“I spent a horrible night sitting in the auditorium. Each hour, they came in to list more victims. Sometimes there was only one name. Then, at 4 AM, they read her name. It was though a curtain had closed on me.”
"After the tragedy, the media called them ‘victims’ or ‘people.’ They refused to say that it was fourteen women who had been murdered. The first person to put a gender on the victims was a woman: Lynn Moore, from The Gazette. Finally, we could start discussing violence against women in the public place.
“The way we look at victims is changing. It used to be that if you denounced your attacker, it was you who was disturbing the peace.”
Sylvie Haviernick, sister of Maud Haviernick, one of the fourteen women massacred at the École Polytechnique de Montréal, December 6, 1989, fifteen years ago today.
Being from the US, I did not know what this was about, so I looked it up.
The nut who caused the tragedy was some kind of crazy anti-feminist type, and his homicidal plan backfired bigtime.
Here’s a link for those similarly ignorant as myself.
You have my deepest sympathy. I can still remember hearing the report on the radio as I was getting ready for work. All the energy was sucked out of me when I heard it. They all seemed like such great women. I also remember how it seemed the entire nation was outside holding candles, and I remember seeing Brian Mulrooney out there as well.
Tough to forget.
It happened during my last year of high school, and the next year I was among the men wearing white ribbons at memorial services.
My wife picked up a scholarship named for Anne-Marie Edward a few years after the massacre.
I’d forgotten this. It happened on my 25th birthday. My brother, father and the gentleman I’ve been seeing are engineers; I was a translator back then and am now a programmer. I’ve always been independent, intelligent, and an unabashed feminist, precisely the kind of woman this man hated so much he killed them. It rattled me then, and it still disturbs me now.
I am a programmer, and a good one. I’ve also never married and enjoy my independence. I do not believe I have it at the expense of any man and I will not apologize to anyone for who I am or who I have become. I will continue to hold my head high and live my life as I see fit. If anyone out there has the temerity to suggest I should get out of the workplace and let a family man take my job, my response is “Fine. Is that an offer of marriage?”
I’d forgotten this evil in a world which has seen so many. It should not be forgotten, nor should the women whose only crime was wanting a good, interesting career for themselves.
This happened eighteen days before I was born. I did not know about it until I was in grade one, when our flag was put at half-mast and my teacher explained to us that before we were born, a bad man killed fourteen women. With my friends and peers, it is customary to put little symbols/numbers/words in front of your MSN screen name (yes, I am aware that it is stupid…). Anyways, I put a 1415 in front of my MSN screen name (14 women killed 15 years ago.) And no one understood what it was about. No one. I was so shocked.
Every time I wrote out the date today, my mind searched for whatever it was that was screaming in the background…“this date means something!” The second I glanced at your title I knew, and I wish I had remembered sooner. What a horrible event, and we really should never forget. Thank you for the reminder.
Well, well, well. It seems something has been “forgotten” (actually, I don’t remember hearing about this at all). The 1989 articles were the most recent newspaper accounts referring to his original name.
It made a big impression on me too, at the time. I had graduated from a women’s college and remembered the feeling of vulnerability when yet another artist’s rendition of a rapist or stalker was plastered on our dorm doors as another criminal to watch out for on our wooded campus.
But we never had anything as horrible as what Montreal faced. God bless their memories.
Maybe it’s not rational, but the last thing I want to do is remember that guy’s birth-name – I actively try to forget his adopted name.
It infuriates me that his name and likeness are etched into my brain, while I find it hard to hold the image or name of any one of the women he murdered in my head for any length of time.
Even in my post above, I searched for the synonym “observe” because the idea of using his Christian name in that context rankled. To hell with him. I don’t want to remember a single personal detail about him.
