THE ROCKY SHORES OF GRIEF: ONE YEAR OUT FROM THE NOVA SCOTIA MASSACRE
“If we awaken in this time, we awaken with a sob.” - Stephen Jenkinson.
The mass shooting that occurred in Nova Scotia in April 2020, a swath of blood and fire and anguish, reminded us that death is not always softened by the white coat of medicine or delivered blindly by inanimate forces of nature. Sometimes death comes as a man of peace, as a Joe Black, cloaked in the body of a man wearing a disguise so perfect we let down our defenses and open the door. The police cruiser, the peace officer, the polished black boots; the human herd has no natural defence against such clever camouflage.
During the long, dark year that followed the merciless killings in rural Nova Scotia last spring, many in our province have exhibited the signs of shock and trauma. As you may recall, it was loss after loss after loss---22 dead in the massacre, 6 Shearwater helicopter crew lost in the Ionian Sea, Snowbird Capt. Jennifer Casey of Halifax, and then the heartbreaking disappearance of 3-year-old Dylan Ehler in Truro.
In the aftermath of so much death, some of us became triggered, oscillating between nightmare images and senseless dissociation, while many more felt very little about the deaths, and talked about them even less. Approximately one month before the killings, with Italy in a death spiral and New York running out of room in their morgues, Nova Scotia received a stay-at-home order. At that time, we all assumed the plague was coming. Seniors were starting to die at our long-term facilities and the health system was gearing up for a mass casualty event. Death was on our doorstep. We were awash in fear and panic. Toilet paper and chicken were scarce, alcohol sales soared.
Then the massacre happened.
In the immediate wake of the killings, many of us expected a scenario reminiscent of the Swiss Air disaster in 1998, where the entire province mobilized. During that tragedy, clergy, psychologists and social workers mustered at Peggy’s Cove to bring help and comfort to broken families and weary frontline workers. While fishermen combed the sea for human remains, women in church basements served strong coffee and sandwiches. Government and private sectors worked together for months. We were almost on a war footing.
But after the April 18/19 massacre, that level of intervention didn’t appear possible. COVID-19 restrictions meant that communities and health systems were unable to mount any sustained physical response; there were no soul-stirring face-to-face public rituals or memorials, no organized trauma debriefings and even fewer opportunities to attend funerals. Our deep human need to gather in huddles to process our frazzled emotions was frustrated and denied.
To be sure, after April 18/19 there was an upwelling of compassion and concern. Blue and green tartan “Nova Scotia Strong” ribbons appeared along our roadways, on our letterboxes and front doors, and there was a huge buzz of media coverage and some scurrying at the government level. But in the end, we saw nothing of the magnitude of the provincial and national response toward Swiss Air 111.
But let’s be clear; a massacre is not an accident. Accidents evoke pathos and sympathy, massacres provoke terror and paralysis. Wortman’s violence was like nothing we’d ever seen in this country. He began with a sickening protracted attack on his neighbours, friends and family, then after a night inhiding, began a mostly random killing spree visited upon strangers, good Samaritan passers-by, RCMP and a few people he knew. He became a cold-blooded predator.
A year out from those 13 unthinkable hours of hyper-violence, I’m not sure we’ve known what to make of it all. First, how to acknowledge the awful impact of the trauma on our bodies, souls and communities, and second, how to engage our internal worlds and do the healing work necessary to return to wholeness. One thing is certain, we stopped talking about it.
I’m a grief counsellor and therapist working in a large regional health centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I’ve spent the better part of twenty-five years helping people cope with every species of death; suicide, homicide, traffic accident, workplace fatality, overdose, child loss, and sudden loss. Every death brings its own unique form of human suffering and opens doors to growth and healing. But no matter if a death occurs naturally or unnaturally, one of the cardinal rules about bereavement and loss is that we need to talk about it because whatever is unmentionable soon becomes unmanageable.
In the months following the shootings, I began to notice a silence creeping slowly into our public and private dialogue around the massacre. Few in my social circle seemed to be discussing their feelings and thoughts about the murders. In fact, we seemed to be actively suppressing the subject. Just last week, while meeting with some community-based partners, I observed one of the leaders becoming visibly upset when someone brought up Portapique. “Don’t even mention that,” she said, shifting uneasily in her chair. “I just can’t.” I began to wonder if the echo of this horror was too cavernous for us, the content too disturbing. It’s as if we were unable to find a shared language around the massacre. It was too close to home yet felt as though it happened elsewhere.
