The mother of a 26-year-old motorcyclist who was severely injured in a collision last week was joined by family and friends for a smudge walk Thursday night.
Sharon Gionette held a bundle of sage while walking to the corner of Queen and Amber, the same place where her son, Robert Gionette, was involved in a horrific collision April 30 that resulted in the amputation of his arm.
“There's all kinds of bad energy over there — a lot of sorrow over there — and we're going to clean that all up so it's not going to be so traumatic,” she told SooToday, prior to an Anishinaabe ceremony held in her backyard.
“It's those emotions, those feelings, we want to get rid of them.”
Sharon drove by the scene on the day of the collision, but only noticed a white vehicle at the time.
Robert’s girlfriend messaged Sharon about three hours later and asked if Robert was there. When she phoned a second time, it was to tell Robert’s mother that the location tracking on his phone had stopped at Queen and Amber.
“I drove in there, and the cops were just yelling at me to get back in my car,” Sharon recalled. “Just tell me if it's my son, if he's alive or dead. Just tell me.”
Sharon remembers an officer telling her that her son was in the hospital.
“A nurse came out and told me he's been in surgery since they brought him there. A doctor came out shortly after that, and he just said that he had massive internal injuries — they had to remove his spleen,” she said.
She was later informed that Robert’s arm was severely damaged, and that staff at Sault Area Hospital sent requests to hospitals in both Sudbury and Toronto to see if there was any possibility of saving his arm.
Sharon was eventually told it was either her son’s arm — or his life.
“I was holding his hand and rubbing his head — I just said, 'OK baby, mama's here. Mama's here now. I'm not going anywhere, I'm going to take care of you,'” she recalled saying to her son once she was cleared to see him.
At one point, Robert told his mother that his late grandmother had visited him and told him that it wasn’t his time to die, and that he had to ‘go back.’
“When I was in the elevator, I was on my knees crying and begging Creator not to take my baby,” Sharon said.
“The last thing I said was, ‘Mama, please take care of our boy. Please take care of him,’ and they did — Creator gave me back my boy, and my mom took care of him.”
Robert was on life support for about 24 hours following the collision. By the third day, he was joking around about having just one arm.
“We have a very warped sense of humour — very dark — but I guess it's how we deal with trauma,” Sharon said.
Robert is making some progress, as he was able to stand up from his wheelchair a couple of days ago.
“His friends are non-stop coming to visit with him and giving him words of encouragement and really keeping his spirits up,” his mother said.
On Thursday, a small group of friends and family took part in a ceremony that was held in Sharon’s backyard prior to the smudge walk.
Danielle Fox-Moore is a friend of the family who organized the event, which saw many people holding what’s known as prayer ties with tobacco inside of them as the smudge walk proceeded to the scene of the collision.
“We acknowledged the happenings of that day and the harm that he was caused and we made these ties. In our culture, we speak to our tobacco,” she told SooToday on the way back from the scene of the collision, where some debris from the vehicles involved remains.
“We were speaking to our tobacco and making acknowledgements through that whole walk, and now we're going to let that go, because even though the city may have not properly cleaned up, we're cleaning up the energy that belongs to everything that wasn’t cleaned up.
“Now, we're going to go back to the sacred fire and everything we've told this tobacco, we're going to put it back into the fire and that will speak to Creator and let everything go.”
Sharon said several people in the east-end neighbourhood came running to the scene with towels and blankets following last week’s collision.
She said the outpouring of support from people in the Sault following the brutal collision that claimed her son's arm is nothing new for this community.
“That's what we do for each other,” she said. “If anything happens to anybody, our community gets together and supports them.”
Family and friends are planning to eventually launch a GoFundMe campaign in hopes of getting Robert a prosthetic arm.