Grief weighs on Lac-Mégantic as a somber concert marks the 10th anniversary of the deadly explosion

Louise Latulip walked up the steps of the Sainte-Agnès de Lac-Mégantic church overlooking what used to be a bustling downtown and thought back to 10 years ago.

The night before a train carrying 72 crude oil tankers razed the core of the town in Quebec’s Eastern Townships just north of Maine, Latulip was asleep a few houses away.

The noise just after 1am woke her up.

“I thought it was a plane that crashed. We walked to the corner and then we saw what happened,” said Latulip.

Exactly 10 years later, Latulip attended a concert at the church – the first of a series of events marking the 10th anniversary of one of Canada’s worst train disasters.

The city was destroyed and 47 people died.

“I felt it was my duty to be here,” Latulip said, adding that she visits the memorial often throughout the year.

“It’s my way of saying rest easy.”

Together with dozens of residents, she entered the church at sunset just before 7 p.m., listening to a baroque music concert with the Le Petit Rien ensemble.

Just after 1 a.m. on Thursday, the town holds a candlelight vigil to mark the moment the train started rolling towards Lac-Mégantic. At 11 a.m. they hold a memorial mass and later in the evening there is a concert at the Parc des Vétérans.

The city’s Musi-Café holds its own concert at 9 p.m. on Fridays

Lise Michaud and her husband Yvon Vanasse drove to Lac-Mégantic for the first time since July 6, 2013 to attend the commemoration. Ten years ago, they were staying at a local inn when the train derailed.

“I feel sad and heavy,” said Michaud. She says that her return to the city gave her unusual dreams.

They narrowly escaped the explosion. They stayed in the center, but then decided to move because it was too noisy in the center. If their accommodation had not changed, she said they would have been among the victims.

Stéphane Vachon, a long-time resident of the city, will attend all the events in the city this week. He says it is part of his healing process to pay tribute to the lives lost.

“When something like that happens, it forces you to heal, but also to look forward,” Vachon said.

“I think we did a good job… Healing is variable, it depends on each person.”

But he says it’s important to respect townspeople who choose not to attend anniversary events. For many, they only mark the anniversary – still struggling with the grief of losing so many friends, neighbors and loved ones.

Working through grief

Wynne Parkin, another longtime resident, is spending the anniversary at home. The events of the early morning of July 6 are “burnt” in her memory.

Her 13-year-old daughter woke her up at 1:15 am

“She said ‘Mom, I think the aliens landed because the sky is lit up,'” Parkin said, standing on the porch of her lakeside estate.

“So I walked to the end of the street and the sky was on fire and it looked like a nuclear bomb.”

“We could see everything on fire and I was like oh my god my friends live there. So I’m on the phone but no one is answering their phone,” Parkin said as her voice cracked.

Her three friends died that morning. She says she still can’t shake the feeling of looking out over the lake 10 years ago.

“It was the visual, but it was the sound,” Parkin said. “It sounded like a monster.”

Six months after the tragedy, Parkin, an artist, stopped painting. But in the end I saw painting as a way to heal.

She created four paintings dedicated to the tragedy. One painting, nearly five feet high, depicts the disaster and a plume of smoke and fire over the city, while another pays homage to all the dead in the inferno.

Another piece shows the downtown as it was before the disaster, and a smaller neutral painting shows three sailboats. Parkin says they are her three friends sailing “into the fog”.

“That process has kind of helped me work through my grief,” Parkin said, looking over her shoulder at her paintings resting on an easel.

“I have to paint this ugliness and then I tried to do it in a comforting way… I can’t get over it the people who lost loved ones, that hurts me.”