for a woman who had lived on the lowest rung of life’s ladder. She had been divorced, then widowed—poor, uneducated, living on a pension, burdened with a struggling child. She spoke with a heavy accent, overweight and had no sense of style. By society’s standards, she had nothing. A widow with no mite,. And yet her funeral overflowed.

People packed the sanctuary, spilling into the hallways. Tears flowed freely. Story after story rose like incense—tender, funny, heartbreaking. They spoke of her warmth, her kindness, her quiet loyalty. they remembered the small, ordinary ways she had changed their lives. They mourned her deeply.

I remember sitting afterward with Cliff and Candace, puzzling over the contrast.

Candace listened closely, her questions gentle but probing.

“Why?” she had asked. “What did the she have that made her funeral so alive?”

I felt badly that we had been in that kind of discussion and that she was listening but then in hindsight it might have been important for her to hear.  I answered her with “She knew how to love,” I told her. “A love that truly sees another person for who they are—recognizes the beauty there and delights in it.” I think I even referred to that famous chapter on love: love is patient and kind, not self-seeking or easily angered, and how faith, hope, and even prophecy have their place, but will pass away, while love endures forever. Things like that –I really preached it.

Candace nodded then, her eyes wide and thoughtful. I could tell she understood, not just with her mind, but with her heart.

Then the choir rose to sing—and they sang beautifully.

So much care had gone into the music. Katie Epp, our pastor’s wife, had taken full responsibility for selecting and coordinating it. We had entrusted her completely, and now we felt the wisdom of that choice. The songs carried the room. Their words named what we could not quite say ourselves; their melodies held the weight of the moment without overwhelming it.

Then Cliff stood and announced the swimming pool fund.

It was, no doubt, highly unusual to introduce such a thing at a funeral. But this, too, belonged to the story. It was not an interruption—it was a continuation.

And then Candace's song...

Cliff introduced the song, Friends are Friends Forever, and told the congregation how Candace had played this song every night for the last year and a half, how the words were her gift to us now.

When that that song that had been so much a part of Candace floated through the loudspeakers, it was as if her presence walked softly down the aisle.  The tears began to slip. 

The chorus:
And friends are friends forever
If the Lord's the Lord of them
And a friend will not say "never"
'Cause the welcome will not end
Though it's hard to let you go...

I've been told that there wasn't a dry eye in the place.  Even though it was painful to cry, all of us needed to do it.

The song continued:
In the Father's hands we know
That a lifetime's not too long to live as friends

Pastor Epp stepped to the pulpit as the last notes of the song faded and began his meditation. "Whatever evil befell Candace, it will not have the last word in her life. God's peace is the last word," he began.

He was echoing our hope.

CBC radio was broadcasting the funeral live  -  so all of Winnipeg had access to that moment.

And then it was over, and we were following the white casket down the long aisle. Another of Candace's songs, "Great Is the Lord," accompanied our procession.

Candace had once told me, "Mom, my favorite song is 'Friends Are Friends Forever,' and I wanted to tape only that one, but I accidently taped 'Great Is the Lord' as well, and now I keep listening to it, too. I like it almost as much. 'Friends' makes me a little sad. 'Great Is the Lord' picks me up and leaves me with a good feeling." And it was doing that for us now….

We stepped outside. The sun had disappeared, and a blizzard swirled around us. Just as I was stepping into the car, a strange man broke through the crowd and grabbed me. He only wanted to give me a little Bible and to wish us well, but it reminded us again that this wasn't an ordinary funeral. The person who killed Candace could easily have come as a guest.

The funeral procession pulled out onto Portage Avenue. Three patrol cars led the way, though we could barely see them through the blizzard. I knew we were part of a sad parade, but for a few moments the storm mercifully curtained us from public scrutiny.

Once outside the city limits, the storm intensified. It was a whiteout again. We could see no more than a car length ahead. Just visible through the blanket of white, three police officers stood at the gate of Glen Eden Memorial Gardens, saluting as we entered, paying their last respects to Candace.

