On 10th August 2008, we arrived in Canada, ready to start our new lives in ‘Inlet View’, our home in the ocean-side recreational community of Furry Creek on the Sea-to-Sky highway. We had discovered Furry Creek while on a visit to Vancouver in 2007; Erin was a mere 3 months old. In between my stints of writing up the final stages of my Doctoral thesis we explored the Vancouver property market. A chance newspaper advert for a west-coast modern home had us visit the Furry Creek community and although our endeavours to buy the house came to naught, we were introduced to the rural lifestyle we’d enjoyed in the UK. 6 months later Mike assumed a teaching position in Vancouver, a year in advance of the rest of the family. However, he had little luck in replacing our beautiful albeit tiny English cottage in Epping Forest north-east of London when he searched in the town of West Vancouver where his school is located. So he decided to return to Furry Creek in his search for a home. Furry Creek homes are newer and larger than West Vancouver the renovator-delight homes that are also much more expensive. There he found a house that offered expansive accommodation, magnificent views over the Howe Sound as well as an aspect over the golf course. Before we knew it we were the proud owners of a 4200 square foot home, about 4 times of Potters Farm Cottage, our British home.
A house is an anthropomorphic manifestation of the people who live in it – it starts to breathe with their same energy, the walls resounding with laughter, tears, dichotomy, challenge and joy. It is a shell within which is housed a hospitable haven of conversation, good food and communion. It takes on a persona of either comfort, bold statements of distinctive character or it oozes with the warmth of family toss and tumble. A house breeds memories of the ages and stages of infants becoming toddlers, becoming young children and then older children. Through renovations a home gains sophistication, efficiencies and aesthetic prowess. Over the years Inlet View embodied snatches of all of these qualities. Play mats were subsumed by wooden floors; plastic push scooters were replaced by push bikes with training wheels, were replaced by small bikes, and then large. Squeals of joy while playing ‘toilet tag’ around the house were usurped by grunts of intent as Cameron transferred his allegiance to electronic Mario games in our family room. Erin in contrast occupied herself on her next bout of destruction around the house or by donning an astonishing range of my clothes from my dressing room as part of her daily dress-up routine. Unpalatable pureed foods transformed in to textured dinners exploding with colour, flavor and interest as the children graduated from high chairs to bar stools for our daily meals together.
The maple leaves changed colour: surf and sand sports morphed in to snow sports. Pre-school became kindergarten became the early grades. And layer upon layer of memories were being carefully nurtured through the seasons: the new Canadian traditions of Remembrance Day, Canadian Thanksgiving, Victoria Day and Canada Day. Our lives transformed as we raised our young family; we shifted our allegiance to focusing solely on our careers to the heady wonders of watching our children grow, presided over by our beautiful home. The large landscaped garden - replete with waterfall and ponds - and the flat asphalted driveway, an unusual commodity in the Sea-to-Sky homes which hug the mountain-side - allowed for imaginative hide-and-seek games, playtime with wheels, and ample space to throw or kick a ball. But while the community of Furry Creek offered an unprecedented safe environment (no imperative for locked doors, security fences or armed response as in SA); kilometers of golf paths on which to learn to ride a bike; a 10km parkland of garden in the winter when the golf course was closed and proximity to a secluded and unspoiled beach a 10 minute walk from our front door, it also offered the paradoxical challenge of distance from conveniences, friends, work and services. Everything was a 15-minute north or 25-minute south drive away; we only had a newspaper stand and golf course restaurant on our doorstep. We knew our neighbours, and were connected with our community without living in others’ pockets: but it came at a cost. Play-dates were challenging; we spent an inordinate amount of time in the car; friends thought twice about coming to visit us as not only was it far out, the Sea–to–Sky highway became dangerous after the village Lion’s Bay and had claimed a number of lives. In our second year in Canada, I assumed a Headship that required a daily 3-hour commute. We put the house on the market, and when I changed jobs to work from home, we took it off the market again. Each day we struggled with the paradox of exquisite beauty and a warm community spirit with the inconvenience of living out of town. We looked at an astonishing number of homes, all offering depressing accommodation for even more depressing price-tags. We’d return to Furry Creek all the more committed to make it work. We must have marketed our home at least 5 times over 8 years.
But as the children’s extra-curricular activities became more pervasive, the timings became more challenging; over the weekends we’d leave at 8.30am only to return late in the evening to save on repeated long drives home. We became experts at ‘maximum performance’, rationalizing our errands and activities. We were all exhausted. It was really, really time to move. 2014 was a magnificent year: the children were old enough to be responsible, we had happy holidays in Mexico, Eastern Canada and the USA, in Idaho with my American Rotary Exchange families, a short break to Winthrop, USA for our wedding anniversary and to Hong Kong for a 10 day break just 2 weeks before Christmas. My transportation logistics had dissipated with Cameron’s move to Mike’s school. In a crystalised moment I remember saying to Mike in November of 2014 that I had finally reached an equilibrium of happiness and contentment in all aspects of my life after our challenging trans-Atlantic move. All we needed to do now was just to find a new home and lose our commute.