Doubtless, the horror stories and awful cinematic snippets of Wortman’s killings that circulated right after the massacre gave many of us cause to turn away from the scene of the crime and not want to look back. Others were perhaps too far away from ground zero, too remote from the bloodshed to be shaken inside. Then there was the possibility that folks were simply as okay as they appeared on the surface; they had girded up their loins, looked to the future and moved on.
So I wonder today, as we reach the one-year anniversary of the massacre; have we been able to heal and grieve since the events of April 18/19 last year, or have we been in a kind of spiritual hibernation? What is our model of community healing and is it truly adequate to heal the wounds wrought by this murderous devastation? Is there any more grief work for us to do, or are we good?
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My daily commute leads me past the now-defunct Atlantic Denture Clinic in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, where, before being shot dead by RCMP, the mass murderer Gabriel Wortman, plied his daily trade. Portland Street is a major artery that leads to Halifax in one direction and toward Sydney Crosbie’s hometown of Cole Harbour in the other. Those of us who drive along it regularly passed a huge pair of bubble gum-coloured dentures Wortman had affixed to his storefront. Odd and ungainly as they were, those oversized choppers had become part of our downtown Dartmouth identity, like the Happy Face Museum and the flabby white swans that stop rush-hour traffic near Sullivan’s pond as they waddle across Ochterloney Street in search of fresh grass.
After the massacre, that big set of teeth began grinding away at our grief and our goodwill. “Nova Scotia is grieving the loss of so many of our family and friends,” wrote Lynn Maughan in her Change.org petition to remove the teeth. “And yet, we have a smile along Portland St. in Downtown Dartmouth that is a painful reminder of the coward [sic] acts of a local denturist. We want him forgotten.”
Several days later, workmen strode up ladders and removed the trademark dentures, loaded them into the back of a truck and carted them away to god-knows-where. I marked how quickly the evidence of Wortman’s presence in our midst was being vanquished. For several weeks there was a constant buzz of activity inside the darkly shuttered denture clinic. Serious-faced plain-clothed men entered the building in steady procession, ingesting evidence until nothing of significance remained.
Shortly after the massacre, while being pre-interviewed by a CBC radio producer for an on-air discussion about homicide and grief, I was informed that my radio host would not be speaking Wortman’s name. That made sense. The killer had tried to erase the names of his victims and so we were erasing his. Online print journalists at the Halifax Examiner were referring to Wortman as “GW,” compressing his life among us into a mere cipher. I heard one television reporter call him a “denturist-turned-killer,” as if the transformation from normal to pathological had occurred with an instant, magical flourish.
This scrubbing action is part of a social hygiene mission triggered by any high-level act of violence. It’s as if a magic eraser gets applied to the trail markers of the gunman’s living, terrorizing and dying. It is a complex and ritualized phenomenon. The perpetrator’s life gets bulldozed, and in its place, a shrine to the fallen is raised. A paradise gets paved over the parking lot.
When a community is shattered by murderous violence, it’s not uncommon to hear people describe the perpetrator as a monster or an animal. Hyperbole and diminutives like these establish an emotional distance between a community and the killer, rendering him too savage, distorted or insignificant to warrant re-entry into their communal embrace. In a secular society, religiously freighted words like evil and demonic are reserved for special operations against the vilest of foes. This heightened lingo is employed when ordinary language becomes insufficient to describe an atrocity.
This ‘othering’ of a killer is an act of social sterilization; of removing the predatory pestilence in our midst. It creates a protective containment zone into which the innocent can shelter in place, take stock of their losses and regain their bearings. This helps regulate an overheated threat response and switches off the communal warning system. After a trauma, a community keeps the perpetrator in spiritual exile to satisfy a desperate need to get clear of the killer; for in a very real sense, he remains in their midst. Although Wortman is now dead and no longer an active danger to anyone, his seat at the table of our communal life remains warm. This is the core mechanism of trauma: the horror passes, but the traumatic energy remains stored in our bodies and in our body politic. The teeth may have been removed, but not the memory of the bite.