The force of the wind nearly swept us off our feet as we stepped from the cars. My brother Wes, who had come from B.C., wore only a light jacket and was visibly trembling with cold as he struggled with the coffin. He handled it as gently as possible, as if she could still feel pain.

I was grateful for the storm. It was a gift. It would have been so much harder on a beautiful day, with birds singing in the trees. Somehow this violent weather mirrored our inner turmoil: no one has the right to take another person’s life; the world is cruel and unfriendly; innocent children are forced to absorb unbearable pain; since creation itself, something has gone terribly wrong. We are spinning out of control. Candace was in the storm.

The director handed each of us a flower from the spray. I stepped forward to the coffin, suspended above the grave, and bent down to touch it. It was cold.

“’Bye, Candace. I love you,” I whispered.

Afterward, we returned to our church for lunch. The public guests had gone; only friends and family remained. Slowly, people began to tell us what Candace had meant to them.

One young man, who had been in Candace's class and about whom Candace had always talked so admiringly, told us what their friendship had meant to him.  I wish Candace could have been with us to hear all those wonderful things being said about her.  I was amazed that, young as she was, she had already left a legacy of love.

*****
After a light lunch, Dave Loewen invited everyone to gather around our table in one massive embrace. Someone offered a simple prayer. Then we went home—emotionally exhausted, yet somehow encouraged.

The officers who had been guarding the house were gone. On the dining room table sat a small cut-flower bouquet. A boy from down the street—another of Candace’s friends—had left it for us. A neighborhood store had also delivered large plates of cold cuts for those who would come and stay with us.

It wasn’t until that evening that we realized how much strain we had all been under. We were sitting together in the overflowing living room, finally able to relax. We had plunged into the depths of grief during the day, and now there was a strange sense of relief—almost a quiet celebration—that the event itself was over. It felt good. We had felt Candace collectively. She had been very much alive.

Once again, we went to bed and slept—another miracle.

Early the next morning, we got up to take my parents to the train station. Cliff stopped at a coin-operated newspaper box and bought the city’s papers.

We were stunned when the headlines leapt out at us—both front pages. “Peace Triumphs!” proclaimed Winnipeg Sun, devoting its first four pages to our story. The piece in the Winnipeg Free Press focused more closely on Candace herself. Both articles were thoughtful and generous. Both suggested that, somehow, within all this tragedy, good had triumphed.

My dad had been unusually quiet during the drive, and I wasn’t sure whether it was simply the exhaustion of the past days or something deeper. I watched him carefully as he read. When he finally laid the paper down, there was a new peace on his face.

“Now I understand,” he said quietly. “On the train trip here, I was so puzzled. I wondered where God was. But now I know.”

My father—who usually showed such remarkable restraint in most things—went back to the newspaper stand and bought every newspaper he could find.

Actually, it was my father who first recognized the transcendent power of Candace’s life.

He saw that she had stepped into a simple but profound truth: that God—who embodies goodness and love—created a perfect world for us, a beautiful toy meant to be held, explored, and delighted in. But in the Garden of Eden, we took that toy and broke it. What followed was not innocence but chaos, not play but violence—a world increasingly marked by cruelty and murder.

Yet God, who never withdrew His love, made a promise. If we would take our broken toy and give it back to Him, He would receive it with grace and transform it—making something beautiful again out of what had been shattered.. It is nothing short of a miracle when He does that.

As a child, Candace committed her life to God, and we watched the power of her love quietly grow. Then, as a young teenager, she went even further: she committed her murder to God. In doing so, she opened the door for God to work His miracle—to take what was meant to destroy her and turn it into good.
​
My father was overwhelmed as he witnessed that moment of transformation unfold before his watchful eyes—the unmistakable beauty of grace at work.
​

The next day, around noon, two officers came by to give us more details.