A month later our equilibrium and lives were shattered. In the aftermath of Erin’s accident I remember arriving home in the early afternoon and at the bottom of the stairs of our home, before going upstairs to our main living area, I had a conscious moment of realization. This was the start of our lives without our daughter. It was a moment of crossing the Rubicon, of shifting paradigms to life ‘after Erin’. And our home changed, too. There were no scribbles of chalk for fancily constructed games of mutated hopscotch on the driveway any more. Erin’s pony-tail no longer bobbed above the bushes as she negotiated a new terrifying handless somersault on the trampoline; the pink baseball glove and bat resided silently in the corner of the garage and Erin’s bike and skis remained inert in their stands. Her usually ‘scrumbly’ duvet now permanently covered the bed with the 4 corners neatly square, her bed uncannily unoccupied as we snuggled Cameron to bed. Her sparkling letters of her name (each letter carefully chosen from a delightful Leavenworth gift shop, a Swiss lookalike American village we’d visited on another wedding anniversary get-away) remained on the door of the children’s room. Taking the letters down would be like evicting Erin and her presence from her bedroom and our home – but they were a daily heart-wrenching reminder of our loss. Our evening meals, always shared together, assumed a new tenor – the crazy girl banter, the innocence and joy of a younger child, the exuberance were all gone and replaced by eerily adult conversation. And most significantly, the early morning chatter that filled our home as Cameron and Erin entertained each other on awakening had vanished. We wrestled with the need to hold on to the memories encapsulated in our home and community: my walks and bike rides with the children to Furry Creek beach when the sparkling Vancouver weather shined; the Christmas community party in our home with the children passing the snacks around; the new year’s parties heralding in the incoming year; the countless meals with friends; the memorialized damage to our home inflicted by a young experimental girl (chips in the wall from roller-skating indoors; mascara on our dressing room wall; baby oil poured on to the carpet; eye shadow inexpertly applied to her eyes and my make-up drawer…).
But now we also recognized the need to move on and establish a different home with new memories for what was to become our reconfigured family. We needed a home that offered greater convenience and accessibility to future friends for our twins. And we have an almost-teenaged son who longs to catch the bus to baseball games on his own or to visit his friends and the beach without relying on his parents for wheels.
And so a year after Erin’s accident, just a year after we had removed our house from the market, we listed Inlet View once again. It was a challenging time to list; while Furry Creek homes had made only modest appreciation, the rest of Vancouver’s homes’ values were soaring crazily and precariously. We had visited at least 75 open houses in person over the previous year and Mike had sifted through well over 500 online; nothing approximated our Furry Creek house and we returned from our search time and time again thinking we would never find a suitable home. We had also discovered over the years that selling our home was challenging – it was too big for retiring people downsizing, and too far out for families to embrace the commute and isolation.
And then one week before the birth of our twins we saw a home we all instantly loved. And five days before their birth, after years of off-and-on trying, we sold our home. Four days before we learned that our bid (against 9 other buyers) was successful. And on Friday 22nd April we welcomed two new little people in to our family. In one week our lives were transformed; it seemed like a collection of whirlwind miracles.
Significantly the sellers of our home had viewed our desire to be in the community where Erin lost her life sympathetically and accepted our bid ahead of others. It seemed very much like Erin’s gift to our family – her blessing for a new chapter of our lives. Two months later we moved in to our new home in Lion’s Bay. It had been immaculately renovated, decorated and maintained and was move-in ready. We had a team of helpers in the form of the Lion’s Bay walkers (many who had been on that fateful walk 18 months previously) who helped us unpack. By the end of the day the majority of our boxes were unpacked. Mike’s sister, Frances who visited from South Africa, helped us unpack most of the remaining ones. As our first gracious and helpful visitor in our new home, she initiated what we hope to be many visits from friends and family from across the globe. A week later we left – pretty exhausted - for a month’s extensive USA road trip!
As we embrace our new home without our sparkling, spunky daughter we are deeply conscious that she will not be with us to make new memories - for the baton has been passed now to Madeleine and Sebastian. It was overwhelmingly symbolic that The Vancouver Sun decided to run the feature article written about our family and our journey on the front page of the newspaper on the very day that we moved: a new turn to our lives with the birth of our twins after an appalling tragedy. Erin is pervasive forever in our and our communities’ hearts; however we have the choice to move forward or remain wedged in the tragedy. And it is a choice – a paradoxical, complicated and heart-wrenching choice that is sensitively captured by the reporter in the Vancouver Sun on-line article and interview here
We stand as a reconfigured family in a new home looking to the future. And as our new home assumes the energy of our reconstituted family’s lives we long to be able to once again experience and offer others the hospitality, the love, the joy and the laughter we have enjoyed in our previous homes. It is because of Erin that we were successful in securing this home after an eight-year search. It is indeed her legacy and blessing for our family’s future life. We see this new home as Erin’s gift to us and our growing family. Thank you, Erin!
