One of my specializations is bank and credit card reconciliation, month-end, quarter-end and year-end reconciliation. That is not what this is about.
I marked the day with silence. And some more silence. The silence provoked introspection: what have I done for the lost children and survivors of residential schools? I have supported indigenous vendors, I have supported indigenous artists, I have also hobnobbed with First Nations Chiefs. That has not resulted in reconciliation, true though it is.
When a mother loses a child, there is pain: irreparable, immense pain. When a community loses not one child, but many, that pain is spread far and wide. It cannot be erased. It must be healed. For that is the resolution for pain. How each survivor or each parent and community that has missing children deals with their pain is unique to themselves, for we are all different people, and we handle what life gives us in our own ways. For we are all survivors. Maybe we did not go through the residential school system, but that crisis has now caused us to reflect on our behaviors, our grief and our support to the communities not only in Kamloops and Cranbrook and Saskatchewan, but everywhere.