They told us that Candace’s body had been found in a shed only about four hundred and fifty metres—roughly five hundred yards—from our house. It was at the end of the railway tracks that branched off Talbot Avenue. They believed she had taken her usual route home and was forced off the road where Talbot intersects with the tracks.

The shed stood on private property, tucked into a desolate corner of a brick and lumber yard. It had been built nearly fifty years earlier to house machinery used for hauling sand, but it had long since fallen into disuse. No one from the company had entered the building for at least two years—until the day before, when a foreman went in searching for a missing machine part. He said he saw the body immediately.

The motive was unclear, but the case was being treated as first-degree murder. That stunned us. We had assumed that, since she had died of hypothermia, the charge would be kidnapping or abduction or unlawful confinement. The officers explained that when a death occurs while a victim is being unlawfully restrained or held against their will—it is classified as first-degree murder, even if the killing was not planned or deliberate. Their initial assessment of the crime scene suggested a street person. No car appeared to have been involved.

They assured us they would keep us informed.

After they left, I sat at the kitchen table.

The house was empty—strangely empty. There were no guests. Someone, anticipating we would be overwhelmed, had taken the children for the day. Cliff had gone out to take care of practical matters. I was left alone.

It was the first time I was truly alone. The last two days had been one trauma after another, going to the police station, identifying the body, late night visitor, funeral director at the funeral home, choosing a white coffin and then coming home to this report.

All I could think of was First-degree murder. It was first degree murder!

The phrase vibrated through my mind.

To my surprise, my first response was relief Not the answer we had hoped for, but after seven weeks of speculation and uncertainty, there was now a conclusion. Murder—finally, a definitive answer.

But the relief didn’t last long. It gave way to horror.

Candace had been murdered!

Who? Why?

The word itself was unbearable. Murder. It didn’t belong in our world. It wasn’t part of our experience. I had no framework for it—no grid by which to understand it. Or did I?

And then I remembered. Candace and I had talked about murder only a few months earlier.

She had gone to babysit at a neighbour’s house across the back alley. Then around ten o’clock  -  she had phoned me. “Mom, the kids are in bed. I’m playing video games. Can you come? I’m scared.”

So I went over. I sat beside her on the rug and let her beat me at a few video games while we munched on peanuts. Then I asked her why she was afraid. She wasn’t usually scared—at least not that I knew. Was there an actual threat?
No, she said. No threat.

Last night she had a nightmare. In the dream, someone had tried to murder her. She described it in detail. Because I believed dreams were the language of the unconscious, I listened carefully, asking gentle, practical questions. After examining every detail, I concluded it was nothing more than ordinary school anxieties—perhaps amplified by a recent horror movie she had watched against our wishes.

Still, I wanted to honour her fear as real. So I offered what I believed was wise counsel—how to live with fear without letting it rule you.

“Candace,” I said, “when you’re afraid, pray and ask God to protect you. Believe that He will, and then lay your fears aside. You can’t let fear control your life.”

I will never forget the way she looked at me—those expressive blue eyes, searching, intelligent.

“Mom,” she asked quietly, “can you honestly tell me that if I pray for God to protect me, nothing will ever hurt me again? That I will never be murdered?”

So much for Sunday school answers.

My daughter had grown up.

In truth, Cliff and I had asked the same question ourselves years earlier, after Cliff had been held at knifepoint for hours while managing a trading post. Though a missionary in the village eventually rescued him, we could not bear the lingering trauma. We left the community carrying a deep sense of vulnerability—of failure—that we struggled to name, let alone resolve.

Later, we met a second cousin of Cliff’s who had also served in ministry up north and had faced comparable threats—perhaps even worse. Yet he was returning, and he seemed at peace, reconciled somehow to the constant danger. We asked him how he lived with the knowledge that his life was always at risk.

With an unusual peace in his eyes, he told us he had come to an understanding with God: that God had assured him that if his life were to end prematurely and violently, God would use his death to have a greater impact than the rest of his life ever could.

Cliff and I talked about it afterward. We loved his cousin’s understanding—and adopted it as our own.

