Wilma Derksen labels herself a writer, coach/therapist, and an “accidental wanderer,” among other things, but she says that she is likely best known as a “mother of a murdered child.”
Derksen, who now resides in Winkler, is the mother of Candace Derksen, the 13-year-old girl whose story has shocked and disheartened the public across the country (and beyond it) since 1985.
Candace vanished on the way home from school in Winnipeg one day in November, and her body was recovered approximately 7 weeks after her disappearance.
For Derksen, after experiencing every parent’s very worst nightmare, she and her husband, Cliff, took a route forward that requires a great deal of strength from anyone who chooses it: Forgiveness.
This topic is the subject of her latest book, Impossible: Forgiveness to the Power of Five, which, years in the making, she labels as her “last wisdom to everybody.”
The book provides a “conceptual framework” for forgiveness from someone who has chosen to forgive an impossible act.
It also poses the challenging question of what forgiveness is and whether it’s even possible to achieve.
‘My daughter was murdered, too’
Derksen has been developing her role as a “forgiveness practitioner” for decades.
One might wonder how the bereaved mother arrived at this concept.
It began with an unknown person at the door on an unthinkable night.
“I just remember, our daughter was murdered .... When her body was found, we just went into huge trauma. Our friends came over that day, and everybody was there, and we identified her body, and then a man came to the door that night,” she says.
“He was a visitor, a stranger, and he said, ‘I've come to tell you what to expect. My daughter was murdered, too.’”
Derksen says that she and her husband invited the person in because they wanted to know what lay ahead in their new circumstances.
“We were curious because we were so frightened, so traumatized,” she says. “After two hours of talking and [hearing the man] describe everything in detail, his traumatic life, we then went to [our bedroom], and that's where we chose.”
Derksen says that when the pair approached their bed, they couldn’t get into it.
“It’s quite common with parents of murdered children that they can't go to sleep, and there it was, all the trauma on our bed, and so then Cliff and I, both simultaneously, almost, said, ‘We're going to forgive,’ because that's the only thing we knew,” she says.
“The trauma left the bed, and we slept .... It was just one of those God-given moments where we relied on what we knew.”
The press conference
Derksen says the epiphany that would shape her future as an author, but more importantly, her future as a parent grappling with tragedy, was private, but it soon became public.
At a press conference in the following days, when the pair was asked their attitude toward the person who murdered their child, they had the same unified response they reached in their home.
“Cliff and I both had only one word in our minds,” she says. “We said, ‘Oh, we're going to forgive.’ It went viral.”
Derksen says the pair’s response “hit every newspaper,” and they also encountered a follow-up question: “Why?”
40 years later, Derksen still strives to answer this question through her writing, which she says she still needs as a means to process the immense loss to her family.
Learning to cope through faith
Although Derksen decided to adopt a policy of forgiveness, it remains something she continues to explore, question, and choose.
It’s not easy.
One thing that has been consistent for Derksen is her faith, which has been a factor since the night Candace didn’t make it home all those years ago.
Derksen says once police officers had left the house and everyone had gone to sleep on the night of the disappearance, she was alone to think in the middle of the night.
“In some ways, I had to go to the worst-case scenario. I thought, ‘What if she's murdered? What if she's going to come home tomorrow?’" she recalls.
“I was talking to my God. Then I heard the voice: ‘I, too, am a parent of a murdered child.’ I knew that God was there, and that He understood .... That was when I realized that God was there, even if the worst happened to me.”
Derksen believes that there are types of forgiveness that can occur without faith (and she notes that she addresses these in her new book), but in her view, when it comes to impossible scenarios of forgiveness, a higher power is necessary.
“It looks different for me than for anyone else, but I had to go to my God,” she says.
Darkness and beauty
In Derksen’s view, although not everyone will be asked to show the level of forgiveness that she has, it’s common in life to need to make the decision to forgive.
As time goes on, Derksen says that there have been other occasions for forgiveness in her own life, including the loss of her husband, Cliff, and the barriers and treatment that come from aging.
“There’s a lot to forgive,” she says.
One quality of the concept that Derksen has uncovered and includes in her book is that forgiving does not mean "being walked over." In her view, the act does not mean accepting the offending actions.
The author's realizations have stemmed from her willingness to confront both the good and the bad on her journey. She says over the years, she has researched grief groups and shared meals with those who have committed crimes to understand her own circumstances.
Although her path has inevitably met with some darkness along the way, Derksen says she has also seen beauty in it.
“It doesn't have to be perfect,” she says. “We don't have to arrive at the perfect solution. We're not ever over things, but [the question is how] to take the wise choice through,” she says.
A legacy
In the end, Derksen says there are two main purposes for Impossible: Forgiveness to the Power of Five, a book she suspects she wrote for her grandchildren.
The author says that she wanted to write “a sort of legacy book” that could tell both her life story and her “findings” over the years, which she says weren’t easy to come by.
“I wanted to capture [them] because I had so many questions and nobody was able to tell me [the answers],” she says.
Derksen’s latest book is available online here.
With files from Jayme Giesbrecht