Esther42 is a recently retired teacher in about her mid-fifties and the mother of four grown children. She first contacted me in July 2005, after seeing the front page
Globe and Mail story about the Woodlands cemetery. Esther happened to see it on the
ferry as she was returning home to Vancouver Island after a visit to Vancouver. While growing up, Esther had been told by her mother, Iris, about an uncle who had been institutionalized at Essondale and never returned to the family home. He died at Essondale in 1952, but the family had never learned where he was buried. Esther felt some regret that her mother had died in 2001 still not knowing Gerald’s burial place:
Mom had mentioned to me a few times … in the years before she died, you know: “I’d like to find Gerald’s grave. I feel like I should find his grave,” and then…[she passed away.] So I just feel I didn’t help her enough. She didn’t drive … and at the time, I was busy with kids, you know – I mean, a whole family – and it’s hard to do those kinds of things. And I really didn’t have any clue where you’d begin looking for something like that, right? But I do regret that I didn’t do that with her.
When she read the Globe story, Esther felt that this might be her opportunity to fulfil her mother’s wish. As I was named in the article, she emailed me at BCACL with some details about her uncle, and I was able to confirm quickly that Gerald was buried in the Woodlands cemetery, that so far no gravestone had been found with his name on it, and that his name would be included on the engraved plaques soon to be installed in the memorial garden. I also gave her further information about how to request her uncle’s patient file from the BC Archives.
42 All names in this chapter are pseudonyms: Esther – participant; Iris – Esther’s mother; Eddie – Esther’s father. Gerald – Esther’s uncle (her mother’s older brother).
Upon leaving BCACL, I let Esther know my research plans, and I contacted her again in 2012 to reintroduce myself and invite her to participate in my research.
6.2. Research activities
It was not until June of 2014, when I was heading to Vancouver Island for a conference, that I was able to arrange to stop in to meet Esther on my way. Following her instructions, I eventually found her rural home, tucked away on a wooded property and surrounded by a number of outbuildings. Esther answered the door saying, “You must be Pat. You found us!” We went through a hall to a spacious open kitchen, living, and dining area at the back of the house, finished in natural wood, where she introduced me to her husband who was watching a Stanley Cup playoff hockey game on TV. Large
windows looked out onto a vegetable garden and a chicken coop, surrounded by tall trees.
I sat on a stool at the kitchen counter as Esther made tea and began to talk right away about her Uncle Gerald. I interrupted to ask if she would mind if I taped our
conversation. She agreed, and after tea was made, we continued at her dining table, which was covered with various files and papers, and baskets of laundry. Esther was a public school teacher about to retire and was reviewing school projects along with teachers’ union materials. A protracted teachers’ strike was making her exit from teaching rather tumultuous, and she was heading to Victoria early the next morning for a teachers’ march on the legislature.
From amongst these papers, Esther pulled over a thick file containing the patient records of her uncle Gerald. As Esther recalled about our earlier contact in 2005:
I emailed you in 2006 [sic] when I saw the article in the paper, and you replied and said “Yes he was buried at Woodlands,” but he had been a patient at Essondale, and Essondale didn’t have a cemetery, so he was buried at Woodlands. And then you said, “You know that you can go to the archives and retrieve any information,” and since Victoria’s not that far, duh!
And you know, my Mom and Dad even lived here for a couple of years, back when my boys were little – the late eighties. And had we known all of that then, I’m sure she would’ve… But she would never have found his
grave because of all that went on there, right? Because he had an
unmarked grave. So there’s no way she would’ve known where his grave was.
Shortly after our email exchange Esther had obtained Gerald’s patient file from the BC Archives without difficulty. She had shared the information with some of her relatives, but her closest aunt (one of four of Gerald’s sisters still living) had not wanted to view the file, as she felt it would be too painful:
My aunt, when I told her I had this and asked was she interested in
seeing any of it, she said, “Esther, I would never want to read through any of that and relive those painful memories.” So I’ve had a couple of my siblings and a couple of cousins who’ve looked at this, but none of my aunts were interested in the pain of seeing it.
Unlike many other participants in the research, Esther had not done genealogy research on the family: “There are people in the family that have done some of that, but I haven’t really – I mean I’m interested in what I learn about it, but it’s not a love.” However, her son had done a life story project about Esther’s father, through which Esther had learned more about how her parents met and about her dad’s relationship with his brother-in-law Gerald.