ONE WEEK LATER
As people move on, the tributes to the fallen remain, Edward Keenan writes.
Seven days after 10 lives were taken in a tragedy that horrified the city, the Star’s Edward Keenan walks along Yonge St. and finds an area surrounded by warmth and love.
“One week later, it is tempting to say that life is going on much as it did before, here on Yonge St. in North York. But that is not quite true — there are reminders, there are memorials, there are tributes.”
On April 23, 2018, shortly after 1 p.m., it began here, on the southwest corner of Yonge St. and Finch Ave., when a white van coming through the intersection mounted the curb and began running down pedestrians.
One week later, more or less to the minute, there are a few bouquets of flowers on the curb near a hydro pole, near chalk marks proclaiming “Love to all,” and there is a white van coming through the intersection. But now is not then. The van proceeds along the road normally, amid the other three full lanes of southbound traffic, while dozens of pedestrians flood into the crossing.
People in suits, striding purposefully; joggers bouncing and huffing; an older woman with a cane. Black and white and Persian and Korean they come, not to mark the occasion of death, but to get where they are going — to pick up bulgogi from a nearby street cart, or fill a prescription at the Shoppers Drug Mart, or to make it to an appointment with the dentist whose office sits under the image of a broad smile just down the block.
Across the street in an open front garden space in front of an apartment building, the shrine that has grown up over the course of seven days fills the air with the fragrance of fresh flowers.
Here, a rotating cast of 20 or 30 people at a time stop to remember. They read the handwritten signs featuring invocations of God or the strength of Toronto or the handprints of children, gaze on the candles, some still lit in the spring breeze, they remember and reflect and pray. There are stuffed animals in among the hundred of bouquets.
The sun is shining on a glorious warm day, finally, but the bright memorials made of cut flowers contrast with the dry brown earth of the surrounding gardens. The branches of the trees are bare. This has been a harsh spring in more ways than one.
There are tributes to specific victims. One says “You will never be forgotten, Sweet Sous Chef Eddie” over the picture of a proud and grinning Chul Min “Eddie” Kang.
Another is a copy of Anne Marie D’Amico’s high school graduation yearbook photo, accompanied by the farewell message she had written back then to her classmates. “My journey at the Abbey comes to an end,” it reads. “So many memories.” It recounts some of those. And then, “Saying goodbye isn’t the hard part. It’s what you leave behind that’s tough.”
Anne Marie D’Amico, Eddie Kang, Dorothy Sewell, Renuka Amarasingha, Munir Najjar, Mary Elizabeth (Betty) Forsyth, Sohe Chung, Andrea Bradden, Geraldine Brady, Ji Hun Kim. Most of us didn’t know their names before we began the shocking process of saying goodbye. But we know them now, and some part of their stories.
One week later, walking south along the west side of Yonge, there are still little memorials marking the spot on the sidewalk where they fell — flowers and rosary beads and messages. Sometimes people pause for a moment, as if caught off guard, to gaze down at them.
But many more people are on their way somewhere. A group of three women stride along laughing, stepping over a heart chalked onto the sidewalk. Yellow metal barriers that had blocked off the roadway now sit neatly lined up, unobtrusively, on sidewalk corners. The spot where a bus shelter was plowed over is easy to miss until you are standing right on top of it, a bit of differently coloured concrete with fire department pylons bolted into the ground atop scattered shards of broken glass.
There are signs in restaurant windows reading “#TorontoStrong” and inside people are filling the tables, eating and drinking and checking their phones and talking. The swoosh of traffic sounds is intermittently pierced by honking as the usual road frustrations continue. A pair of workers in hard hats guide a flat of plywood to a safe landing as it is lowered to the ground by a crane that is more than 10 stories up. Down at Mel Lastman Square, there’s the smell of flowers again, at the site where one week ago the carnage and chaos reached their nadir, where just over 12 hours ago thousands stood in a vigil of prayer and resolve and remembrance. People are again gathered to pay respects.
A stroller and a wheelchair — their occupants separated in age by seven decades or more — park face-to-face for a smile a few feet from a cross bearing the names of all 10 deceased victims.
The word “Love” is all around, crowds step over it chalked onto the ground, read it on poster-board and on handmade cards and on the tags on potted plants.
In the square, people walk dogs and eat their lunch at tables. The flags of the city, the province and the country fly at half-mast. A man sleeps on a nearby bench.
In the middle of Yonge St., in front of the square, there is a sculpture that depicts, in multiple overlapping forms as if showing the frames of a film, the figure of a dancer running and leaping into the air, her partner stepping forward to catch her and lift her up. Cars pass. People stream in and out of nearby government buildings.
One week later, it is tempting to say that life is going on much as it did before, here on Yonge St. in North York. But that is not quite true — there are reminders, there are memorials, there are tributes.
We live our lives now knowing these 10 who died, knowing how they died, knowing how they are missed. There is still all of this, saying goodbye. As D’Amico wrote about such different circumstances years ago, the farewell is not the hard part — indeed in this case it is the healing part, for many. “It’s what you leave behind,” she wrote.
We do not leave them behind. We carry them with us, as we go on, holding their memory with us. Who they were, and what happened to them, and to our city. And the stories of both heartbreak and kindness that followed immediately after.
On Beecroft Rd. near Sheppard Ave., toward the end of that van’s terrible run through the city, there are some men in bright orange vests tending a garden bed outside a residential building. They are surrounded by flowers, bright and vibrant and rooted in the ground. These ones not placed in sadness or grief, but planted in anticipation of spring, and the promise of warmer days ahead.