Mrs. Gloria Hooper, left, and Christopher Holopina.Handout
Every year on Remembrance Day, Gloria Hooper lays a wreath in Portage la Prairie to honour all those who have given their lives for Canada. Every Bastille Day, she lays a wreath at the cenotaph in her hometown of St. Claude, Man. The name of her son Chris is engraved on the monument.
“He always wanted to be in the military,” Ms. Hooper says.
Sapper Chris Holopina, a combat engineer in the Canadian Army, was killed on July 4, 1996, while on duty during Canada’s peacekeeping mission in Bosnia. While on his way to help rescue a group of British soldiers stranded in a mine field, the armoured vehicle he was travelling in tried to avoid an accident on the road and fell down a ravine, rolling over and killing him.
This month, Ms. Hooper will represent all the mothers who have lost a son or daughter serving in Canada’s Armed Forces as she lays a wreath at the National War Memorial in Ottawa on Remembrance Day in her role as this year’s National Silver Cross Mother, an honour given by the Royal Canadian Legion. Although she knows that everyone has their own feelings about military service, Ms. Hooper says she simply wants to represent “just the feeling of having a child gone.”
Born on Oct. 5, 1973, in Russell, Man., Sapper Holopina always dreamed of joining the Army, either as part of the artillery or as an engineer, or sapper in military parlance. After graduating from high school, he joined the reserves as a teenager and later enlisted in Portage la Prairie. He became a member of 2nd Combat Engineer Regiment, based in Petawawa, Ont.
He experienced two tours of duty abroad as a reservist, first in Cyprus in 1992 and again in Croatia in 1993. While on leave he loved to travel, visiting Greece and France. As soon as he returned home he was eager to go back out on another tour, his family says.
Besides loving to travel, Sapper Holopina was also a prankster – the whole family was.
“We liked to play jokes on each other,” says Ashley Zuk, Sapper Holopina’s sister.
Her brother was always asking for underwear while on deployment, Ms. Zuk says.
Ms. Hooper found a pair of glow-in-the-dark underwear in a novelty store, took it out of its packing and sent it to him wrapped up with several other pairs of regular underwear.
“One of the first nights he wore them everyone started laughing because they just saw these glow-in-the-dark hearts walking to the bathroom when he got up in the middle of the night,” Ms. Zuk says.
More than anything, though, he was driven to helping people. When he was serving in Bosnia, seeing how children there had so little, he organized a toy and clothing drive.
Ms. Hooper arranged to have a donation box at a local school and a store in town. She’d take the donations and ship them to him.
“He always wanted to help,” Ms. Hooper says.
After Sapper Holopina’s death, the Portage la Prairie Armoury renamed its lounge the “Holopina Lounge” and dedicated a wall to him. A lake in northern Manitoba was also named for him, an honour bestowed on the day of his funeral.
After his death, Ms. Hooper was awarded the Memorial Cross, better known as the Silver Cross, an honour given to mothers and widows of Canadian soldiers who have died during active duty.
Ms. Hooper, 74, is nervous about travelling to Ottawa.
“It’s bigger and there’s so many people,” she says. But, she adds, “It’s an honour.”
Remembrance Day is an emotional one for the family, as it is for all those who have lost a loved one, Ms. Zuk says, but her brother will always be remembered as someone who was dedicated to helping others.
“He died doing what he loved,” Ms. Zuk says. “He was a soldier through and through.” Their mother, Ms. Zuk says, was always proud of him.
Ms. Hooper hopes that on Remembrance Day Canadians reflect on what it means to serve, to dedicate yourself to helping others the way her son did.
“I want them to learn what it is,” she says of service, however we might define it. “People should at least help.”
Dave McGinn