ARTICLE #114) Two years of aguish

Sunday, March 30, 2008
Two years of aguish
Kamloops This Week by Melissa Lampman

It’s been two years since Jessie Foster disappeared. That’s 104 weeks, 731 days and 17,544 hours.

For Glendene Grant of Kamloops, each second without her daughter has been torture — but she is also fierce in her determination to find Jessie and bring her home.

March 29 marks two years since Jessie’s daily phone calls, text messages and e-mails from Las Vegas to her family in Canada abruptly stopped — and there are still no clues as to where the then-21-year-old could be after being lured by her boyfriend into the Nevada sex trade in May 2005.

“As time goes on, we get stronger,” Grant said of the family.

“If I was ever going to stop before I found Jessie, then I should never have even started.

“That would be like starting a puzzle that you knew you would never get to finish. But I think when you do start it, you just keep going and you don’t care if you only get one piece a week, one piece a month — there’s just something that keeps you going, even though you knew when you started there was a good chance it was going to be hard.

“If I was going to give up, I should have just started my mourning process two years ago and be well into it today,” she said.

“I chose not to and, therefore, it’s not a matter of do I want to keep going, it’s a matter of I have to keep going.

“I can’t let Jessie’s name, story, face or picture not be thought about or talked about for 24 hours and some people may want to call it an obsession, I call it a job to a degree.”

Grant is still firm in her belief her daughter was kidnapped and is being held against her will as part of a human-trafficking ring.

To emotionally and physically cope, Grant said she has developed two personas — one to handle the investigation aspects, the other to deal with losing her daughter.

“If every time I tried to pull some information about Jessie I broke down, I would be nowhere,” she said of her tougher side.

“But then there’s the mommy side, where I can’t hold back the tears and I think about Jessie as a little kid carrying firewood and burping and graduating and laughing.

“And those I keep a little separate from each other because I need to be able to do both and I can’t do that if I’m crying all the time.”