When grief came knocking—which it does, to you, to me, to everyone—Daniel wasn’t content to live automatically, doing the same thing over and over. He was ready to switch gears and take back his power.
As he put it, “Something so hard or tragic can happen that a person has to make a choice to continue being the same way, or make a change for the better.”
His story of loss began as a love story. He met Tracy when he was eighteen years old. Both indigenous Canadians, they were studying the same subjects—environmental science and indigenous studies—at university. Right away they became good conversationalists and good friends, talking for hours at a stretch, relaxed and happy in each other’s company.
But now Daniel reflects, “There was a lot we didn’t talk about that we probably should have.”
Daniel was twenty-five when they married, thirty when their son, Joseph, was born. They moved across the country to Tracy’s home province. That’s when things began to sour. She was thriving academically and professionally—she finished her master’s degree and started working on her doctorate, and was a respected environmental expert and sought-after consultant. But being back at home underscored all the reasons she’d left in the first place: rampant alcoholism and drug addiction in the community, as well as violence and deaths. And, though Daniel didn’t know it yet, she was again in proximity to tragic abuse that had occurred within her own family. She fell into a tailspin, often drinking and raging, and she and Daniel separated. Joseph was just two.
They did their best to coparent in a respectful way, sharing custody fifty-fifty, managing not to fight around their son. But Tracy’s life was growing more tumultuous. Her driver’s license was suspended, he presumes for drunk driving, and on several occasions when Daniel dropped Joseph off, he felt uneasy, a fleeting sense that she might be high. He confronted her about his concerns, and she said she was dealing with difficult personal issues, but had it under control.
Once, concerned for her welfare, Daniel left Joseph at home with a babysitter and went looking for her. He found her at a relative’s house, sleeping off a hangover. When she woke up, she seemed distraught. He sat on the bed with her. Sobbing, she revealed that when she was twelve she’d been sexually abused by members of her own family. At age eighteen, she’d confronted her parents, and her mother sat tightlipped and rigidly silent while her father threw it back in her face, blaming her for what had happened. Daniel was shocked. He knew she’d had it rough as a kid, that she and her siblings had been beaten. But he’d had no idea about the sexual abuse. It helped him understand how much she was hurting—and it ignited a new set of concerns. He told her, “From now on I can’t have Joseph around anyone who does that to a child. So that’s the new rule. No contact with your parents until this is brought out and talked about.” She agreed. But a month later she filed for divorce. And a year later she gave their son to her father to watch. When Daniel found out, he took her to court and earned full custody.
With Tracy’s blessing, Daniel moved to be closer to his family. They planned for Tracy to move, too, to be near Joseph and far away from the chaos of abuse and addiction at home. In the meantime, Daniel regularly drove Joseph to visit her, and she sometimes traveled to see them. She seemed a ghost of herself—deep shadows under her eyes, her body somehow lethargic yet agitated. But when Daniel expressed concern, she was dismissive, face taut and eyes vacant.
And then she went missing.
No one knows the exact day she disappeared. Some say she had been in the company of a drug dealer. Joseph was five the last time he saw his mother.
“It was shocking,” Daniel told me. “Mind-boggling. She was an accomplished woman. Her community looked to her for help in the environmental field. I’d always known her to be a great person. When I look back at it now, I guess all those things were lying buried, never dealt with, catching up.”
He’d been grieving already—for the loss of his best friend as a life partner, the loss of their marriage, the loss of his coparent. But now the grief was absolute—and ominous. Tracy was gone all of a sudden, and forever. No one would likely ever know why. She’d become one of countless missing and murdered indigenous women in the United States and Canada, where indigenous women face murder rates as much as ten times the national average.
Daniel felt like he was spinning through a revolving door, recounting all the ways he’d failed her—every hurtful thing he’d ever said or done or been a part of, all the ways he’d missed understanding just how alone and out of place she must have felt in the world. He was surprised to find that her disappearance stirred up his own older grief, things he didn’t realize were still festering inside, unhealed—the ways he hadn’t known or accepted himself as a child, the onslaught of racism he’d experienced in school, the years he’d spent hating himself and contemplating suicide, the trouble he’d always had communicating his desires and boundaries. He’d been taught to be tough, to carry on, isolate, shut down his feelings, all in the guise of moving forward and onward. It was the same now. Well-intentioned people told him to toughen up and be a man, that she was in a better place now, that God had a plan.
These things may be true. “But they don’t help you get the pain and turmoil
