How forgiveness brought 2 strangers together after a deadly crash in Saskatchewan

After a drunk driving crash wiped out an entire family near Saskatoon in January 2016, two strangers spent many days in the same way. They both sat in the dark, rarely eating, burning with anger toward the same woman — the drunk driver.

The two men didn't know each other. At the time, they didn't want to.

Chad Mierau, then 37, had lost his "four favourite people on the planet" in the crash: his little sister Chanda Van de Vorst, 33, her husband Jordan, 34, and their two children Kamryn, 5, and Miguire, 2.

Spencer Michel, then 24, felt he had lost his mother, Catherine McKay, who drove with a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit, then blew through a stop sign and killed the Van de Vorst family.

McKay pleaded guilty in June 2016 to four counts of impaired driving causing death and was sentenced to nine years in prison. She served four years in a healing lodge and is on day parole.

Today, the two men have found solace in their surprising friendship and a shared belief in the power of forgiveness. It's something neither of them could have predicted during those dark days.

Mierau was in a "grief fog" for months after his sister and her family died, he said. He struggled to get out of bed or get dressed and forgot simple tasks like picking up his kids from school.

"Going days without eating because you just forget, or you don't think about it, or you don't care," he said.

The businessman from Watrous, Sask., 120 kilometres southeast of Saskatoon, felt consumed by grief over the loss of his family and by rage toward the drunk driver.

He said he knew instinctively that something had to change.

"How am I able to release this thing off of my shoulders?" he remembers asking himself. "It's a heavy weight."

Meanwhile Michel, McKay's son, was struggling, too.

After the crash, he was hit by a tsunami of vitriol toward his family on social media.

"There was death threats sent to me … people threatening my life, my children's lives, wishing that we would be in a car accident and die," he said.