Carnival of Soul

Sometimes it takes the wide-eyed, unfettered wisdom of a child to best encapsulate something.

Early into dutifully helping set up a memorial for his aunt, Jane Schreur, a 31-year-old Mason City woman who went missing around May 2019, Joseph Johnson, not yet 10, gets at why this is even happening.

“A lot of people are going to be here because a lot of people miss her,” Johnson said. The next two hours or so bore that out.

Under a bridge on North Illinois Avenue, on a rocky and uneven bank of the Winnebago River, near where her partial remains were found on July 18, at least two-dozen members of Jane’s family did a whole lot of missing her. At times that manifested as the kind of raw, unvarnished crying that would reduce anyone within earshot of it to a puddle.

“This one right here,” Jane’s mother Cindy says holding up a photo of Parker, one of Jane’s three sons, “he wants his mommy and we can’t give him to her.” Every line is said through tears, pockmarked with unexplainable loss. Right before that, one of Jane’s cousins, Krystal Ficken, stepped forward to say that Jane wasn’t without blemish but was beautiful all the same. “She had a problem connecting with family but she loved us,” Ficken cried out. 

At other turns, the missing was quieter but no less potent: A younger cousin, Americus, walked as far downstream as possible to release a solitary heart-shaped balloon into the evening wind. No one else on the curlicue of rocks, just her alone with memories of Jane.

But so much of the grieving process is communal, and so it was during Jane’s vigil.

Perhaps the clearest evidence of those connections came when the family brought out “I’ll Be Missing You.” Originally an ode to the departed Notorious B.I.G. that’s since become a fixture in times of mourning, “I’ll Be Missing You” played as Jane’s younger sister Sueann and their mom huddled around the semicircle of photos and flowers they’d carefully arranged. As the words Cindy sang became overwhelmed by grief, Sueann put her in a tender bear hug. To almost take up the torch, other family came forth to sing the words of the chorus:

“Every step I take, every move I make, every single day, every time I pray, I’ll be missin’ you. Thinkin’ of the day when you went away, what a life to take, what a bond to break I’ll be missin’ you.”

Not everything was as somber as that, though. As Cindy made clear throughout the proceedings: “This isn’t her funeral.” There wasn’t a pastor reading Psalm 23:4, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…,” in between hymns exhaled by a church organ. 

When it came time to light the sky lanterns and release them toward the heavens, the music shifted to “Jealous of the Angels.” As those flames gradually disappeared from sight, Joseph couldn’t help but comment, “This is beautiful.”

“Beautiful”: A word that several family members used to describe Jane herself. Before the event started, Sueann referred to Jane as “a beautiful soul.” In Sueann’s eyes, Jane was the kind of person who was plenty strong when the moment called for it and tender when that was needed. Shifting from being serious as a nurse’s aid to goofing off with family members came easy. 

“She loved teasing with her nephew Joseph,” Sueann reflected. She also loved going to the fairgrounds and catching all kinds of musical acts, country artists were a staple. Those sorts of moments loomed large in her life.

So, too, did her kids. Sueann couldn’t emphasize enough how much Jane cared for them. Nor could Cindy. “She loved them to death,” Cindy said about Jane’s relationship with her children.

Though her children weren’t there, the kind of multi-faceted love Jane’s family said she had was a constant throughout the night. It shone bright when two cousins pranked each other with actual frogs and feathers pretending to be spiders and it shone when her aunt Tina Holder, clad in a “Hakuna Matata” shirt, gazed up and said “You’re going to look after everybody down here from up there.” 

One thing that Krystal noted while watching a family offering to Jane float down river is that the totem was “just going with the current.” 

When it comes to currents, swimming against them isn’t an option. It’s an exercise that ends in exhaustion and frustration. Once people are in a current, they can’t magically hop back out. Making the current dissipate is an impossibility. The best that anyone can do is to embrace the current. Float or swim with it. There will be raging waters, for sure, but eventually, there will be peace.