Connect with us: PO Box 453, Lion’s Bay, BC, V0N2E0
Phone: 604 360 5717
A house is an anthropomorphic manifestation of the people who live in it – it starts to breathe with their same energy, the walls resounding with laughter, tears, dichotomy, challenge and joy. It is a shell within which is housed a hospitable haven of conversation, good food and communion. It takes on a persona of either comfort, bold statements of distinctive character or it oozes with the warmth of family toss and tumble. A house breeds memories of the ages and stages of infants becoming toddlers, becoming young children and then older children. Through renovations a home gains sophistication, efficiencies and aesthetic prowess. Over the years Inlet View embodied snatches of all of these qualities. Play mats were subsumed by wooden floors; plastic push scooters were replaced by push bikes with training wheels, were replaced by small bikes, and then large. Squeals of joy while playing ‘toilet tag’ around the house were usurped by grunts of intent as Cameron transferred his allegiance to electronic Mario games in our family room. Erin in contrast occupied herself on her next bout of destruction around the house or by donning an astonishing range of my clothes from my dressing room as part of her daily dress-up routine. Unpalatable pureed foods transformed in to textured dinners exploding with colour, flavor and interest as the children graduated from high chairs to bar stools for our daily meals together.
The maple leaves changed colour: surf and sand sports morphed in to snow sports. Pre-school became kindergarten became the early grades. And layer upon layer of memories were being carefully nurtured through the seasons: the new Canadian traditions of Remembrance Day, Canadian Thanksgiving, Victoria Day and Canada Day. Our lives transformed as we raised our young family; we shifted our allegiance to focusing solely on our careers to the heady wonders of watching our children grow, presided over by our beautiful home. The large landscaped garden - replete with waterfall and ponds - and the flat asphalted driveway, an unusual commodity in the Sea-to-Sky homes which hug the mountain-side - allowed for imaginative hide-and-seek games, playtime with wheels, and ample space to throw or kick a ball. But while the community of Furry Creek offered an unprecedented safe environment (no imperative for locked doors, security fences or armed response as in SA); kilometers of golf paths on which to learn to ride a bike; a 10km parkland of garden in the winter when the golf course was closed and proximity to a secluded and unspoiled beach a 10 minute walk from our front door, it also offered the paradoxical challenge of distance from conveniences, friends, work and services. Everything was a 15-minute north or 25-minute south drive away; we only had a newspaper stand and golf course restaurant on our doorstep. We knew our neighbours, and were connected with our community without living in others’ pockets: but it came at a cost. Play-dates were challenging; we spent an inordinate amount of time in the car; friends thought twice about coming to visit us as not only was it far out, the Sea–to–Sky highway became dangerous after the village Lion’s Bay and had claimed a number of lives. In our second year in Canada, I assumed a Headship that required a daily 3-hour commute. We put the house on the market, and when I changed jobs to work from home, we took it off the market again. Each day we struggled with the paradox of exquisite beauty and a warm community spirit with the inconvenience of living out of town. We looked at an astonishing number of homes, all offering depressing accommodation for even more depressing price-tags. We’d return to Furry Creek all the more committed to make it work. We must have marketed our home at least 5 times over 8 years.
But as the children’s extra-curricular activities became more pervasive, the timings became more challenging; over the weekends we’d leave at 8.30am only to return late in the evening to save on repeated long drives home. We became experts at ‘maximum performance’, rationalizing our errands and activities. We were all exhausted. It was really, really time to move. 2014 was a magnificent year: the children were old enough to be responsible, we had happy holidays in Mexico, Eastern Canada and the USA, in Idaho with my American Rotary Exchange families, a short break to Winthrop, USA for our wedding anniversary and to Hong Kong for a 10 day break just 2 weeks before Christmas. My transportation logistics had dissipated with Cameron’s move to Mike’s school. In a crystalised moment I remember saying to Mike in November of 2014 that I had finally reached an equilibrium of happiness and contentment in all aspects of my life after our challenging trans-Atlantic move. All we needed to do now was just to find a new home and lose our commute.
