Nathalie Provost, a survivor of the École Polytechnique shooting and a Member of Parliament spoke on CPAC last week about the tragedy in Tumbler Ridge. Here is as best a translation I can do.
How does a trauma like this shatter our feeling of security that we so often take for granted?
It is an enormous distress. We don’t understand, we understand nothing, we lose a little bit of… I call it a great loss of bearings.
I was 23 years old, and it was accompanied by a great loss of innocence. The horror in my school were things that happened elsewhere, in countries that I never thought I would visit. So when that horror shows up in my life, in my school, in my class, it made no sense to the point that in the first few days in the hospital, I asked to see psychiatrists because I thought, I was going to go crazy. How was I going to start over?
Everyone has to live through that distress. Parents will say to themselves, “But what did we do wrong? What happened? Why?”
It’s very hard. It’s very, very hard. Everyone must be appalled.
Precisely because this tragedy that happened in Tumbler Ridge took place in a school, a high school, a place that is supposed to promote safety, learning, and development.
This school forms its own little community with only 160 students in a town of about 2,400 inhabitants. I imagine that the community of Tumbler Ridge will experience what École Polytechnique experienced. We were a school. It’s a similar scale. So it’s going to be extremely upsetting for that town. In these small towns and institutions, it is like a living organism, composed of human beings.
When it happened to me, I felt like I was losing my bearings. And it’s very hard for the community to find those bearings again. How do they rebuild?
And at the same time—and this is what I tried to do in 1989 when I spoke after the events—it’s important to return to and recreate the feeling of community, of family. In any case, as a victim, that’s the thing I needed most. That’s why I went back to school quite quickly. It did me good and I urge the families, the mayor, the elected officials, to do everything possible to recreate the feeling of community despite the rupture that has been created today.
The survivors, all the families, the entire community, in essence, they will all have to deal with this trauma and this grief for years, even decades.
What will need to be done will evolve. Right now, I think they need delicacy, understanding, and intimacy. It’s hard to experience a grief like that. It’s hard, it hurts. They are broken now and so we want to know, we want to watch, we want to have a lot of information but at the same time the community, the families, they need discretion, they need intimacy, they need to first receive the information and then absorb it, and it’s extremely delicate because we want to see, to understand. We want to help, but we all have to be very very careful.
There were photographers who took quite intimate photos of the Polytechnique events. It caused deep wounds for families over many years. We are in a world of immediacy. We want to know right away. And there are a lot of people who like to comment. I know there are people who comment when we don’t have the complete information. I urge everyone to be very gentle, respectful, and discreet in the short term. That’s what they need right now.
They don’t need 22 analysts. And we don’t know each of the stories and each story is unique. Each family has its own story. Making generalizations will serve no purpose. In any case, not in the short term. Really, discretion, gentleness, protecting their privacy, is fundamental.
And don’t forget all those who saw, so there are survivors who saw horrible images, there are teachers, there are first responders. Those who are just going to go there to clean up, imagine what they are going to see. When I think back to Polytechnique, I am so grateful for all those who rebuilt.
We will have to find ways to pay special attention to the community and see how it will recover. They are experiencing a heartbreaking event where there is a lot of hatred, there is a lot of separation and polarization.
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.