So, I told Candace that story I said that committing our death to God—our murder—meant that if we were killed, our death would carry the weight of martyrdom; that God would bless our death even more than our life. I assured her that if she were to die violently as a young person, God would somehow use her death to have greater impact than if she had lived a long, full life.

The important part, I told her, was to commit – take off your shoe.

I was referring to the story of Moses: tending sheep in the wilderness, Moses comes across a bush burning in the desert that is not consumed. He stops. He examines it. The bush, ordinary and fragile, mirrors Moses himself. From within the fire, God calls Moses by name then instructs Moses to remove his sandals, for the ground is holy—not because the place itself is sacred, but because God is present there. By removing his shoes Moses signifies reverence, humility, repentance, and the recognition that he stands at a crossroads—between loyalty to heaven and allegiance to earth.

In other words, for God to transform a threat—or a fear—we must commit it to God. I then told her that even after the fact, that commitment had given us a new understanding of that moment

Oh, how glibly we speak.

She just sat there.

“Are you okay, Candace?” I finally asked.

She looked up at me, tears in her eyes. “Yes, Mom.”

I knew by her tears that she had taken my words seriously—her fears had been transformed from a nightmare to a sacred moment.

We had never talked about it after that. think we even played a few more video games before the parents came home. I assumed our conversation was a non-issue—irrelevant—because there was no threat on our lives.

However, I did notice that she no longer carried fear. She seemed to radiate a new confidence.

Now, in hindsight, I wondered….

What had I promised her?

“Oh God,” I whispered, “what have we done?”

Just then Cliff came home, I told him what I had remembered and we talked it through. He had the same questions. Again, we were out of our depth.

So we did the only thing we knew how to do. We prayed our way through it—just as we always had – then we let it go.
We had to.  Our own lives had a new agenda.

Yesterday, as our friends flooded into the house in response to the news, they noticed the steady pressure of the media gathering at our door. Quietly, throughout the evening, they signaled to us that this was far from over. What lay ahead would be public. We would need to organize a funeral worthy—so they implied—of this new, tragic hero in our family’s story. Expectations were already forming.

People wanted to know the date of the funerals. We had been told it might take up to five days before Candace’s body would be released. No one seemed to know how long it would take for a body to thaw.

When we had discussed this with the funeral director earlier that morning, he had promised he would contact us as soon as she arrived.  Then he added, gently, that didn’t mean we couldn’t begin planning.

He laid out a list of practical decisions.

A memorial card?

He showed us two samples. We chose one adorned with a simple shaft of wheat—humble, earthy, hopeful.
Bulletins for the program?

We agreed to pick them up on our way home.

Which coffin would we choose?

He led us into a room lined with them—a quiet, solemn gallery of final resting places. That was where we had our first major meltdown. The full reality of everything struck us all at once. Strangely, it was the perfect place to fall apart, with the perfect person standing beside us—someone who understood, someone who didn’t rush us, who simply let our tears come.

Eventually, we returned to his office.

Which church?

Our own, of course.

Whom would we invite?

“Anyone who wants to come,” we answered instinctively.

A flicker of concern crossed his face. Perhaps, he suggested gently, we might want to consider a larger church.
And then the final question.

Which organization would we like people to donate to in Candace’s memory?

Apparently, there is always a memorial gift—often given in lieu of flowers—a way for people to express grief through generosity. The funds usually go to a cause connected to the life or values of the one who has died, something meaningful, something that carries their name forward.

When he presented the idea to us, we hesitated. In our case, we wondered whether we should even have one. People had already given so much—meals, time, presence, care.

“No,” the director said firmly. “People need a way to express their sympathy.”

All we had to do, he explained, was choose a cause.

He told us the amount usually ranged anywhere from two thousand to seven thousand dollars—more if the person was well known. With Candace being so well known, he expected people would be generous.

He suggested Gideon Bibles.

Gideon Bibles at Candace’s funeral?

