A young woman cries last week at a memorial in Tumbler Ridge, B.C., for the victims of a mass school shooting.Jesse Winter/The Globe and Mail
There were still bullet holes in locker doors when students returned to Brampton Centennial Secondary School on a Monday morning in the spring of 1975.
The week before, they had survived one of Canada’s first school shootings after a 16-year-old brought a pair of rifles in a guitar case and used them to kill two and injure 13 before taking his own life.
Such horrors were not yet a regular feature of North American life and the then-small Ontario community didn’t know how to respond. The principal gave a short address that day and the shooter’s sister Donna apologized over the PA system.
“Then, they just moved on,” said Maureen Abraham Sim, a survivor who still lives in Brampton. The adults in their lives thought it was better not to dwell on the tragedy.
That approach left lasting damage and slowed the healing process – a message, among others, that other survivors of Canadian mass shootings now want to share in the wake of the Tumbler Ridge tragedy last week. On Feb. 10, eight people were killed in one of the worst mass shootings in Canadian history, before the 18-year-old shooter turned the gun on herself.
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“My heart goes out to them,” said Ms. Sim. “They should get lots of support.”
When she heard about the attack in British Columbia, her mind went back to where she was on May 28, five decades ago. Ms. Sim was standing in the hallway when the shooter came out of the bathroom holding a gun, with another slung over his shoulder.
She began to run, “hearing gunshot after gunshot and just wondering which one was going to hit me before I drop,” she recalled. “That’s the thing with shootings – it’s what you hear.”
In addition to those haunting memories, visual and auditory, Ms. Sim was later plagued by survivor’s guilt.
“I still struggle with that.”
The story of trauma is accompanied by an experience of “resilience,” Ms. Sim added. Many students from Brampton Centennial went on to careers in public service, spurred in part by their experience that day. She became a teacher. Her friend Jennifer became a nurse.
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Pam Hand, another survivor, became a police officer in the region. But she experienced years of struggle and emotional turmoil after the shooting, which she said the adults in her life were ill-equipped to manage. As Ms. Hand became more subdued and quiet in the following years, her mother thought she was on drugs, rather than grieving.
“My mum thought I wasn’t crying, so I wasn’t in trouble,” she said. “Everybody grieves differently, so don’t judge anybody.”
The healing process took years and even decades for many survivors of Brampton Centennial. Ms. Hand was only able to talk openly about the shooting without crying after a cathartic 40th anniversary gathering.
Those supporting the survivors of Tumbler Ridge will need to be patient, cautioned Ms. Hand.
“It’s going to be a rough road for them for a long, long, long time,” she said. “The help needs to be immediate and ongoing.”
Canada’s deadliest school shooting remains the 1989 massacre at École Polytechnique, an engineering university in Montreal. On Dec. 6, a gunman entered the school and killed 14 women, claiming he was fighting feminism. He injured 13 other people in the attack, which ended when he took his own life.
Nathalie Provost was in a classroom at Polytechnique that day when the shooter walked in and separated the men from the women. She argued with him before he opened fire on the women, killing six students. Provost was hit by four bullets to the leg, foot and forehead.
Nathalie Provost, pictured in 2014, was in a classroom at Polytechnique on Dec. 6, 1989, when a gunman entered the school and killed 14 women. She was hit by four bullets to the leg, foot and forehead.Graham Hughes/The Canadian Press
More than 36 years later, the days after the attack are “crystal clear” in her mind, said Ms. Provost in a recent interview. She spent nine days in the hospital, struggling to cope with the loss and with the fact of being alive when she had come so close to death. “That made me feel that I would become crazy,” she said.
She asked to see a psychiatrist in the first days after the shooting and was visited by a psychiatry student, barely older than she was, who gave her a couple of pages about post-traumatic stress disorder that he had printed from a book. “Nobody knew about PTSD,” she said.
But something else happened in those early days that would shape the course of Ms. Provost’s life. After having raised her voice during the attack, Ms. Provost spoke publicly about the shooting, quickly becoming a face of the massacre.
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Eventually, Ms. Provost would become a prominent gun-control advocate, and she is now a Liberal MP. “The capacity to feel useful with my words is my own way to cope with tragedies,” she said.
Ms. Provost returned to Polytechnique several weeks after the shooting, determined to finish her degree. She urged the parents of the Tumbler Ridge survivors to believe in their children’s strength.
“Maybe their reaction will be to protect and overprotect, but I really think that it was a gift that my family let me live my life as I wanted it,” she said. “And it’s important that we let them get back on their bike.”
Still, her recovery was far from over when she returned to school. Nearly four years after the massacre, Ms. Provost said she suddenly began sleeping 10 or 11 hours a night. She eventually realized it had taken that long for her body to be able to “really, really rest.”
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Recovery is a long process that becomes intertwined with all the other “small wounds” that people suffer as they move through life, Ms. Provost said. She believes the most important thing, for now, is for the Tumbler Ridge survivors and the victims’ families to be surrounded by people who can “listen and wait and accept the grief.”
She recalled feeling profoundly lonely after the 1989 attack. “People around you, they want to talk about something else, and you’re just asking them to go back there,” she said.
She hoped the survivors will have a place “where they can be ugly” and still feel loved. “Maybe they will be stronger, if we do our job correctly,” Ms. Provost said. “Maybe they will just be stronger.”