There will come a time when we will tell our children, grandchildren and, if we’re lucky, great-grandchildren that we were there in that terrible April of 2020. Then they will stop what they are doing and look at us with the same expression with which we once gazed upon those who had endured war, disaster or some other calamity beyond heartbreak.
Tragedy cannot be put on a scale and weighed. But I would not wish the perfect storm of woes and misfortunes that have befallen us — the Portapique massacre, the mounting death toll from the pandemic, all having to be endured in numbing isolation — upon anyone.
It is going to be so hard to move on for the families of the victims, suffering such immense unexplainable loss, but for everyone really, because being Nova Scotian isn’t just a geographical term.
It’s also a way of looking at the world, an openness, empathy and ethos that, on some level, are shared by everyone, from every diverse group, who has found their way here.
We’re a clan, in the best possible meaning of that word. The horror inflicted by he-who-shall-not-be-named violated so much of what we understood to be true.
We suffer from what the Germans call weltschmerz, which translates, according to author Robert Macfarlane, into world pain, “the feeling of sadness at the suffering that surrounds you.”
So we’re like PTSD sufferers now. You could see that in the heightened way that reports of gunshots in the Halifax area Friday triggered panic.
A couple of days earlier, I talked to a friend, waiting out the pandemic not far from Portapique. He told me that he and his wife had been out for a walk days after the shootings when they saw a car coming down the road.
They know every automobile by sight in their little community; it’s that kind of place. But he didn’t know this one. So his pulse quickened. He and his wife looked at each other. They were ready to run for the woods.
So much will change because of last weekend. The prime minister has promised stricter gun-control legislation. The RCMP’s emergency alert system will surely be revamped.
At the same time, I want some things to stay the same. I hope the "new normal" isn’t a level of fear and distrust that penetrates the soul of this province.
I hope, going forward, we don’t stop becoming the kind of place that the rest of Canada felt compelled to wrap its arms around during Friday night’s virtual vigil.
I have hope for all of this, because, though we’ve never been through anything like this, our spirit has been forged by hard times.
Our story isn’t so much one of soaring triumphs as it is of enduring: death at sea, in the mines and from disasters of an epic scale; an economy hindered by being a small, distant place on the periphery.
Yet when something bad happens, we just lean further into the wind, as we’ve always done.
We don’t quit. If we were the kind of people who did, let's face it, we would have done so a long time ago.
Yet here, to me, is the amazing thing: no matter the challenges, no matter how often it seems like the gods are against us, we haven’t, as a people, given in to anger and cynicism.
We have never descended into the darkness, which would have been so easy to do.
That’s what gives me hope.
The eased COVID-19 restrictions announced Friday in nearby New Brunswick are an inkling that the new normal will not really be very normal at all.
But some things, maybe, can be as they were before.
The shootings will reverberate through this province like the ripples from a boulder thrown into a lake. Generations to come will recall what happened to those poor people and their families, and to all of us, that awful weekend.
I have no idea how we move on from there, or even if such a thing is possible. I just know a little bit about our history.
The other day I was emailing back and forth with a friend, this one hunkered down in Halifax waiting for the Great Pause to end.
The usual stuff of conversations these days - the terrible unreality of the times, and how distraught it has left each and every one of us.
He said that his Judique, Cape Breton, mother’s words have been with him lately: “The devil is never far away doing his work.”
There is evil in the world, my friend concluded. All we can do is respond with the good.
