Awakening to Grief in Montreal

How Love Enters the World

In spring 2019, I regularly lay sleepless in my apartment in Côte-des-Neiges with silent tears streaming down my face. A few weeks before, while picking up my first-grade son from his school in downtown Montreal, he told me that a second-grade boy from his school had been hit and killed by a car on a dark road the evening before.

The next day on the school grounds, I pondered how someone else’s child had been playing there in my field of vision just two days before but would now unexpectedly never return. I forgot to hand my son's backpack over to him and started making my way home. When I returned, I found the secretary looking downcast. "I completely understand. We're all having a bad day here,” she said. My mind was darkened with a sense of mourning for weeks. I realized that if my own child died, all kinds of small things would intensify the devastation, from jackets left on coat hooks, to drawings on the wall, or bedding retaining my child’s scent. 

My husband informed me that a school portrait of the deceased boy had been posted with a message encouraging students’ families to donate to his funeral fund. I asked him to donate, but I could not bear to look at the photograph myself. His death already felt deeply personal to me. Having never had this kind of response to a death before, at first I didn’t understand what was happening. Why did this disrupt my daily life? How could I feel intense love for a family and child I didn’t know personally? 

I couldn’t see it then, but my grief would lead me into closer communion with God and challenge me to expand my vision of God’s nature, love, and plan for Their children. I would learn that charity paired with spiritual longing holds great creative and revelatory power. My cries would be answered with revelation that my pain, longing for a better world, and love for others were answers from God in their own right and echoed in divine intimations across generations.

In the fall of 1964, my grandmother, Etheleen, woke one morning and went through her morning routine in her small brick home in Syracuse, Utah. She prepared lunches for her three schoolchildren: my father Bryan, ten years old; Paula, nine years old; and Gayle, six years old. First-grader Gayle asked her mom to style her hair in pigtails, which she did as they looked at one another in the bathroom mirror. She hugged Gayle and sent the children out to catch the school bus.

That school lunch was the last meal Gayle ever ate, that hug was the last one they’d ever share. The next time Etheleen saw Gayle, she was lying on the street after being hit by a speeding driver. She died on impact right in front of their home. Gayle had been with her older siblings but ran out ahead in excitement to see her mom. Bryan and Paula ran into the house and pleaded with God for Gayle to live, while an ambulance came and took her away.

I picture my family during the first nights after the death. My dad sitting in his bedroom grappling with the new reality that his little sister was never coming home again, regretting that he did not happen to be holding her hand that afternoon. In the next room, Paula thinks she hears Gayle’s spirit pressing the keys of the piano. Across the hall, Etheleen lies in the master bedroom. After finally drifting off, she wakes, the stupor of sleep wears off, she remembers the scenes of Gayle’s death, starts weeping, and can’t fall asleep again, many times over.

Etheleen was tenderhearted. When she parted ways with a loved one, there were tears and hugs. The sudden loss of her six-year-old was harrowing. Normally full of zest for life, she descended into severe depression that lasted several years. For the rest of her life, she resisted talking about Gayle’s death with my dad. Avoiding her trauma prevented her from reassuring him about the events surrounding the accident and of her continued love for him. The fallout of my aunt’s death hurt me and others in ways beyond the scope of this story, but my personal awareness of how much suffering one child’s death can cause certainly increased my sense of grief and wonder as I pondered the death of my son’s schoolmate. The suffering and schisms caused by one child’s death can make lasting, damaging ripples in a family.

In my apartment in Montreal, I realized that I wasn’t only mourning with a family in my community but also with my own family. The depths of grief opened before me. The wood floorboards of my bedroom split open into a deep tenebrous chasm, the seemingly bottomless sadness of children’s deaths. For the first time in my life, I tried to gaze into this space without shutting my eyes. What do people experience when they lose their children? As Grandma’s traumatic wound flared up within me, I could not bear the thought that any child should die an untimely death, and the thought that any parent should endure a lifetime of mourning and grief caused me to tremble and despair in the face of human suffering.

I did not connect with the sadness of Gayle’s death growing up, even though my grandparents’ house was full of reminders of her absence. Gayle’s last school portrait hung in a room decorated for a young girl kept as if it were waiting for her return. Grandma shared the story of her death at bedtime, which always ended with my grandparents raising Gayle during the millennium. Hope in temple blessings was their way of moving forward to live content lives.

