Lac-Mégantic remembers, moves on
One year after the Lac-Mégantic disaster, town residents gathered in a church and in a candlelit walk to remember
Metal screeching against metal as a train weighing thousands of tonnes careened off the tracks and slammed into the downtown core. The whoosh and crackle of flames filling the air, climbing higher and higher until they completely obscured every star in the sky. The screams of those who ran for their lives, or lost them.
But precisely one year later, as residents convened on the spot where the unthinkable happened, there was only silence.
Into that silence the town of Lac-Mégantic poured its memories, its prayers and its grief on Sunday morning as the clock again hit 1:14 a.m. There were no more speeches to deliver, no gentle words of comfort to offer as hundreds of men, women and children filed out of Ste-Agnes church following a midnight mass and began a slow march around the still-barren pit where the core of their community once stood.
After all, what more could be said that hadn’t already been said in 12 months of upheaval and anguish?
The procession — lit from within by multicoloured stars that hung around each person’s neck — was led out of the church by Mayor Colette Roy-Laroche, a woman who many have come to regard as the mortar that kept this place from crumbling last summer as firefight- ers searched for survivors in the debris. In the end, they found only bodies.
For a town at a crossroads between trying to forget and choosing to remember, this weekend’s anniversary was a reminder that forgetting might never be a possibility at all, and the only option left may be moving forward without pausing to look back too often. Once a place known for its beautiful scenery and friendly faces, Lac-Mégantic awoke on July 6, 2013 to find its beauty horribly marred and its stunned populace thrust into the international spotlight. For cities and towns across Canada and the U.S. with railway lines running through them, the town became a wake-up call and a call to action. For the police, it became a crime scene. But to those who live here, it is, and will remain, home — for better or for worse.
“Some people really need this, they need to be around other people who can share their grief,” said 63-year-old Lac-Mégantic native Guy Bouffard. Standing atop Laval Street and looking down toward the construction site on Friday, Bouffard said he knew people who were among the 47 killed in the blast, but he counts himself lucky to not have lost any family members.
“You like to think that when you go to sleep in your bed at night you’re safe … But we all found out that night that we’re not, and that feeling hasn’t gone away yet,” he explained. “I know a lot of parents who lost their children, and I know they don’t want to be alone for this.”
Others craved solitude, however. Maurice Roy, 66, was born in Lac-Mégantic and now lives near Granby. Before last year’s tragedy and ever since, he’s spent the majority of his weekends here, where he meets up with old friends and revisits childhood memories — two things that are increasingly hard to do.
The downtown sidewalk where a youthful bike accident left a lifelong scar across his knee is gone, as are the three friends he lost in the derailment.
Roy said he planned to stay home and pray by himself, avoiding the town for the first weekend in a long time.
“It’s a little too sensitive for me,” he explained. “I have a life to live. I don’t want to bring all this up again. I have to continue to try to live.”
The desire to move forward — and the guilt associated with doing so — seemed omnipresent in this tiny Quebec municipality over the weekend.
“Let us turn a page in our history,
I know a lot of parents who lost their children, and I know they don’t want to be alone for this.
not to forget or to make something disappear, but to permit us to look toward the future,” Roy-Laroche told the congregation during Saturday’s midnight mass, seemingly aware of the internal struggle so many of her constituents were facing.
“One year ago, we found ourselves experiencing one if the worst tragedies in Quebec’s history and in Canada’s history. But we were also enveloped by a huge wave of love and solidarity. We are now 365 days later, and it is still necessary to say those words: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
At Roy-Laroche’s feet, lined up in front of the pulpit, were fresh tributes to those who died. One handprinted card read simply, “Chère Diane: A year without you seems like an eternity to us.”
The past year likely felt endless for many in Lac-Mégantic. Officials asked the media, ever-present since before the flames were even out, to respect the solemnity of the overnight events and to leave people to their thoughts and prayers.
Few were willing to speak anyway as they streamed out of the brightly lit church and into the night.
A year on, many of Lac-Mégantic’s 6,000 souls are sick of talking about what they’ve lived through — sick of microphones and cameras and sirens and bulldozers. Sick of all the noise.
But they were willing to come and bear silent witness in the predawn quiet of Sunday morning — walking together, arm in arm under the stars.