A touching story about Kristin Gurholt from someone who remembers.
“[...] But there is a footnote. It is provided by a letter from a person who knew the victim a long time ago, a long way away. The letter provides no evidence that will help the major crimes division in its investigation but it provides a middle for a story that only had an ending.
The writer of the letter asks that her name not be used because “it contributes nothing to what is intended as a memorium to a victim of a society to which I belong, and for which I must share responsibility.”
The preface to the memorium states: “This is about someone I knew when she was a young girl, thousands of miles and light-years away from her premature end in an apparently uncaring city.
As a child I lived for a while in the area where she was killed and I used to walk its streets with little fear, loving their friendly character. Now I am alienated by them as others must be and wonder if we can still care enough about what happens in them to do something, instead of cocooning ourselves in comfortable indifference.”
The rest of the letter is a memory and a memorial:
“Twenty years ago while living in the Maritimes, I went to a piano recital with my young daughter, one of many students undergoing this ritual ordeal in the community. The event was held in a high school auditorium, and attended mainly by friends and relatives of the participants, who ranged from six to 16 years in age.
The audience was kept entertained, if not always by the display of musical ability, at least by the self-conscious behaviour of the performers parading up to the platform, but after two hours of sitting on hard, wooden chairs, it was audibly restless. Those whose turns were over squirmed in their best clothes, paying little heed to what was happening on stage, while a few still left waiting to play whispered nervously with reassuring mothers. I doubt that many of us were prepared for what was about to take place.
The music registered before anything else, as its force brought quiet to the hall. It was one of those obscure pieces music teachers cherish, apparently composed only to challenge the technical skills of promising young musicians. Invested now with a strange kind of fury at the hands of a girl in her mid-teens, it became something more than just an exercise in discipline. It carried us relentlessly along with it, until a victorious finale finally broke our thrall.
I redeemed that the release of tension brought me close to tears and, judging form the applause which followed a moment of awe-filled silence, others clearly shared the excitement. Then the casually dressed girl who had caused it strolled away from the piano with a remote look on her face, probably unaware of the spine-tingling sensation she had created in one or more of her listeners.
The program didn’t end with this unexpected revelation of talent, but I have forgotten the rest of it. What stays in my mind now is the life Kristin Gurholt put into her music that day, when she jolted an unsuspecting audience out of its apathy and made it feel again.”
The letter ends there. But this we can add to the file of Kristin Gurholt, who died naked and beaten and mostly alone:
Once she was young and alive. Once she created music and experienced approval.
And someone remembers."
November 20, 1981 (page 3 of 146). (1981, Nov 20). The Vancouver Sun (1973-1983)