A month later our equilibrium and lives were shattered. In the aftermath of Erin’s accident I remember arriving home in the early afternoon and at the bottom of the stairs of our home, before going upstairs to our main living area, I had a conscious moment of realization. This was the start of our lives without our daughter. It was a moment of crossing the Rubicon, of shifting paradigms to life ‘after Erin’. And our home changed, too. There were no scribbles of chalk for fancily constructed games of mutated hopscotch on the driveway any more. Erin’s pony-tail no longer bobbed above the bushes as she negotiated a new terrifying handless somersault on the trampoline; the pink baseball glove and bat resided silently in the corner of the garage and Erin’s bike and skis remained inert in their stands. Her usually ‘scrumbly’ duvet now permanently covered the bed with the 4 corners neatly square, her bed uncannily unoccupied as we snuggled Cameron to bed. Her sparkling letters of her name (each letter carefully chosen from a delightful Leavenworth gift shop, a Swiss lookalike American village we’d visited on another wedding anniversary get-away) remained on the door of the children’s room. Taking the letters down would be like evicting Erin and her presence from her bedroom and our home – but they were a daily heart-wrenching reminder of our loss. Our evening meals, always shared together, assumed a new tenor – the crazy girl banter, the innocence and joy of a younger child, the exuberance were all gone and replaced by eerily adult conversation. And most significantly, the early morning chatter that filled our home as Cameron and Erin entertained each other on awakening had vanished. We wrestled with the need to hold on to the memories encapsulated in our home and community: my walks and bike rides with the children to Furry Creek beach when the sparkling Vancouver weather shined; the Christmas community party in our home with the children passing the snacks around; the new year’s parties heralding in the incoming year; the countless meals with friends; the memorialized damage to our home inflicted by a young experimental girl (chips in the wall from roller-skating indoors; mascara on our dressing room wall; baby oil poured on to the carpet; eye shadow inexpertly applied to her eyes and my make-up drawer…).
But now we also recognized the need to move on and establish a different home with new memories for what was to become our reconfigured family. We needed a home that offered greater convenience and accessibility to future friends for our twins. And we have an almost-teenaged son who longs to catch the bus to baseball games on his own or to visit his friends and the beach without relying on his parents for wheels.
And so a year after Erin’s accident, just a year after we had removed our house from the market, we listed Inlet View once again. It was a challenging time to list; while Furry Creek homes had made only modest appreciation, the rest of Vancouver’s homes’ values were soaring crazily and precariously. We had visited at least 75 open houses in person over the previous year and Mike had sifted through well over 500 online; nothing approximated our Furry Creek house and we returned from our search time and time again thinking we would never find a suitable home. We had also discovered over the years that selling our home was challenging – it was too big for retiring people downsizing, and too far out for families to embrace the commute and isolation.
And then one week before the birth of our twins we saw a home we all instantly loved. And five days before their birth, after years of off-and-on trying, we sold our home. Four days before we learned that our bid (against 9 other buyers) was successful. And on Friday 22nd April we welcomed two new little people in to our family. In one week our lives were transformed; it seemed like a collection of whirlwind miracles.
Significantly the sellers of our home had viewed our desire to be in the community where Erin lost her life sympathetically and accepted our bid ahead of others. It seemed very much like Erin’s gift to our family – her blessing for a new chapter of our lives. Two months later we moved in to our new home in Lion’s Bay. It had been immaculately renovated, decorated and maintained and was move-in ready. We had a team of helpers in the form of the Lion’s Bay walkers (many who had been on that fateful walk 18 months previously) who helped us unpack. By the end of the day the majority of our boxes were unpacked. Mike’s sister, Frances who visited from South Africa, helped us unpack most of the remaining ones. As our first gracious and helpful visitor in our new home, she initiated what we hope to be many visits from friends and family from across the globe. A week later we left – pretty exhausted - for a month’s extensive USA road trip!
As we embrace our new home without our sparkling, spunky daughter we are deeply conscious that she will not be with us to make new memories - for the baton has been passed now to Madeleine and Sebastian. It was overwhelmingly symbolic that The Vancouver Sun decided to run the feature article written about our family and our journey on the front page of the newspaper on the very day that we moved: a new turn to our lives with the birth of our twins after an appalling tragedy. Erin is pervasive forever in our and our communities’ hearts; however we have the choice to move forward or remain wedged in the tragedy. And it is a choice – a paradoxical, complicated and heart-wrenching choice that is sensitively captured by the reporter in the Vancouver Sun on-line article and interview here
We stand as a reconfigured family in a new home looking to the future. And as our new home assumes the energy of our reconstituted family’s lives we long to be able to once again experience and offer others the hospitality, the love, the joy and the laughter we have enjoyed in our previous homes. It is because of Erin that we were successful in securing this home after an eight-year search. It is indeed her legacy and blessing for our family’s future life. We see this new home as Erin’s gift to us and our growing family. Thank you, Erin!
Connect with us: PO Box 453, Lion’s Bay, BC, V0N2E0
Phone: 604 360 5717