Wander the far reaches of Glenwood and you’ll come across a whole new corner, a memorial garden for Miranda Frum. It is an unexpectedly beautiful and serene space, midway up Macaulay Mountain, surrounded by trees, and enclosed with low walls that offer a place to sit.

A gently coloured, rammed-earth headstone marks the resting place of David and Danielle Frum’s eldest daughter, who died last year at the age of 32, following complications from a brain tumor. Alongside is a bronze sculpture of her Cavalier spaniel, Ringo, waiting patiently for his mistress.

Ringo — immortalized in an Atlantic essay by David, “Miranda’s Last Gift,” about losing his eldest daughter and inheriting her dog — was the final touch in Danielle’s creation of a garden for her daughter, her family, and for Glenwood Cemetery.

His presence suggests a life in full, youthful flow, unexpectedly arrested. There could be a martini glass on the headstone and it would not seem out of place.

 “It’s a place to gather with her,” Danielle said one summer afternoon as we sat together there. Full of newly planted wildflowers, the garden is studded with stones bearing messages of love and remembrance.

The Frums convened a formal unveiling of the memorial for friends and family from near and far in June, followed by a lively reception at the Merrill House.

And they marked what would have been Miranda’s 34th birthday on July 26 with an extended family gathering for late afternoon cocktails.

“We imagined it as a place for anyone who passed by to feel welcomed — a contemplative space to be enjoyed by all. Miranda was gifted at making friends everywhere she went. It continues that spirit. We hope people find her — and Ringo.”

It is easy to see where Miranda came by her gift for friendship. Danielle is both warm and strikingly funny — and frank about how devastating the loss is. While we have only recently met — the stepdaughter of Toronto Sun founder Peter Worthington, she loves reading the local newspapers — it feels as though we are old friends. I suspect she makes many feel that way.

During the summer months, Danielle visits Miranda’s garden two or three times a week, Ringo in tow. “It keeps me close to her.” The year and a half since Miranda died have been the most difficult of her life. “When you have a baby, a child, you are never, ever expecting to see their name carved on a gravestone,” she says sadly.

The absence is still a shock. “I’m still surprised she’s not here, every day.”

The sheer pain of the loss was a shock as well. “I never knew, had never known, such pain,” she says.

The support of those who had already crossed the invisible line into the land of the afflicted was invaluable.

“We discovered a world that was already very well populated. There were many other families lined up at the gates of the alternate universe those who suffer terrible loss suddenly find themselves in.”

Everyone in the family, David, Danielle, and their two younger children, Nathaniel and Beatrice, had to grapple with “the horrible place we were suddenly all living in.”

“The friends we have here are very, very special to us.
They are friends no matter what. Here, people rush to embrace
and help you. It’s very special. I think a lot of the people who this happens to,
not all of them have that kind of community, one that literally supports you,
helps you up, helps you stand.”

—Danielle Crittenden Frum

“We were all in the same horrible boat,” she says of the first months after Miranda’s passing. It’s still very hard to get used to. “A jagged piece has been blown out of our lives. Our family will never be what it was.”

Danielle found company and consolation in corresponding with other mothers who have lost children. Describing the grief has been an esssential part of coming to terms with it. A memoir of her experience, “Dispatches from Grief: A Mother’s Journey Through the Unthinkable,” comes out in February, on the second anniversary of Miranda’s death.

“There are a lot of grief books,” she says dryly. C.S. Lewis’s On Grief, which he wrote when his wife died, was a model.

Also offering great consolation were family friends, many of whom are in PEC, where the Frums have been coming every summer since Danielle was first pregnant with Miranda, in 1990.

 “There is something so unique about this community. We are connected to the people here not by profession, but by shared interests, by feelings.

“The friends we have here are very, very special to us. They are friends no matter what. Here, people rush to embrace and help you. It’s very special. I think a lot of the people who this happens to, not all of them have that kind of community, one that literally supports you, helps you up, helps you stand.”

Miranda’s garden will be an important space for the Frums for all of their lives. The family is  working with Glenwood  to  turn the site into the first section of what could become a Jewish Cemetery. 

As the couple prepared to leave the County to return to Washington, D.C. on Labour Day weekend, Danielle left a big vase of flowers with coloured fall foliage at the gravesite, meant to last the weeks to Thanksgiving. I have no doubt there will be many willing hands keeping the flowers fresh until their return.  

A Village Effort
Miranda’s garden was designed by Ben O’Brien, who founded Wild by Design. “We met him when he was just starting out. He had put an ad in The Wellington Times. I knew he was going to be a big talent,” says Danielle. “He was one of the first, if not the first, practitioners of ‘wilding’ and using native plants in the County.” 

Ben turned what once were fallow farm fields, soaked in chemicals, on the Frum’s PEC property into what Danielle calls, “a magic landscape of grasses and trails.”

Jeffrey Forrest, founder of Stacklab, a Canadian architect and designer based in Toronto, planned the hardscape. “He created an elegant, modern, and peaceful arrangement where we can come together and hang out with Miranda.”

Graham Cavalier, of Picton-based Aerecura Sustainable Builders, built the hardscape out of rammed earth, and made the headstone. “This material allowed us to embed stones and rocks collected from all over the world from places that were significant to Miranda. There are stones from the front garden of her Brooklyn Heights apartment, which she loved, and where she died.”

“We were able to tint the rammed earth in 
different colors. There is a slash of blue at the bottom, 
representing the lake. The colors then fade to a green and gray — the County fields and sky.” 
Beautiful stones can be seen at the back of the headstone,
along with a Euro Danielle found in Miranda’s purse.
“We tried to bring meaning to every aspect of her gravesite.”