Trauma’s message to us goes like this: "you are vulnerable and in danger and cannot control events impacting you and those you love." Like a potent neurotoxin, this injection of trauma eventually finds its way into each of us. Nobody escapes. Some respond to trauma by launching into super-helper mode while others collapse into a shameful state of despair, defeat and helplessness. Trauma drops many into a dizzying vortex of hypervigilance and hyper-arousal; they feel ever on the knife-edge of panic and threat. In some cases, trauma acts like an emotional spinal cord injury, numbing our feelings so completely that we don’t even know we’ve been wounded. We can minimize our pain, by shrinking it down to size, or by just outright ignoring it. Nothing to see here…
What trauma energy doesn’t do is disappear. It may impact us instantly or remain dormant in the nervous system for months or years but it doesn’t just fade into the background. “The body keeps the score,” writes trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk. Even more troubling is the fact that trauma does not need to be experienced first-hand to endow us with its neuro-biological burden. Secondary trauma can occur just from reading or overhearing news of a trauma, imagining the traumatic event in our minds, or watching impacted people suffer.
Years ago, a pipe-carrier of the Oji-Cree tradition in Northwestern Ontario taught me that the target of the evil Wendigo spirit is not the person it devours, but rather the community that watches on in utter fear. Trauma strikes down bystanders, the innocent, the survivors, the ones with no defenses. For the people who live in the small rural hamlets where the Wortman killings occurred, a rupture opened in the fabric of their communal life. It was as if the sea had ripped away from the spine of the shore. The earth itself was wounded. The land desecrated. We watched in utter terror as good people were taken from us.
I began to wonder if the silence I noticed following the massacre was a defense mechanism keeping us from drowning in an event too big and too horrific to metabolize. Perhaps we had gone somewhere far inside where the nightmare couldn’t reach. How else to manage the tectonic forces of terror. How to ingest the murderous poison of a man who left scorched earth, dead pets, orphaned children, and thousands of inconsolable grievers in his wake? How to speak of such an event? I think many of us were concerned that whatever might be said about the massacre would be considered inappropriate. Inadequate. We’re Bluenosers after all. We’re pathologically polite and proud of our social reserve. Instead of venturing into risky and vulnerable territory, it appears we became speechless.
Shutting down and going numb isn’t necessarily a decision we make. It’s the way the psyche processes trauma and lethality. We desensitize to the event and then we find ourselves moving in a different direction. We “get on with life.” When we come across media reports and cues that remind us of the horror, we look, but nothing really registers. I once heard Gabor Maté say that trauma isn’t what happens to you, it’s what happens inside you. I thought that was a great definition until I read trauma expert Peter Levine who offered a powerful coda: “Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.” It’s not just that something terrible happened to us last April, it’s that many Nova Scotians have ended up carrying their piece of the pain, alone.
Part of our muted-ness could also be related to our anxious relationship with Wortman himself. We have not had an easy time engaging him or his unthinkable deeds. Yet understanding Wortman’s brokenness as a person will be crucial for our collective healing. If we flash freeze him in the form of a demonic inhuman monster, it ensures that we never need to view him as a deeply harmed and harmful human person; in that case, we grant him more power and standing than he deserves and also relinquishes any responsibility for his social development---for murderers do not drop down on wires. They grow in our midst.
The joint federal/provincial Mass Casualty Commission that has been mandated to examine the April 18-19 massacre will likely begin to dismantle some of our fearfulness around the man. During the public inquiry, Wortman will be pulled apart cell by cell and sinew by sinew; the minutia of his shattered soul, childhood and adult sexuality will be exposed, analyzed, and presented in the public commons. They will unlace the man from head to toe, publish the findings and pray something good comes of it all.
Although public post-mortem psychological autopsies are crucial after mass casualty events, they often fail to live up to their promise. In fact, they can raise more uncomfortable questions than answers, which is why governments drag their feet about initiating them. Many of us may have forgotten that no public inquiry was called after the École Polytechnique massacre in Montreal on December 6, 1989. There were muscular forces within the Quebec government that did not want the appalling social significance of fourteen murdered women put under a microscope.
