B (12:10)
As Christmas approached, her family and friends took comfort in prayers for her safe return. There's still no word, and her disappearance is still a total mystery. I was very pleased with the attention we got. Our house became sort of a headquarters for all of the commotion that was happening. We had the psychics coming out and telling us their thoughts, and we had friends and prayers and prayer meetings. It had been seven weeks by this point, and we decided that even if Candace was dead or if she was kidnapped or whatever, we needed to continue. We had children and we had a life to support. So we decided that we were going to visit the police one more time. So we actually drove to the police station. But before we could lay out our suspicions, they kind of said, we need to talk to Cliff. And they put me in another room. And then Cliff came and talked to me and he said, you know what? They found Candace. And I said, this can't be. We're in the police station. They can't have found Candace. This is one of their Tricks. Sometimes they tricked people into talking. And so I didn't trust them. And then to realize that this time they found Candace. We went to the hospital to identify her body. And that was horrific because I remember walking into the room, she was so tiny. She was just so tiny. I thought she was always such a big personality. And here she was, so tiny. And the horror of what she had experienced was still written and etched on her face. And so we then cried, realized that she was really, truly gone, and went back home. There were people waiting for us at the house already. The media was there. We told them that we would have to have some time and that they'd have to wait for a few days. Our house was filled with people. They just came in and they just wrapped their arms around us as we grieved for Candice, that she would never come home. The relief that we'd found her, though, that we knew that she was okay, that she was in heaven. We comforted ourselves with those words. And the food just walked right through that door. There was Bush and Svaibach and Mennonite food, beautiful apple pie and cherry pies that were still warm. And so it was an up and down roller coaster of emotion to relief, to the grief. We could remember Candace the way she was. We didn't have to think that she was being assaulted or tortured or that kind of thing. We knew that she was okay. After a day of people just coming and going in our house, we were debriefing at the kitchen table when there was another knock on the door. And I just suspected that it would be somebody coming back for gloves or something they'd forgotten. But there was a stranger at the door. He was a tall man dressed in black. He introduced himself as a parent of a murdered child, too. And the word too sort of shocked me that now we're identifying with another people group, that we were parents of a murdered child. And then he said he'd come to tell us what to expect. So we invited him to the kitchen table and there we sat for two hours. He ate some of the pie, and he talked and talked and talked, and he told us that it had just destroyed his life. He told us about his daughter and the murder. And it was just a horrendous case that all of us knew about, and it had dominated the newspapers for a long time. So we recognized him from the media. He took out all the little black books that he was taking notes in about the trial and laid them all on the table. It really took a toll on him physically. He Was talking about his physical ailments. He took out all the pills and he laid them out on the table. He told us about how he was unable to concentrate, how he was unable to love his family, and how he was just consumed with anger and suspicion and just resentment. We just felt it. He just vibrated with the trauma. And then he said, I've even lost the memory of my daughter. I can't even remember her. Without thinking of all the trauma. He had every right to be angry. And actually, he did this a lot to a lot of the people that were experiencing trauma in the city. So that eventually the police even banned him from going to the people because they said that he was traumatizing the people. He had this mission in life to warn people that murder does traumatize, that it does take our lives away, and didn't have any solutions for it. He just wanted to tell us and to warn us. At one point, I remember looking at him and thinking, how can you do this to us? This is the worst thing that anybody could do to another person. Surely you know that you're traumatizing. We just couldn't stop paying attention to this wonderful man who was telling us and who cared, Even though his message was that of doom and gloom and desperation and eventual death. Like he really was saying that our lives were over. And I just was horrified. He left around 12 o' clock that night, and we sat in stunned silence for a while, and then we all went to bed. As we were just about to climb into bed, all of a sudden, Cliff and I stopped. We couldn't get into bed. There was something on our bed. It wasn't real, but it was imaginary, but it was a presence on our bed. We looked at each other and we both sensed that we didn't have the words for it. We were too stunned and too tired and too exhausted to even deal with this new thing. I've heard about this after. In many cases where the victims can't crawl into bed again and they will sleep in the living room. But we couldn't sleep in the living room. We couldn't sleep anywhere else. So we had to deal with this presence. And that's when Cliff and I just said, we'll forgive. And you know what? It was that simple word that actually removed the presence from the bed. It just hopped off. And so we actually climbed into bed after that and slept. And it was a miracle that we could actually do that. That was when we found out the real power of that word, that it can move trauma. It is a way of Us saying, no, we're not going to go that way. The trauma, I think, was the leftover presence of the man who'd come to visit us. And we said, no, we didn't want to go that way. We weren't going to follow his example of anger and hatred and all that. We were going to go another way. We didn't quite know what that all meant at that point. We didn't even know what forgiveness looked like in the face of murder and that kind of trauma. But we had just decided that we were going to forgive and we were going to move on. We lay down. I tried to close my eyes, and I opened them and I said, cliff, can you close your eyes? And he said, no, I can't. And I said, every time I close my eyes, I just see Candice's face, the horror still etched on her face, frozen there. And he said, me, too. I said, you know, let's think of scenes that we know where Candace was happy. Cliff was a photographer, so he had taken these beautiful videos of Candace running through leaves of her playing with kittens. We just started talking about all these scenes. And then slowly we fell asleep as we remembered her in happier times. And we actually slept that night. We woke up the next morning saying, we're going to forgive. We didn't know what that meant, but we were going to forgive. And that was the one word that we put all our hopes in, that this would bring us back to healing and normality.
