If only the world had more people like Ed Grennan. What a beautiful story.
He’s a trucker who travels down the Alaska Highway each week from Whitehorse to Fort Nelson then back, and on each trip he’d pass the spot where Chynna and Lucas were killed.
It bothered him to see no trace of the people who died there. He thought of his daughter, gone 20 years now. He thought of Chynna and Lucas and their family. He couldn’t let the spot sit empty.
One morning he put a flower arrangement in the 18-wheeler and started a makeshift memorial. Each time he’d pass, he’d bring something to add. A local television station did a story on him, and soon he connected with Chynna’s family and Lucas’s family and started personalizing it. He put sunflowers, her favorite flower, on top of a stake that holds the Australian flag. The family that owns the ranch where Lucas worked dropped off his old work boots. Now, passers-by bring things, mostly flowers, but sometimes handwritten notes and signs.
Before one of his runs, he sent Sheila a message to tell her he was leaving Fort Nelson. He said he’d let her know when he made it to the memorial in four or five hours. “I’ll be saying a prayer,” he said. “And if you say a prayer then, too, then we’ll be praying for her at the same time.”
“It just looks so beautiful, in every photo,” Sheila Deese tells me, flipping through the pictures from Grennan. It’s a beautiful place for a memorial, Grennan figures.
He contacted the Fort Nelson First Nation, the native people who’ve inhabited the land for thousands of years and told them he hoped the memorial would heal the “badness in the land,” brought on by the killers.
He worries about the bison trampling it, or the bears eating some of it. But for now, it remains undisturbed.
People come from hundreds of miles away just to visit. Others slam on the brakes after passing it. One day recently, Grennan parked and watched another trucker pull onto the shoulder and walk toward it.
The trucker stared down at the photos of Chynna and Lucas, flanked by the Australian flag and the U.S. flag and the boots. Grennan, whose daughter would be in her early 40s by now, kept watching the man, until he heard a sound. There in the quiet of northern British Columbia on the eve of autumn, the season when the tourists leave and nights grow long, the other trucker started humming “Amazing Grace,” before breaking down into tears, surrounded by mountains and clovers and wildflowers.
The world knows Chynna Deese because of how she died. Now her family wants to make sure we remember how she lived.
