OVERCOMING TRAGEDY
For the town’s youth, grief has been a formative experience of their lives. But many have drawn on the strength of community to move forward
Ludovic Théberge was a high school senior when a train carrying crude oil derailed and exploded in downtown Lac-Mégantic 5 years ago, killing 47 people and wiping out the town centre. Christopher Curtis examines how people banded together to move on.
When Ludovic Théberge tells people he’s from Lac-Mégantic, it elicits an uncomfortable question.
“They’ll ask you, ‘Did you lose someone?’ It’s the first thing they want to know,” said Théberge, a 20-year-old university student. “It’s normal, I guess. But once the answer is no, they’re just like ‘Ah, OK! You didn’t have to grieve.’
“I don’t think I had some great sense of loss, but you often wonder if you are grieving or if you have grieved. Have I been moving too fast, and was this too big an experience to understand?”
Théberge was a high school senior when a train carrying crude oil derailed and exploded in downtown Lac-Mégantic five years ago.
He may not have been close friends with any of the 47 people killed on July 6, 2013, but Théberge lived through something most teenagers will never have to. For youth in Lac-Mégantic, grief has been a formative experience of their lives.
A recent study examined the impact of the fatal train derailment on young people in Lac-Mégantic. Although it draws some stark conclusions, one of its authors says the overall message is a hopeful one.
Although 25 per cent of the children surveyed showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, the rate among adults was 50 per cent, according to Danielle Maltais, a humanities professor at Université du Québec à Chicoutimi.
“These kids are incredibly resilient, and the adults in their lives have done a great job at caring for them in an impossible situation,” Maltais said.
The study, however, does hint at a link between the tragedy and self-harming behaviour. Some 39 per cent of teenage respondents said they had suicidal thoughts in the last year — roughly twice the provincial average.
Twenty-one per cent of high school students seriously considered harming themselves. That’s three times higher than the Quebec average.
If they didn’t lose a parent or a loved one, the youth in Lac-Mégantic lost their town square — a place that contained memories of St-Jean Baptiste celebrations in the park or trips to the ice cream parlour.
What Théberge remembers from that summer is a sense of powerlessness. He was on his way to bed when the train careened off the tracks and levelled downtown.
“I saw the lights flicker all around the house. I thought, ‘Maybe there’s a storm,’ ” said Théberge, now a journalism student at Université du Québec à Montréal. “The next morning, at 7 a.m., my uncle called in a panic. He wanted to know if I was OK. I had no idea what had happened.”
Théberge stepped outside his parents’ home in Nantes — a neighbouring village — and saw plumes of black smoke waft above the valley.
That day, he was supposed to work a three-hour shift at the local McDonald’s. Instead, he worked nine hours without taking a break.
“Everyone did what they could to keep the town running in a crisis,” Théberge said. “You learn a lot about your friends and neighbours in a situation like that.”
Maryse Talbot was named principal of the local high school, Polyvalente Montignac, the day before the explosion. The school lost one of its youngest faculty members — math teacher Mathieu Pelletier. Talbot made it her mission to give teenagers like Théberge some sense of stability when classes finally resumed.
She told her staff that if teachers were ready to come back, mental health professionals would be on hand to help them through the transition.
“After what we went through that summer, none of us were in a place where we could care for an entire classroom,” Talbot said. “But we had no choice. We had a job to do.”
When the kids came back to school, they filled their social calendar with activities. About 50 per cent of the student body enrolled in a sport. Meanwhile, the theatre and improv club, music class and student government breathed life back into the building.
A collective sense of grief filled the halls, but Talbot said it was accompanied by raucous laughter and the sounds of hundreds of kids being kids.
“If there’s a hard part about this sort of collective grief, it’s that maybe you lost someone you know but someone else might have lost a mother or a sibling,” Théberge said. “So you wonder if your sadness is valid; you wonder why you would ask for help when others are going through something so much worse.
“But people leaned on each other, they checked up on each other. It really did bring us closer together. There was a great tenderness with which people interacted.”
Théberge, who now lives in Montreal, said he has had a fairly normal life in the five years since the tragedy. He thinks back to that summer when he visits his parents, but said it isn’t something that haunts him.
“It hasn’t been easy for everyone,” Théberge said. “You’ll probably read headlines like ‘Mégantic is back on its feet’ over the coming days, but that’s an oversimplification. For a lot of people, it will never be the same. They’ll carry that grief forever. Some of us have moved on, but some of us lost something or someone that simply can’t be replaced.”
You’ll probably read headlines like ‘Mégantic is back on its feet’ over the coming days, but that’s an oversimplification.