The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
Did Portapique change us?
I got nowhere when I tried to talk to the families of the victims of the Portapique massacre, which is understandable, and probably just as well.
Even if I had a chance to ask them how they felt a year after their loved ones were taken from them — if I had the opportunity to ask about the ache of their loss, and the anger that we understand to be deep over the lack of clarity to the events of 12 months ago — all they could have responded with were words, and there are some things for which words are woefully inadequate.
Only those among us who have suffered searing loss might have an inkling of how they feel. I have not, and there is no value in trying to imagine the truly unimaginable.
I am, however, a citizen of this province, and it is, I think, as Aristotle wrote, that evil draws men together. So, I feel for them as I feel for a family member, or a neighbour, who has experienced something vile and wicked.
Tragedy upon tragedy piled onto the people of this province a year ago: Portapique, but also the COVID deaths at Northwood Centre, the disappearance of three-yearold Dylan Ehler in Truro, the snowbird crash, the six lives lost when a helicopter from HMCS Fredericton crashed off Sicily.
It dulled our senses; the unrelenting nature of the woe made us feel what the Germans call weltschmerz, a deep sadness at the state of the world surrounding us.
At the time there was fear that all this misery would change us as a people, that we would never look upon the world the same way again.
As if we were some sort of 21st century Brigadoon, it was said that we had lost our innocence amid the heartbreak, and that where there was
once light there would now only be darkness.
The sense of community that marked this province would disappear, some felt, replaced by a feeling that we are all alone in a cold land devoid of logic or morality.
I had the same questions. Some things I am sure of: Never again will the people of this province look smugly at the gun violence that seems to happen daily in the United States. The tragedy, to my mind, strengthens rather than weakens the argument for greater gun control in this country.
However, a year later I wonder if perhaps the accumulated traumas of 2020 have translated into the kind of PTSD that manifests itself somewhere down the line, because, to my eyes, we are for now who we have always been.
In the past 12 months this paper and others in the Saltwire network have bulged with tales of selfless acts, of people doing good, and staying connected.
It is as a headline to one of those stories declared: The only way to respond to the world’s evil is with good.
We know this because we have had plenty of practice, as is the case with people used to tragedy.
The seminal event in Halifax’s history, after all, was a blast that took nearly 2,000 lives in 1917, and which remains the main reason why much of the world knows this city.
But 2,500 Nova Scotians also died in explosions, caveins, and other accidents in the coal mines of Pictou and Cumberland counties. They went way down under the ocean, and never returned from the collieries of Cape Breton.
The database of the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic has not been updated since 1999, but still lists almost 5,000 ships that have gone down in the waters off Nova Scotia.
Unofficial estimates run far higher, which means tens of thousands of mariners aboard schooners, square-riggers, passenger and cargo steamships and warships went to their graves out in the Atlantic.
The names of some of them can be found on the monument on Water Street in Yarmouth, which lists the 2,400 people from Yarmouth County who have perished out in the ocean.
Some of them are also found on the eight three-sided memorial columns found in Lunenburg’s historic old town, and even in Gloucester, Mass., where the plaques, which bear the names of the 5,000 men who lost their lives sailing out of the New England fishing port, also include 1,200 from Nova Scotia.
It sounds like ancient history. But the last Nova Scotians died in a coal mine in 1992. Just four months ago, six men died when a scallop dragger sunk in the Bay of Fundy.
To my mind there is an unfairness to every one of those deaths, a sense that there is no justice in a world where some people get to live nice, clean, safe lives — perhaps typing for a newspaper — while others had to go deep into the subterranean depths, or out on the North Atlantic in winter to put bread on the table.
Yet, on some level those were all accidents, misfortunes, and acts of God, including the 229 people who died in 1998 when Swissair 111 plunged into the waters off Peggys Cove.
The tragedy of Portapique was something altogether different: an incomprehensible, unholy act.
It taught us that evil, however you describe it, walks the Earth. When it does, we can only do what Aristotle counselled: draw close around our neighbours, in the hope that they someday again believe that good does too.