Artist reflects on grief during the holidays at Winnipeg’s Memory Tree
Posted December 20, 2024 4:44 pm.
Last Updated December 21, 2024 11:25 am.
As many people struggle with grief during the holiday season, Winnipeg’s Memory Tree — which has been put up by Palliative Manitoba for the past 37 years — has been filling up with cards written to loved ones who have since passed.
“Talking about grief is a way to lessen the effect of it. To not feel alone, to be able to feel connected to others in their world,” Wayne Sandler, Palliative Manitoba’s interim executive director, told CityNews at the lighting of the tree at the end of November.
RELATED: Memory Tree returns to help Manitobans in mourning during holidays
Luna Zuniga, an artist in Winnipeg, lost her father at this time last year.
“I find that it still feels really fresh. Like, it feels like it just happened yesterday. It also was my father’s favourite holiday — no one loved Christmas like my father,” she said.
“My father and I shared a very unusual connection with Christmas. I find that I’m really pensive and reflective and thinking about just the last year of my time with my dad because it was probably the most time that I’ve spent with him.”
She said as her father was nearing the end of his life, she found it hard to see him going through physical changes.
“The last few months with my dad were really hard because I could see that he had lost a lot of weight, but I also saw a really quiet strength as he was approaching the end of his life. And I think he knew it, though he never said it.”
Zuniga said the relationship she had with her father was complex, describing his presence in her life as ‘being in and out’ of it. Despite the hardships, she visited the Memory Tree at the St. Vital Centre Friday and wrote a letter to her father.
“I’m a little emotional,” she said after she placed it on the Memory Tree. “I didn’t expect that. In a good way, not necessarily in a bad way. This is just a really cool way to connect with my father who passed away shortly before Christmas last year.”

Zuniga said she’s been reflecting on the last day she saw him, right before he passed. She had made it a point to call him ‘Dad’ — something she hadn’t done since she was a child.
There was quite a big of baggage between my father and I, but I was trying to set aside because I was trying to help him through this last phase of his life. … He’s talking about how this Christmas is going to be, and I said, ‘I gotta go, Dad.’
“And he said, ‘Oh, you called me Dad.’ And I said, ‘Can I call you tomorrow?’ And he’s like, ‘Yes, we’ll talk tomorrow.’ I said, ‘Goodbye, Papa.’ In Spanish, it’s father. And he said, ‘Goodbye, my love.’ And that was the last words he said to me.”
Since the tree was lit, Palliative Manitoba said it’s seen a steady stream of people coming to write and hang their cards. Last week, cards were moved from the bottom half of the tree to the top half.
Palliative Manitoba says it’s to “ensure space for others to place their memories for the remainder of the campaign.” Adding, “We’re just happy to provide people a safe space to honour and remember their loved ones.”
And that’s exactly what Zuniga found upon her first visit.
“I know that I felt like there was a lot of things that I didn’t say, I wanted to say. I didn’t tell my dad that I missed him because he hadn’t gone, but I wish I could tell him. And I do in my own way, but I think that having card — I was looking forward to writing the card. I knew I was going to write a card to him, so there’s that little connection that I still have with him,” said Zuniga.
“This is something I’m gonna do from now on, just so that I can connect with my father. I still wanna remain connected to him. There’s still so much I want him to know about. To share with him.”

Zuna said she’s learned a lot about the different shades of grief through the relationship she had with her father.
“The grief wasn’t just a grand gesture. It didn’t look like I always saw it in the movies and it could co-exist with love, with happiness. I would never think that grief and happiness could share the table, but they do,” she said. “I found that in the last few months with my father. Since my father’s passing, I found that grief, forgiveness, passion, reminiscing through all of those things, it’s possible to do it all at once.”
Zuniga says she’ll be back next year, and every year after that, to share her life with her father through Christmas cards.
“I’d like to think that he’s able to see it.”
People can stop by the Memory Tree for a free card to write a message to their loved ones, until the end of business hours on December 24th.