Joe Vanderweerd and his daughter Laura play Come Walk With Me during a performance in Morell in March 2023. Laura was killed in a road accident nine months later. (Submitted by Trish Vanderweerd) Trish Vanderweerd remembers the times when company would come, and her husband Joe and teenage daughter Laura would grab their guitars and play a special family song together.
Come Walk With Me was based on a poem about nature that Joe's sister, Emma Walsh, wrote in a Christmas card one year. Laura loved it, and set it to music. One night, her father recorded her singing it.
"I remember thinking, 'Why is he doing that?'" Trish Vanderweerd recalled. "But he was a proud daddy and he still is a proud daddy. And we're ever so grateful that he recorded a few other songs, and those are just memories.
We often play it and it's comforting." Tragically, Laura Vanderweerd died in a two-vehicle collision in December at the age of 18. Three other young people and the driver of the other vehicle also died in the crash, which left the entire province shaken and grieving for the families.
Roadside crosses painful but important reminder of Marshfield tragedy, victim's mother says About six weeks later, Joe Vanderweerd approached John B. Webster of the P.E.
I. band Fiddlers' Sons. Webster had lost his teenage son in a farming accident 23 years ago, and at first, he thought Vanderweerd might be looking for advice on how to deal with such a tragedy, he told Mainstreet P.
E.I. 's Matt Rainnie in an interv.