The Healing Quilt Mural at 20 West Hastings, Vancouver

The Healing Quilt: Blanketing Our Lost Loved Ones went up on the west wall of 20 West Hastings Street in 2017, a thunderbird spread across the top of the building and a giant star blanket below it. Across the colour, in plain white letters: “There’s no one to care if you do not care.”

It sounds like a line written for an overdose memorial. It wasn't.

Downtown Eastside poet and activist Bud Osborn was saying it at least twenty years earlier. In the 1997 documentary Down Here, he talks about community in unusually practical terms. Care for one another. Care for those least able to care for themselves. Care that actually requires doing something. Then comes the sentence that eventually wound up on this wall.

The timing is grimly circular. In 1997, the Downtown Eastside was already in a public-health emergency. Osborn helped plant 1,000 white crosses in Oppenheimer Park for drug users who had died across British Columbia, then helped organize what became the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users. Two decades later, with fentanyl killing people in the same neighbourhood, his words were back on Hastings Street in letters big enough to read from down the block.

The pictures on the wall are personal too. Sharifah Marsden designed the star blanket, which PHS's Patrick Smith said represented Tracey Morrison, the Ojibwe harm-reduction activist and president of the Western Aboriginal Harm Reduction Society who died shortly before the mural was painted. Corey Larocque designed the thunderbird using a crest connected to his adopted family in Alert Bay and dedicated it to a chief lost to fentanyl. Jerry Whitehead helped bring the pieces together. The lower part of the mural was deliberately left for people to add names, photographs and messages for their own dead.

And there was another story happening directly below it.

When this photograph was taken in 2018, the mural faced the open land at 58 West Hastings, a former tent-city site, urban farm and long-running battleground over social housing. A new building was already being planned there. One of the City's design conditions actually asked its architects to find a way of carrying something of the Healing Quilt into what came next.

For the moment, though, there was still the wall, the open lot and Osborn's sentence hanging over both.