Lessons from abroad in coping with grief
There was a time in Israel, a generation ago, when the first terrible suicide attacks on random civilians triggered mourning on a national scale.
Sad music blanketed the radio airwaves for hours on end, smiling and laughter stopped. The grief was universal – and sustained.
Then, as the Second Palestinian Intifada deepened in intensity, with armoured IDF invasions of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a new kind of resilience took hold.
With each successive blow, Israel’s mournful music tapered away. The grieving compressed to an abrupt minimum — a kind of collective emotional tradeoff, placing the restoration of normal foremost in the hierarchy of needs.
The best contemporary evidence of that uncommon resilience: two years ago, barely a day after two Palestinian gunmen opened fire at Max Brenner Café in the heart of Tel Aviv, leaving four Israelis and seven more injured, the popular dessert restaurant was cleaned up and right back enjoying business as usual.
Rivka Yanai, a Toronto-born emigrant to Israel, told the Jerusalem Post that immediately reclaiming the scene of so much pain was the ideal response.
“This is how it needs to be, people coming back, going on with their daily lives,” Yanai said. “I feel sadness, but not fear.”
Toronto is hardly at war, let alone locked in the sort of decades-old territorial Gordian knot that plagues Israelis and Palestinians alike.
Yet for those of us inclined to want to do more than share a hashtag, there may be a lesson in resilience worth borrowing.
Monday’s rampage on Yonge St. carved a 2.2 kilometre scar from Finch to Sheppard. And within a stone’s throw of it all, there are more than 94 cafés, restaurants and pubs — every one of them offering the opportunity for Torontonians across the city to flood the zone and reclaim what is ours.
Above and beyond blood donations, crowd-funding efforts to support the victims and their families and candlelit vigils, there is something about the physical restoration of normal — inviting friends or family to join in patronizing Yonge St. as it was prior to Monday.
Others with deeper pockets might consider taking that one step further: why stop at buying your own lunch in this stricken stretch of Yonge when you can buy someone else’s? This seems asuperb moment for the pay-itforward movement to splash kindness on a neighbourhood that has taken a blow unlike anything the city has previously known.
However Toronto contends with the aftermath, the act of reclaiming our best-known street will be complicated by the need to remember — and commemorate — the attack itself. Reclamation will move us in the right direction, but it cannot amount to erasure. And it alone will not give closure to Toronto, let alone to the families of those directly affected, for whom closure may never come.
Two very different recent events in Manchester and Paris offer lessons for Toronto on the delicate balancing act between the needs of victims and their families versus the needs of a city’s broader population in the aftermath of attacks.
It’s hard to overstate the rawness of the moment last June when pop singer Ariana Grande took the stage for the One Love Manchester benefit concert, just 13 days after a suicide bomber killed 22 of her young fans during a performance at Manchester Arena.
Grande had spent the weekend visiting casualties still in hospital. Other victims not yet physically healed were well enough to attend the show, which was itself in doubt after yet another attack the night before, when a white van ran down pedestrians on London Bridge. Grande’s show did indeed go on, accompanied by an overwhelming police presence. Reporters on the scene described it as a collective act of defiance for the singer and her teenage fans.
“Thank you for coming and being so loving, and strong and unified,” she told the crowd. “This unity is the medicine the world really needs right now.”
The city of Paris, by contrast, waited not two weeks but rather a full year before reopening the historic Bataclan venue after 89 concertgoers were killed there in a string of Daesh-orchestrated attacks on Nov. 13, 2015. And it was still too soon for some.
The morning of the relaunch, the newspaper Liberation celebrated what it called “Generation Bataclan” for its opposition to intolerance in all forms. Also featured was an interview with a survivor of the attacks, infuriated by the fact that people would resume dancing at the site where his wife was killed one year earlier. No French headliner appeared that night. Instead, the navigation of this delicate, relaunch was left to Sting, who first performed at the Bataclan with the Police in the late 1970s.
Sting opened the show with remarks in French, reminding his audience of the need to first “remember and honour those who lost their lives” but then “to celebrate life and music as represented by this historic concert hall.” A minute’s silence followed.
The pin-drop silence was broken by the words to Sting’s first song, “Fragile.” Though written in the 1980s, Sting’s lyrics now came freighted with 21st-century meaning, saying as much to Toronto today as they did to Paris in 2016:
If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one
Drying in the colour of the evening sun
Tomorrow’s rain will wash the stains away
But something in our minds will always stay
Perhaps this final act was meant To clinch a lifetime’s argument That nothing comes from violence
And nothing ever could