Hey Nostradamus! By Douglas Coupland

Linda tells me she has written to you, and in so doing she has shamed me. How can I thank you for your
bravery on that horrible morning? You saved the lives of so many children without thought of your own
safety. I drove down to your house earlier today, but it had been sold quite a while ago. There was no
forwarding address for you, but I'm hoping Canada Post will track down your family with this letter.
Linda hasn't been herself since October 4. How could she be? I don't know what she wrote in her letter,
but please take into account that we've both been running on empty for months now. That I didn't
recognize the media's smear job of your fine nature is a stain I will take to the grave.
I asked if she had described the funeral for you, and she hadn't. So I will. It was Tuesday, the eleventh
of October, a week after the shooting. I had thought the week would allow things to cool down, but
instead things snowballed, and have never stopped snowballing.
We opted to have a graveside ceremony only. This was a tactical decision made by Linda and me. The
people from Youth Alive! wanted to run the show, with no regard for our wishes. We figured they'd be
having events of their own soon enough (we were right) and we wanted something that was entirely ours,
and more intimate. This was a mistake.
For traffic and crowd control reasons, the police had asked that we not have a cortege drive to the
cemetery, but that we meet the coffin there. We thought they were overreacting, but we went along with
their suggestion: another bad idea, as it turned out. By two in the afternoon there were hundreds of cars
parked on the sides of the road around the cemetery. The RCMP escorted us in, and the cemetery was
overrun with (the papers reported) about two thousand people. My skin crawled. That's a cliché, but
now I know what it means - like a slug crawling down the small of your back.
There was a large white-and-blue-striped canvas awning over Cheryl's grave area, and that was good,
but what made me furious was that the Youth Alive! people had brought hundreds of black felt markers,
and passed them out to everybody, and by the time we got there, Cheryl's casket was densely covered
both with teenagers, and with the sorts of things teenagers write. They were treating my daughter's casket
like a yearbook. Maybe I was mad because I'd chosen the casket in Cheryl's favorite shade of white,
slightly pearly, and I'd been so pleased. Linda was upset about the felt-penning, too, but we bowed to
the inevitable. I suppose it's cheerful, really, to be buried with the goodwill of your friends all around you.
Linda and I were offered pens, but we declined.
Before Cheryl's funeral, Linda, Chris and I had attended two other funerals. I had thought they would
prepare us for Cheryl's, but no, there's nothing that prepares you for the funeral of your own child. The
minister was Pastor Fields. He did a fine job of the service, if I may say so, even if it was a bit too
preachy for my taste.
I'm still unsure what Cheryl found in religion, but I'd always thought her conversion was too extreme, and
so did Linda. Linda says you've had a falling out with your religious friends, and even though they work
like Trojans on the Cheryl Anway Trust, I'm with you all the way in thinking that they're slightly creepy.
And it was a shock how quickly and how powerfully they denounced you. It's because I listened to them,
and not my own heart, that I'm sending you a pathetic letter so long after the fact, instead of having
invited you over to our home ages ago.
This letter has become difficult to write, and it's through no fault of yours, Jason. You know what it is? I
wish I'd taken one of those pens and written something on Cheryl's coffin. Why didn't I? What foolish
pride prevented me from doing something so innocent and loving? Just one more thing to take to the
grave with me. Sometimes it feels as if everything in life is just something we haul into the grave. Cheryl's
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