The pain will linger
The lives of the survivors, and those left behind, were changed forever
The cane hangs, rarely noticed by visitors, from a bookshelf next to my office desk. It’s just a piece of lightweight metal of adjustable length with a foam grip handle.
The heavy use is easy to spot. The bottom is scarred from scuffing along hard surfaces. The foam handle is torn.
“Pass this around,” I tell students each November early in my advanced writing course.
“Is it yours?” someone inevitably asks.
I smile.
The cane changes hands quickly as student after student gives it a brief glance, perhaps tries spinning it around like a baton. Its trip soon completed, I take it back.
“What is it?” I ask.
“A cane,” comes the obvious response.
“It’s adjustable,” offers another. The owner of the cane, I tell them, begged the couple who stopped on that mid-January night 10 years ago to give him their cellphone. Stunned at what they were looking at, they did. Then he did what kids do when they’re in trouble, he called home.
His father picked up. They’re all dead, his son said. They’re all dead.
It was shortly after midnight on Jan. 12, 2008 and the 12 passengers were victims of the Bathurst boy’s basketball team van crash. Eight died in the collision with a truck minutes from the turnoff into their community.
The lives of the survivors, and those left behind, were changed forever.
“This cane,” I say, “belongs to the player who made the telephone call. He was the mostly seriously injured survivor. He spent months recovering, slowly going from a hospital bed, to a wheelchair, to using this cane.”
Silence. I wait. Finally, a budding journalism student figures it out.
“How did you end up with it?” “The owner of this cane was a good friend of my son. They played against each other and with each other on basketball teams throughout high school.”
When my son broke an ankle during a summer league game after his first year in university and required emergency surgery – involving a plate and a handful of screws – his friend gave him the cane, I say.
“My son was the last person to use it.”
More silence.
A graduate of our journalism program picked up her phone shortly after the horror of the Humboldt bus crash first made headlines and the final tally of the dead had not yet reached 16. A junior hockey team decimated. Lives lost, lives forever changed.
The reporter called Chris Quinn, whose 16-year-old son Nickolas died in the Bathurst accident. Chris isn’t one for doing interviews, but he talked to her.
“It put me back into a different place,” he said of Humboldt. The community helps him cope, all these years later. “They’re there and it helps.”
But time and community can only do so much, he s aid.
“Some days I suppose I still think he’s around,” he said. “Maybe I didn’t deal with it the best.”
The pain is obvious in every word.
“I say I’ve moved on, but yes and no,” he said. “You do eventually move on, I guess. To say it’s any less … I don’t feel the pain I once did. I still remember my son. I still remember the other boys.”
Sadly, brutally, the survivors, families and friends of the young men on the bus in Saskatchewan know – and will know for years to come – what Chris Quinn means.