My first late friends
2011/08/15
Many fond memories of my time at the farm in Manitoba have to do with the friends I made in the area. Two of them were Mark and Sonia, siblings born a year apart, from the nearby Olynyk family – close neighbors at 1.5 miles away. They were also very close to my age. Sadly, this is my only surviving photo of them, taken from the attic window of our house:
Cropped:
Left to right, Mark, Sonia and me.
They were good kids – Mark was earnest and good-hearted, and Sonia had an uncommon intelligence that she mostly hid but you could see in her eyes. We often went to each others’ places for play dates, but most often they came over to our place, because primitive though it was, it was a better place for us to socialize.
I lost touch with them when we moved away to Toronto, and I don’t recall if we re-stablished any contact during the brief period we returned in 1992. A number of years after we again left and moved to Calgary, I heard that they had both passed away. Sonia had needed a liver transplant (cause unknown, but I doubt she was a drinker even in her adult form) and her body rejected the transplanted organ, killing her. Mark fell off a roof he was working on, and suffocated as a result of the severe asthma attack that ensued.
On today’s return trip, I learned from a neighbor that almost the entire Olynyk family had been wiped out one way or another. Their older sister Laureen had died, though I don’t recall the cause of death now. Their father Peter fell down a well, was unable to climb out and died of exposure. The remainder I don’t know about, but apparently only two of the youngest children survive and are living in Alberta.
I was given the location of their graves – within sight of their home – and went to visit them one last time. The cemetary:
Turns out they all were married before their deaths. Not surprising; being single in your late 20s is unheard of here.
Sonia and Laureen’s graves:
Mark’s grave is just off to the right. His headstone:
Grave marking technology has advanced. Thanks to their headstones, I now have more recent photos of them both. Sonia:
And Mark and his wife Victoria, whom I never met:
When I received the news of their deaths in Calgary, it didn’t really have much impact on me; I had been out of touch with them for most of the last ten years already. It was sad, yes, but it didn’t upset me all that much – I feel kind of crummy saying that, but I’ll trust that you know what I mean.
Standing there in this little country graveyard, knowing their bodies were just a few feet away from me under the dirt, was a bit different. It was a little creepy actually, but it also reminded me much more strongly of how vibrant and alive and physically real they were when I knew them, and of how easy it is to associate self with embodiment. I have to remind myself that the bodies buried here are empty and useless now; it was the information content therein that made them the people they were, and the sad thing is that that information is now irretrievably lost. All I can do now is try to hold onto what remaining memories I have of them.
Occasion to once again curse our greatest enemy, death.
On a brighter note, the other neighboring family I hung out with, the Melnyks, are doing fine. My old playmate Joey is married, working in Brandon and buying a house in Forrest. One of his elder sisters, Jackie, is working at a flax plant south of Angusville and has three boys and the other, Wanda, is working at the nursing home in Russell. Joey’s older brother, Wally, is still running their farm and is married and has three daughters. I talked to Wally on the phone and his wife and eldest daughter in person, and visited Jackie briefly at work. Will try to establish contact with Joey before moving on.