The seething moral outrage that accompanies mass murder is perfectly suited to mobilize families and communities to seek justice. In the case of the massacre in Nova Scotia, the strong voices of survivors Harry and Cory Bond, Nick Beaton, and dozens of others turned the tide and brought both levels of government to their senses. A thorough inquiry should provide answers about Wortman, the fatally miscalculated RCMP response, and the readiness of our provincial health services to attend to the grief and trauma needs of so many citizens and frontline workers.
Although justice must be sought for the victims and survivors, problems can arise when the relentless search for truth and restitution becomes chronic. Grieving families of murder victims can become trapped in an endless angry search for legal redress. Many families end up feeling deflated and depressed when the legal process grinds to its inevitable conclusion, with or without a conviction. Their loved-one remains gone, their hearts are still broken, and their rage feels unfulfilled.
There is little lasting soul nourishment to be found within the justice system. Although it is important to seek truth and hold the guilty accountable, wounded loved ones must eventually turn from their impassioned protests towards their broken families and shattered hearts. Only then can healing begin.
The Mass Casualty Commission will squint into the chasm between Wortman and the terrible things he did, trying to fathom reasons for his slaughter: was it misogyny and violence against women? Was it the worship of weapons and authority? Was it the epidemic of mental illness, toxic loneliness and rage? Did the killer suffer developmental trauma, or was it the cultural plague of spiritual poverty? These will all, doubtless, play a part in the gestalt of the killer’s hideous barbarity. To learn from this ordeal, these perspectives must be parsed out carefully.
Will anything add up when all these arguments and allegations are stacked on the ledger? In the end, there is no scale of justice that will balance the gross inequity of the loss. There is no way we can exact enough justice from Wortman, there is just not enough density to the man, not if we had a thousand of him, not if we launched a thousand commissions. We would always come up short. Inquiries leave people feeling bloated with tortured facts and malnourished of hope and healing.
The Commission could be a crucial endeavour for our province and nation as it seeks answers and preventative measures, but we know that such reports trickle down into policy and legislation at an exceedingly slow rate. People suffering need not wait for the final report to move into the next phase of their healing. This spring, as we awaken from the safety of our year-long hibernation, we are called to the sacred task of healing as individuals, families, and communities. Healing from trauma isn’t easy and is rarely quick, but the good news is that each of us has the internal resources to help ourselves and our communities mend. Here is a shortlist of actions and responses that we can take now, today, to set ourselves and our families on the road to wholeness.
1. Grieve: We are born to grieve. It’s in our blood and in our bones. Our ancestors grieved their dead as we grieve ours. We’ve been practicing grieving those we love as long as we’ve been human. The ability to mourn each other is built right into our DNA. It’s not something we do, it’s who we are.
But just because we’re born to grieve doesn’t mean we’re instantly great at it. To master our natural abilities and proclivities takes attention, discipline, and commitment. The grief that accompanies traumatic loss is unique and challenging to accept because the deaths leave us feeling powerless and defeated. It will help for you to discern between traumatic distress, which is the acute feeling of terror, numbness, rage, and bitterness that attends us after a trauma, and separation distress, the longing, yearning and searching behaviours that we see in all typical grief. Usually, we must contain and soothe our traumatic distress before we can move into the process of separation distress and mourning.
If you think for yourself, trust your feelings and give your natural grief instincts the respect and opportunity they rightly deserve, you will know what you need to do to heal. Grief may peel us back, strip us down and carve a hole in our hearts, but it’s not foreign to us. As difficult and painful as it is, grief is your birthright.
2. Talk about what happened: Thankfully, the majority of Nova Scotians didn’t experience the events of April 18/19 2020 first-hand, but each of us was impacted and each of us carries an emotional imprint of those days. There is a difference between reporting or reenacting the gruesome details of the murders and being gently curious about how the murders changed or challenged our experience of living and being alive. Whether we are survivors, bystanders or front-line responders, sharing together with open hearts and minds will be crucial to our well-being in the long run. We need to shine light in the darkness and undo the aloneness that has kept each of us isolated in our own version of events. Some of us may need to seek specialized help, especially those who were closest to the massacre, who lost people, who helped in a
mbulances, hospitals, morgues and pursued the killer along those highways of violence. But for most of us, a friend, pastor, therapist or mentor will do the trick.
