December 6th, 1989

In the life of this city there are few anniversaries that are as difficult and painful as December 6th. It was on this day that 25 year-old Marc Lépine walked through the doors of École Polytechnique de Montréal carrying a semi-automatic rifle and proceeded to murder 14 young women before taking his own life. His motive, as declared in a suicide note, was to seek vengeance against the "feminists who ruined his life."

That was twenty-one years ago.

For most Montrealers, as much as we are still horrified by this event, we have moved beyond the question of how it could happen here. It did, and very little we can do or think will change that. We still feel wounded and angry by the events of that day, and perhaps even a modicum of shame.

For the media, today will be an opportunity to revisit this story, searching for a new angle, a tidbit of information that perhaps the public didn't know. They will stir up issues surrounding gun control, violence against women and gender equality. They will send reporters to École Polytechnique to cover events taking place to mark the anniversary. They will try to secure a sound-bite from those who witnessed the event and the parents who lost their child on that tragic day.

For the politicians it will be a time to align themselves on the right side of the related issues. To stand with family members and parents who lost their children. To make speeches and promises and perhaps steal a positive photo-op. For those politicians who oppose legislation created in the wake of those murders, they will skulk through the shadows of power, offering their sympathies when cornered, but little in the way of contrition. They will lay low, hoping that the next 24 hours will pass without having to offer a substantive explanation of their position.

Long after the reporters have moved on to their next story. The cameras no longer flash, the television crews have packed up their equipment. The politicians have returned to Ottawa, Quebec or City Hall to games of polemics and endless debate. When the candles have long since burned out, and the flowered wreaths lie beneath a thin layer of snow on a cold and dark winters night, one indelible fact will remain.

Mothers and fathers will awake to another day when their child is no longer there. The child they once held in their arms, nurtured, protected, loved. They will live yet another day faced with the hollow reality that every parent fears most, they have outlived their child. To know that their most precious gift was wrenched from their lives in an act devoid of reason, or justification, or compassion.

There is no right way to mark this occasion. That we commemorate it with what has become at times a predictable, almost routine order of events seems a terrible injustice, and yet what else can we do? We owe at least a moment of our time this day to consider the pain of those affected by this tragedy. Not to pontificate, to ask questions, to assign blame, to make promises we cannot keep. Simply to hold them in our hearts, to carry the weight of their grief upon our shoulders, to mourn and remember their children as if they were our own. For that is what they have become.

Geneviève Bergeron
Hélène Colgan
Nathalie Croteau
Barbara Daigneault
Anne-Marie Edward
Maud Haviernick
Maryse Laganière
Maryse Leclair
Anne-Marie Lemay
Sonia Pelletier
Michèle Richard
Annie St-Arneault
Annie Turcotte
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz