It’s been five years. I was at work that day. I had just finished seeing a client. I was putting away toys and thinking about what I needed for the next child coming after lunch. My colleague stopped in the doorway. She asked, “Don’t you have a daughter at Dawson? Is she at school today?” Her voice sounded funny. I looked up. She continued, “There’s something going on at Dawson. My friend texted me that there’s shooting.” The world slowed down. I reached to the back of a shelf where we kept the CD-radio we used for summer camp. I couldn’t understand why it would not plug in, until I saw my hand was shaking. My office filled with my colleagues.
We listened. It was excited, fractured, dramatic reporting. There was one gunman, or several gunmen. There was shooting with automatic weapons outside and inside the college. Students were laying on the pavement shot or running for safety. There may be gunmen in the metro. I remember calling my daughter. First the phone rang, but then the calls would not go through. We didn’t know they had closed down cell phone transmission around Dawson. I called and called. It seemed to take forever. Finally she answered, her voice high and breaking. She was on Sherbrooke Street across from Dawson. She did not have her bag, her books, her bus pass. My normally self-possessed daughter just kept saying, “What should I do, what should I do?” I was on the way out the door to find her somehow. She said her friend’s father had arrived and she would come to my office. She held it together until she saw me. We both cried and held on to each other. She said, “Mom, I was so scared.”
She had been in one of her art studio courses that morning one floor down and a few doors from the cafeteria where the shooting ended. Her instructor usually gave them a break right around noon. It was late today. When they got their break she and a few of her friends stayed in the classroom working while the others went for coffee . Suddenly a few more students rocketed into the classroom saying someone was shooting. They could then hear gunshots. They hid behind some equipment trying to be still, trying to be quiet. They could hear footsteps in their corridor and the doors of neighbouring classrooms being opened and slammed shut. They wondered if someone with a gun would find them and shoot them. When the door to their classroom opened they were paralyzed by fear. It was security checking and locking classrooms. A police officer led them from the classroom to the safe corridor they had established on the street outside. They were told to take nothing, be quiet, and run.
It was a difficult time. My daughter was alternately angry, sad, fearful, and outraged. As information started to flow the questions came. How could this happen? Where did he get so many automatic weapons? How could his family and friends not know he was going to do this? And why did he do this? I had no answers for her. She was outraged by endless media interviews of students speaking of their relationship to the student who died. She said, “But they didn’t know her!” or “They weren’t at school that day.” Somehow she felt that student’s privacy was being invaded. A memorial of flowers and tokens of remembrance grew along the college fence. A few days later my daughter asked if it would be right if she put flowers at the site. She knew who the young woman was, but she had never spoken to her. I tried to say it was good to show respect. This horror happened to all of them and radiated out beyond the college, the city or even the country. She needed to grieve for Anastasia, for the students who were injured, and for herself.
I drove her and her friend to Atwater market. They bought their flowers. They wanted to go by themselves so I drove them to Dawson. I watched them walk down the street clutching their flowers and each other. It broke my heart.
I don’t remember the gunman’s name. I think I refuse to remember his name. I do remember Anastasia’s name. That is as it should be.
