If it is true that death shakes men as the wind shakes trees, my grandfather wished the afflicted family to have the resilience of the palm tree. For what ? When the storm is unleashed upon it, he said, the palm resists. It faces the gusts, it dances to the rhythm of the wind, at the risk of losing a few leaves in the process, it bends and folds, but it does not collapse.
After this allegory, my ancestor reminded those who remained that the memories of the deceased would help them weather the storm. Thanks to them, they could better take the hit and experience mourning, to then reorganize, close ranks and start living again. When the winds die down, the palm straightens up and, one day, it spreads its foliage to the beneficial rays of the sun.
If this formula applies to, say, more conventional disappearances, the shock is much more terrible when it comes to the death of a child. Even more when it occurs without warning, as in this daycare center in Sainte-Rose in Laval.
It happens that a wind hits so hard that the palm tree, however resilient, ends up leaning over, overcome by the beginning of uprooting. It will then take much more time and energy to get up and regain some balance.
It is this drama that played out this week. The grieving parents will have to muster all their courage not to collapse. Imagine the time, the strength and the support it will take for them to get back on their feet… Imagine a mother who drops off her offspring at a daycare and is told an hour later that her child has died in circumstances as dramatic as they are incomprehensible. .
My grandmother, who very early suffered the loss of two of her young children, used to say: “If you kill a young hippopotamus, you have also killed its mother. She said that it is as if an evil force had entered her body to empty it of all the juice that makes you want to live. Until her death, I saw Grandma put her hands on a tree, a huge baobab we called the Mother, a kind of vegetable matriarch surrounded by her descendants whose story I told in a book. entitled Give back to these trees what belongs to these trees.
I sometimes wondered why she wandered under this giant sap that still adorns our fields. I learned it after his death, through the mouth of my father: if this baobab occupied such a special place in his heart, it was because his two children, Sikh and Madlene, carried away by an epidemic in the flower of the age, rest in its shadow. Perhaps she heard the breath of her deceased offspring through her branches… A few years ago, I wanted to erect a tombstone to mark their burial, but I gave up on doing so. I prefer to see the baobab as their mausoleum and imagine traces of their components in the trunk and branches of this tree which has always been generous with our family.
If death listened to the will of the living, no one would attend the burial of his child. So said my grandmother. The ancestor of my Gaspé friend Mathieu Fournier had lost one of his sons to the sea. He was barely 18 years old. When she looked at the big blue, through the kitchen window at Saint-Maurice-de-l’Échouerie, she said to him, in a low voice: “You’re very beautiful, but you’re very cruel.” This funny feeling, where admiration and resentment intertwined, is probably the closest thing to resignation. Like my grandmother, this Gaspé native never really recovered from the loss of her son. The sea, which she had in front of her all her life, reminded her of this every day, in its peaceful splendor as well as in its wild outbursts. This is what the buses that travel all over town risk becoming for these families in Laval.
My parent’s heart bleeds at the disappearance of these children. I wish parents to have the resilience of the palm tree and the strength of the baobab tree.
I wish them to be surrounded by these big-hearted humans who are the best medicine for their fellow human beings. I wish them to take advantage, well beyond this media hype which will end up fading much more quickly than pain and incomprehension, from this solidarity of an entire community which, when it closes ranks and stands together next door, perhaps does not make the pain disappear, but blocks the winds that continue to blow and protects, at least partially, these unjustly weakened souls.