Grandma taught me not to wear black to funerals. She showed me photos of her mother’s funeral, where she wore a brightly colored floral dress. We took pride in our confidence in the physical resurrection and reunion of families taught in the restored gospel. I now believe Grandma preferred sharing about death this way precisely because the devastation was unspeakable. She wept at length when she mentioned her mother or my grandpa after they passed. The grief was in plain sight, but I resisted acknowledging that losing someone might be horribly sad even when faith is intact.  

A few years before my move to Quebec, I found an album in Grandma’s basement with worksheets Gayle completed just before her death. The handwriting and crayon marks had grown very faint. Behind them was a letter to my dad that Grandma never delivered. She apologized to him for being cold, angry, and withdrawn after the accident. I wondered what had kept her from following through with this urge to reconcile with her young son. Grandma’s visits and enthusiastic love were central to me as a child. How could grief lead someone who loved me so much to hurt me and our family? Was my own current sense of mourning something I needed to go through to understand and accept my Grandma’s mental illness and actions?  

I chose to move to Montreal feeling inspired that this would bring greater spiritual light and growth into my life, but my faith seemed to be disintegrating in this new place. In my international urban ward, I was mostly cut off from people who shared my lifelong faith experience and roots in the Intermountain West.  I felt more at home with secular people at work and often had the impression they were happier than I. Church responsibilities weighed heavily on top of my hectic life as an immigrant mom entering a bilingual workforce and helping young children navigate school in French, a language none of us had learned before.

I also needed to find belonging in a society with robust critical sensibilities toward Christian traditions. The Québécois people made a mass exodus from the Catholic faith in the ’60s and ’70s, sacrificing their faith to build a society more conducive to women’s and families’ well-being. While not all is peaceful and resolved in the province’s relationship with faith (as Bill 21, a policy that prohibits wearing religious symbols and apparel for many jobs, attests), the aspects of the Quiet Revolution that empowered women stunned me. I witnessed remarkable benefits in my own life and neighborhood. Quebec’s history validated my pain and anger about misogyny and undue pressures I had faced as a Latter-day Saint woman, and it provided a comparative reference point that challenged many things I’d been taught about God’s will and vision for me and my own needs and desires.

As I excavated fractures in my faith, my foundation became shaky. I no longer felt sure about what happens after death. Human life seemed to teeter on the edge of a precipice overlooking a dark abyss. I asked myself: Where can I find God in the midst of children’s deaths here and now, rather than at some long distant day? Do They ask too much of us in sending us to a world where our children can so easily be torn from us? What are They doing to support grieving families who have lost faith and hope because of the blindspots and missteps of their faith traditions? 

Walking into Cirque du Soleil’s headquarters (where I taught English), and later outside the gates of McGill campus, I overheard a couple of conversations mocking my faith tradition as something naive and quintessentially absurd. My French tutor told me Québécois individuals often perceive Latter-day Saints as an ultra-religious dogmatic cult. Was my past joy in God’s love and eternal life based on a far-fetched sham? My safety rope of certainty having snapped, if I found God again, it could only be with a new appreciation for God’s power to offer humans hope and healing in our precarious and tragic situations.

My dark thoughts kept returning for months, partly because I couldn’t avoid exposure to events that added to the grief. Art and artifacts in Montreal led me to descend to a deeper level of questioning. I visited an exhibit by Indigenous artist Kent Monkman featuring his painting The Scream, which depicts children being forcibly torn from their families by church and Canadian officials to attend residential schools where they suffered abuse, neglect, and often death. I also visited the Montreal Holocaust Museum two blocks from my apartment, where I witnessed histories and photos of children about to be taken to concentration camps, enter gas chambers, or be euthanized. 

I looked on the suffering of these children and families and cast my head down with my hands over my eyes. The weight of their indignation and grief were beyond what I could bear. I didn’t want these deaths to be the history recorded in my own neighborhood. Why so much trauma in the lives of young souls? How did God expect me to have the strength to mourn with these thousands in my state of intensified love and grief? 

I had internalized narratives about God assigning suffering to humans in order to purify us and correct our missteps. Deep down, I was afraid my anguish was punishment for damaged religious trust and growing moral independence. I felt abandoned by God, and I worried that victims and their families might feel stuck in similar states of despair and abandonment.

