By Andrea Hoff
Published: March 13, 2016
Published: March 13, 2016
IT WAS a few days after New Year 1990, when Zanna Fidler’s 11-month-old daughter Lauren nearly drowned. “She did drown,” Zanna explains. “She stopped breathing and it was my husband Chris who brought her back to life.”
As British citizens, Zanna and her family were living in Hong Kong. Her husband Chris was working for an airline company out of Lantau and Zanna was home with their two children Lauren and Hayden, both under the age of two. It was a Sunday and the family was together enjoying a neighbourhood gathering. “I remember I was talking to a man I knew and in my hand I held a small shovel,” recounts Zanna. “I suddenly dropped the shovel and had the strangest sensation that something was wrong with Lauren.” Within seconds Chris and Zanna were calling out and searching the area where the children had been playing. Spotting a tiny space in the fence around the above-ground pool, they raced towards the water. “We somehow leapt the eight-foot-high fence and there she was—floating, her skin as blue as can be, face down in the pool. Chris hauled her out and performed CPR. She started breathing again.” Within minutes, Lauren was raced to the hospital. Because she had been so young, Lauren’s ‘diving reflex’, a natural response causing babies to hold their breath underwater, stopped her from inhaling while submerged. “She had swallowed half the pool,” says Zanna, “but she hadn’t breathed in a drop. I still remember watching her in the IC unit at the hospital the following day, happily bouncing up and down on her little bed, completely unaware of all the wires and monitors still connected to her. And I thought—yes, sometimes this life gives you miracles.”
“It is so important to spend time being grateful for what he have,” Zanna reflects over breakfast in the Crabapple Café in Brackendale. Every day Zanna spends time reflecting on her gratitude. “When I wake up in Squamish, I look around me at this beautiful valley and all I’ve been given and I feel immense gratitude.” At the centre of her gratitude is Zanna’s family: her daughter Lauren, now a 27-year-old actress living in Vancouver, her son Hayden and her husband Chris. Zanna also feels profoundly grateful for living in Squamish. She moved here with her husband and son on December 5, 2015. “To me, Squamish is full of feminine energy and creative spirit. I had always imagined living in Canada and now moving here—this is the home I dreamed of having. This is the place I want to stay.”
Zanna remembers as a child being fascinated with images of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in their red uniforms astride tall horses. She watched every Western movie she could and envisioned that her life would one day take her to the West Coast of North America. However, it was through another kind of family hardship that finally brought her to discover Squamish as her home.
A year ago, Chris and Zanna were on the brink of a separation. After almost thirty-three years of marriage it was all somehow unravelling. She remembers the moment their paths took a very different turn. “I was at the lawyer’s office preparing to sign the documents that would end our marriage. And I couldn’t stop crying. I had the pen in my hand and was suddenly overwhelmed by the sensation deep within me, saying, ‘No, this is not what I want. This cannot be the end’.”
Zanna left the office without signing the documents and later that day, she met with Chris. They walked together, through the Pacific Spirit Forest, speaking candidly about their relationship, their lives and their future. “And we found something in that walk—we found a way forward—together.”
Where their future would go together though was not so simple. They had already sold their home of three years in Vancouver and were independently looking for a new place to live. Zanna had settled her sights on Squamish. “It was during a brilliant day in July 2015 when I rode my motorcycle up the Sea to Sky highway. I arrived in Squamish and just knew—this is where I want to live.” Zanna recounts a feeling that is hard to put into words when she arrived in Squamish that day in the summer. “The town resonated with me. It was like we were on the same frequency. I had the sense that I was coming home. There is a reason they call this valley ‘the Mother of the Wind’.” Zanna did not know Chris and Hayden had been touring around Squamish and were also considering a move here. “Our city life wasn’t working for us, in more ways than one we were falling apart. When Chris told me he was thinking of moving to Squamish, I knew that this could be a home for us—a home together.”
“I wake up with the sense that this place is a paradise. It is a place for dreams and for new beginnings,” she says. Zanna is a writer and is looking to develop her work here in Squamish and “to finally conquer [her] biggest desire (and fear)” of publishing her writing. Her life experiences have brought her much fodder for both poetry and prose. She is building connections with the community: spending time at the library, attending yoga classes and walking her dogs through the natural beauty surrounding the town. She is also working on developing her skills as a voice actor and storyteller. She speaks in poetic style about her greater purpose in Squamish—“I reflect upon the plaintive cry of the train whistle as it pierces my thoughts and realize there’s two reasons I’m alive in Squamish: to connect with other human beings and to endeavour.”