Twenty-two years ago today, I had just turned seven years old. I didn't understand what was going on when my parents were watching the live report from Polytechnique Shooting. But I remember the images. I remember the ambulances and the policemen, noticeably worried and confused. What was going on in there? They knew something terrible was going on, involving a lot of deaths. But nobody wanted to go in there first. Behind the walls of the famed engineering school were the dead bodies of fourteen brilliant woman and one man who lost his humanity somewhere along the way.
I have to confess something. I have been fascinated by the phenomenon of school killings, because I sometimes feel empathy for the shooters. By that, I don't mean I condone their action or deny their responsibility on what happened. Taking somebody's life is unfair, it will always be unfair and tragic. But I can understand how somebody gets there. I think that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were killers, of course, but they were also products of their environment. They were medicated for serious psychological issues and didn't have the intellectual or social resources to deal with abuse.I think about their families sometimes and I cannot imagine the weight it must be to have your children. Your flesh and blood commit such atrocities.
Don't get me wrong here. I don't wish they were my friends or that I could have saved them. It's not a prison-pen-pal syndrome case. I just thought they looked like decent kids and for a numbers of factors out of everybody's control, their souls died long before their bodies. I'm not trying to be poetic here, the Columbine massacre is so haunting to me, because I can't get over the idea that this could have been stopped. It's shrouded in the ghost of missed opportunities
But somehow, I can't feel anything for Marc Lépine, the Polytechnique shooter. He said in his suicide letter that he had a grudge with women. Feminists. All radical feminists, he said. He had a sick mind, no doubt. He had a history of erratic behavior that most likely concealed a personality disorder. Women were just a scapegoat for all the missed opportunities and all the factors he never wanted to face in his life. Women never bullied him and he was never really put in distress by his environment, outside maybe his own family. It's one of those tragedies where there's nothing to understand. A lunatic snatched the lives of fourteen brilliant women without any reason.
So what does it leave us with?
Remembering. We have to remember, so that it never happens again. Quebec (and Canada in general) has been good with this, so far. Schools are as safe as they can get and while the kids in distress don't get all the help they should, like Marjorie, the ghost of Marc Lépine is still haunting the hallways and school personnel keeps their eyes opened. But we have to remember more than Lépine. We have to remember the fourteen women, the fourteen women that have been brutally murder because we have to keep in mind the scope of what he has done. Had Marc Lépine never been there, those fourteen women would have went on with their lives, had great jobs and families of their own. But now, all we have left of them are their memory.
Geneviève
Nathalie
Anne-Marie
Maryse
Anne-Marie
Michèle
Annie
Hélène
Barbara
Maud
Maryse
Sonia
Annie
Barbara
We must remember you, always.
May you find peace where you are.