No. That didn’t fit. She needed something more alive. More playful. More her.

What would Candace have chosen?

Immediately, images surfaced— Candace diving into the deep water behind her father, then hovering near the bottom, beckoning for me to follow, fully aware that I couldn’t. The younger children had loved watching her do something I couldn’t do—so capable, so confident, so free.

Perhaps it should be something connected to her love of swimming.

Camp Arnes had a swimming pool in their future plans—I had seen it in the blueprints. Candace and I had even talked about it once, imagining how much a swimming pool would add to the winter family camp we hosted every year.
The thought lingered.

*****
When, Dave Loewen called from Three Hills, Alberta, to say he wouldn’t be able to return until the evening before the funeral.  He was so sorry…

We understood, but we had a question for him.

We knew that Camp Arnes had a swimming pool in its future plans for the motel lodge, could we raise the seed money for that pool in Candace’s memory?

Dave said it was a good idea, but he would need to talk to the board.

And then there was the media. We needed his advice. We had promised them we would speak to them the next day.  How should we handle this?

Dave took a long breath. He suggested that the search committee might be willing to help us with the funeral preparations – would we want that. We agreed immediately, and he said he would call them.

A meeting was arranged. When the committee learned that we intended to open the funeral service to the public, they hesitated. Gently but firmly, they warned us that the crowd could be enormous. The search had become a public event. People across the city had begun to identify with us. Strangers—people we had never met—had grown emotionally invested in our story. They felt they knew Candace.

Were we sure we were ready for that?

We thought about it carefully. But in the end, it only confirmed what we already would be the right thing to do. If the people of Winnipeg felt that close to Candace, then they also had the right to say good-bye.

The committee exchanged glances, then drew a collective breath. They suggested that the funeral be held at Portage Avenue Mennonite Brethren Church—the largest Mennonite church in the city. It could seat two thousand people. Our own church would host the lunch afterward.

Harold Jantz contacted the media and arranged a press conference for the next day.

Then they helped us think through the morning.

*****
The next day, Len DeFehr picked us up and drove us to the press conference. With Dave still out of town, Harold Jantz chaired the gathering, and Cliff read the prepared statement. He thanked the media for their sustained and careful coverage of the search, then thanked the public, invited them to the funeral, and finally announced that anyone wishing to express their sympathy could donate to the dream of building a swimming pool at Camp Arnes.

Their first question was – how did we feel. We told the reporters that we were tremendously relieved that Candace had been found—but that now we were trying to accept her death. We were still in shock but were already feeling the pain which we knew was probably current in all of those who had fallen in love with Candace during the search.

We talked about that for awhile in different ways.

Eventually, someone asked how we felt about the perpetrator.

Cliff and I paused. We didn’t even need to look at each other – we could feel the same tension. Should we be honest? Would they understand?

We had no choice. Our only strategy throughout the ordeal had been to be completely honest.

Cliff, always decisive, said that we were “going to forgive:—that he already had forgiven. For him, making the choice itself was somehow conclusive. It fit his nature.

I live in the past and the future, only dipping into the present occasionally. For me, forgiveness would take longer. I told the reporters that I had chosen to forgive. I wasn’t sure whether I actually had—yet. In hindsight, I can see how strange our answers must have sounded to them. They had no idea about the seven weeks of anticipatory grief we had already endured, nor the intense spiritual journey we had been on during the last two days.

When the lights went down, the reporters stayed seated and began asking questions informally. It felt less like an interview and more like curiosity—almost as if they wanted to understand what made us tick.
I would have loved to explain it to them. But I didn’t yet understand it myself.

We tried to describe our faith, but it was a pitiful attempt—halting, inadequate, incomplete.

As we talked, I forgot they were the press and felt instead that we were among friends – Candace’s friends. In some strange way, they had been with us for the last month, tracing the search alongside us, carrying Candace’s story into the city. It felt right that they should be allowed to walk with us to the end.
​
So, we invited the media to the funeral.