The Icelandic Canadian - 01.04.2009, Síða 40

82
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
Vol. 62 #2
not now remember. But somehow they
tracked her down to North Bend, a small
scattered village across the Fraser River
from Boston Bar, reached by an aerial
tramway.
Disheveled, filthy, straw sticking out
of her hair like a scarecrow, they found
Anna living in Mrs. Walker’s barn, a refuge
when her own shack had burned down one
night and she appeared in her nightgown,
asking for help.
She was given a room in the barn,
where she set up a primitive camp, without
power or water. She continued to live there
for several months after Barbara and Kari
located her.
Barbara tells of this time:
“We visited Anna there several
times...On one of our trips we brought
Anna back to Vancouver to see an ophthal-
mologist as her eyes were failing. While
there, I offered to wash Anna’s jeans, and
found a huge wad in her pocket which
turned out to be all her old age pension
cheques from several years - uncashed. I
also washed Anna’s hair while she was
staying with us and could understand how
beautiful her hair must have been when she
was young. It still showed golden lights.”
Anna’s eyesight diminished and she
eventually became blind. The ophthalmol-
ogist put it down to her years of living in
deprivation.
They referred the uncashed pension
cheques to the government, which re-
issued them. These Kari put into a bank
account for Anna, in a Boston Bar bank.
Barbara again: “The next time we
drove up to see Anna I suggested that we
could take her over to the bank to get some
money and she told me that she had taken
all her money out of there. When I asked
why she replied, “Well, Eddie was going to
get it.” “Eddie?” I asked and Anna
answered, “Eddie, the Prince of Wales, of
course.” So, when the bulk of Anna’s
money was (later) returned from the gov-
ernment, Kari established a Trust Account
for her in Vancouver, and he became the
trustee”
It wasn’t long before someone laid a
complaint with the British Columbia
Health Commission - an old woman was
seen to be living in a barn in North Bend.
Before she could be evicted, Barbara and
Kari moved Anna to a seniors care centre in
Hope. Sigurbjorg wrote gratefully to them:
Now in better circumstances, the
Angel of the Waterfront re-emerged.
Barbara gave Anna a sweater for
Christmas...next time she visited, someone
else was wearing it. They gave her a radio
for Anna loved to sing. It, too, she gave
away. Kari paid Anna’s bills from the Trust
Fund and gave her spending money. Anna
tucked all the money under the doors of
the other residents.
Two years later her mental status had
severely deteriorated. She’d be up at 5:00
a.m. banging pots around in the kitchen,
claiming that she was getting breakfast for
the threshing gang. She insisted that her
father had been visiting her and she’d given
him her cane. She introduced Kari to other
residents as her father. And she continued
to wander, once loading all her possessions
into a wheel barrow and getting as far as
the bus depot before she was nabbed. It
came to a point where the home couldn’t
keep her any longer, and Kari, at his wits’
end, turned the matter of Anna’s care over
to the Public Trustee.
From 1981 to 1986, they continued to
visit Anna in a different care home, this
time in Coquitlam. She still loved to sing
her Icelandic songs and tell stories of her
pioneer childhood. Sigurbjorg, in a letter to
Kari and Barbara writes, “and what if she
imagines that we whom she knew long ago
are close to her? If that can be a comfort to
her and make her better satisfied, that is, I
think, all to the good.”
Sigurbjorg herself died in 1985, but
Kari and Barbara continued to visit and
care for Anna, moving her to a care home
in Victoria when they themselves moved
there.
Kari died in 1993, and Barbara carried
on that care alone, until Anna’s death in
1996. Remarkable dedication, but not yet at
an end. For two further years Barbara tried
to locate Anna’s family, for there was the
matter of money left in the Trust Fund, as
well as Anna’s cremated remains. What to
do with them? Letters went back and forth
for two years - to Iceland, to Wynyard, to