3. Acknowledge our feelings: The reason we avoid talking about ugly, uncomfortable or disturbing events is that doing so makes us feel physical pain or dis-ease. We don’t always recognize that while Boston Strong, Vegas Strong, and Nova Scotia Strong, are uplifting slogans, they also mask and defend against a deep emotional vulnerability. Indomitable strength is not the only community resource that can weld broken hearts.
It takes real courage to feel our own pain. Courage is that heartfelt tenderness that dares to be present to our hurts in the middle of chaos and uncertainty while still recognizing limitations. Seeking help, commiseration, and companionship in our suffering makes encountering our hidden or unfelt feelings a lot easier. When we are gently present to our feelings, we begin to move away from terror, rage, numbness and silence.
4. Talk about Wortman: In the chilling days after a violent event, we darken the perpetrator and bring light to the victims. But to regain a deep sense of safety in our communities, Gabriel Wortman needs to be perceived as a person, for we presently either overlook him or demonize him. Phrases like “mass murderer” and words like “massacre” are descriptors with no boundaries; attach them to a man and we create some kind of limitless evil entity.
To see Wortman as he was, we must contend with the fact that the man who perpetrated historic levels of violence, both physical and emotional, against so many of his friends, neighbours and fellow citizens was, whether we like it or not, one of us. Canada’s most notorious mass murderer was a Nova Scotian. There is a mistaken belief that if we talk about Wortman, we eclipse the dead and their legacy. But this is not true. We can hold our dead in love and light while meeting Wortman’s presence in our community head-on.
By talking about Wortman, we learn that even abhorrent deeds are the products of regular, albeit damaged, people. Wortman’s violence outmatches that experienced daily in Canada only in its density and intensity. We don’t need to hide from him anymore.
5. Ask ourselves if we have changed: I recently met a paraplegic who explained his nightly self-care ritual:. Because he had no feeling in his torso and legs, he had no way of knowing if he was cut, bruised or bleeding. To ensure he was okay, he had to stop for a moment and examine himself carefully, slowly and gently. We cannot tend to a wound until we feel a wound.
Likewise, we who have lived through this terrible event must pause and ask ourselves if the murders changed anything about how we live, feel, think, trust, or relate to each other. When an RCMP cruiser passes you on the highway, what kind of thoughts enter your mind? Are you able to drive along the Fundy Shore without intrusive images popping into your head? Do you find yourself wondering about which of your neighbours might have guns at home? Do you feel as safe today as you felt on April 17, 2020? Be curious about these questions and talk to those you love about what you discover as you reflect on them.
6. Engage in public ritual: COVID-19 chained us to hearth and home exactly when we needed to be gathering with the victims and families and letting our tears join in a river of grief. As more of us become vaccinated and we move as a province out of a state of emergency, ritual makers, friends and family, artists, musicians, clergy and community activists need to join forces in love to create sacred spaces of healing and restoration.
It was good to see that the Nova Scotia Remembers Legacy Society is working to create a permanent memorial site as well as a gathering on the anniversary of the shootings. There is no best-before date when it comes to people getting the care they deserve. Grief is always ready and waiting inside of us. Let’s talk to the people who need our help and figure out how we can lift their hearts and celebrate and mourn the people who we lost: Heidi Stevenson, Lisa McCully, Sean McLeod, Alanna Jenkins, Emily Tuck, Jolene Oliver, Aaron Tuck, Jamie and Greg Blair, Corrie Ellison, Gina Goulet, Tom Bagley, Kristen Beaton, Joey Webber, John Joseph Zahl and Elizabeth Joanne Thomas, Lillian Campbell Hyslop, Dawn Madsen and Frank Gulenchyn, Heather O'Brien, Joy and Peter Bond.
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In the span of a life, a year isn’t a long time. Especially where trauma is involved. It takes on average five years to recover from murder, suicide or other violent death, so we have plenty of time to care for our wounded, to bandage up our hearts and feel safe again. There is no rush, but we also need not delay. The time is right.
As we cross the threshold of this sad anniversary, as we awaken with a sob into our collective sadness, may we lay our hands upon the shattered coast, wash our wounds in a sea of salty tears, and walk home again together along the rocky shores of grief.
