‘It won’t get better. I don’t want it to get better.’

International Children’s Memorial Place adds new memorials to Everliving Forest

The International Children’s Memorial Place (ICMP) has added 36 new memorials to its Everliving Forest.

The scene during the 11th annual dedication ceremony was impressive, with the largest audience in the history of the event according to board member Dennis Hopping.

With provincial, national, and international flags snapping in the wind, ICMP board chairman Mait MacIsaac quickly put it into perspective.

“Everyone puts aside the trivial. Together as one, we meet to remember children who have slipped the bonds of mortality,” he reminded in his opening remarks.

He classed his listeners in three groups - parents, relatives, and those who say they can’t imagine what it’s like to lose a child - and asked those who couldn’t imagine the loss to especially consider his words, as they are the ones who help the others to carry on.

MacIsaac, who has experienced the loss of a child, proposed that the lost be considered as having transformed to another level of living and being. Carrying on with life - enjoying other children, family, blue skies, pictures, and special events - keeps alive the spirit of a remembered child.

“It won’t get better. I don’t want it to get better,” he said of the 20 years since his child’s passing, but advised that the more the forever young are incorporated into life, the more life is lived.

“Love them as much in their mortal death as you did in life,” he counselled.

His remarks were exemplified by the legacy sculpture unveiled during the ceremony. It had been created by Julie Glaspy over the winter, depicting a family holding onto the memory of a child, which is represented by an empty form carved through the stone.

The dedications to those represented by the sculpture reflected the international character of the experience and the site.

The new memorials in the Everliving Forest counted children from seven Canadian provinces, the United States, Scotland, and Haiti.

Many in the audience were visiting previously dedicated memorials, much as Hopping has done nearly every week in remembering his daughter and grandson.

Forest caretaker Gus Houston took time to arranged an update photo of a three-metre tree to be taken for a family in Australia he had met whose son died in circumstances similar to his own son’s.

Rachel Birt, whose older brother, Troy Dummond, succumbed to cancer as a teenager in 1989, appreciated there was a place to go where others comprehend the family struggles with illness and loss. She knows the feelings of a sister who lost a brother, but recognized another aspect from attending with her three-year-old.

“As a mother, now, I can only imagine what these people are feeling inside,” she said.

“I was shedding tears, during the ceremony, for other people. Of course I miss my brother, but it was imagining what it might be like losing my own child,” that overwhelmed, she admitted.