At Gayle’s funeral, a church leader had said it was God’s will she die because there were more important things for her to do in the spirit world. Yet what could be more important than finishing first grade? How could God inflict intergenerational trauma on my family? From my own communion with God, I knew no answers to such questions but could only believe God knows and loves humans, weeps with us, and encourages and heals us. 

I told God I could only bear my increasing love and grief with Their accompaniment. God whispered the quietest messages, so soft I could easily have denied or ignored them, slowly over time. Once They gently gestured to my own heart, as if saying, “This love that’s in you, this grief that’s in you, this is Our grief. This is Our love. It is through you that Our love enters the world. The compassion you seek is already within you. Your heart is the answer to your prayers and pleadings.” My longing drew me into greater closeness with God; my cries of sorrow were echoed in Their sacred answers. I’ve come to believe that my and others’ compassion and grief are a central part of God’s great work of wiping away all tears and creating a new earth in which there will be no more death or despair. 

In an effort to faithfully reimagine my thoughts about death, I wrote a letter heavenward asking what God does to support and comfort children who die. Then I wrote a detailed response using the dreams of family members, scripture, past experiences with prayer, and my own imagination. This was a way to ground myself in faith that God is actively accompanying human souls now rather than waiting for some future time. This kind of creative activity resonates with the answer God gave me: love, sorrow, and longing provide a sacred space within which I could seek, imagine, and discover answers to my questions. It is a space in which I’ve come to believe that God's love for us is more pure and unfailing, and more compassionate and full of care, wisdom, understanding, and resilience than I had been taught to believe or ever imagined before. 

I envisioned children being immediately embraced and cared for by Heavenly Parents and ancestors standing ready and prepared. I imagined beloved communities welcoming them. I imagined wounds being tended to and tears being wiped away. I saw friendship and belonging, music, study, and learning. I pictured children I’ve grieved over tapping God on the shoulder and adding a little note of their own as a postscript:

“Thank you for remembering us and loving us and having faith in our future. Don’t despair. Our suffering is over. We’re already beginning to enjoy eternal life in the presence of our Heavenly Parents. We see their loving faces looking upon us continually. 

“Soon we will be reunited with our parents, siblings, and friends, and God will finish healing their hearts and wiping away all the tears from their eyes. There will be a new heaven and a new earth. The things that Jesus prayed for us will be fulfilled in us—blessings so great they are beyond what human words can express. There will be special recompense to make up for all that has been suffered or missed because of our early deaths. The Savior feels our experiences and needs keenly and will not rest until all is fulfilled and restored. 

“Always trust that like us, you are known and loved, and your sadness is fully understood. Our Heavenly Parents weep with you. If you have another bad day, remember that their love and comfort will always be there. With love from all the children you care about who are now in God's presence.”

Remembering the inspiration and the tears of joy that flowed while writing my letter from God has been one of the things that has helped me the most to exit states of despair. 

One night, an image of my great-grandfather walking through his garden flashed in my mind. Belvin Gerald lost his mom to cancer when he was twelve and spent his life caring for his blind father and siblings. He supported them with subsistence farming and factory laborer wages. Like his daughter Etheleen, Belvin was tenderhearted. He is still remembered in his community in rural South Carolina for kindness. As his image flashed in my mind, I felt he was speaking to me, saying, “Candice, I know you and I love you.” I felt immersed in warm acceptance. Grandpa used to hide jars of coins in family members’ closets, and feeling his love was like finding a message he’d hidden just for me. He passed two years before I was born, and I marveled that there he was—alive, well, and even speaking—in my mind and heart, even though we never met in life. I pondered the power of love to survive decades beyond death. 

I hope that my love will spread to others’ lives like Grandpa’s has. I felt this most keenly recently while sitting in sacrament meeting when my now eleven-year-old son hugged me after the prayer. I unexpectedly thought of Irina Sedler, who rescued Jewish children during the Holocaust. It was the great love of her father, who was very generous with his hugs and who served the poor and marginalized as a physician, that energized her audacious missions that prevented thousands of deaths. As I looked into my son’s face, I felt a surge of confidence that my love, and the love of all the people around me, will lead to unforeseen miracles and relief for many generations to come. 

Candice Wendt is a writer who supports students of all backgrounds and belief systems in their spiritual lives at McGill University’s Office of Religious and Spiritual Life.

Art by Bruce Herman.

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