The connecters

Posted on 11 January 2020

A national tragedy is also many local ones

When I found out passengers destined for Canada were on-board the crashed flight PS752, the first thing I did was look for the names of my friends among the dead. Seeing none, I reached out to find out if they had been spared the same grief I had. Some had. Others had not.

“It’s like a nightmare,” one told me of his night spent in a group chat as people he knew told him about people they knew who had been lost in the wreckage.

By now, we’ve heard the stories. A family of three from Ajax. A dentist from Halifax. International student returning to studies in Vancouver and Edmonton. Newlyweds.

What strikes me about all of this is that unlike other national tragedies to occur in my lifetime, which have been largely geographically centred, this one has victims across the country. Communities from coast to coast are feeling the loss of friends and neighbours. Every provincial paper and news site seems to have a picture and story about the people in that particular place who are gone. It’s a national tragedy, but also multiple very local ones.

I’ve seen some people mention their social media feeds don’t seem to be reflecting this grief. That has not been my experience. My timelines have been full of personal stories and reaction from people who see themselves in the victims of this tragedy.

To be fair, this isn’t necessarily through some great effort on my part. It’s largely because I went to a university that had enough of an Iranian student community that I happened to be in the same rooms as some of them often enough that we became friendly. They, on the other hand, had gone through a lot to get to Canada: financially, academically, personally. If you’ve never asked someone what it takes to become a member of this country, take the time to learn. It’s an incredible commitment.

The challenges are compounded when your adopted country ceases diplomatic relations with your birth one, and many of the largest airlines and airports on your new continent don’t connect to the place of your heritage. That’s why so many people bound for Canada were connecting to Kiev: the feat of getting from Tehran to Toronto is not an easy one. Imagine loving a place so much you’d go through such lengths just to see it.

Of course when we love a place, what we actually love is its people. It’s difficult to cut ties to a distant country when it contains your aunts, cousins, and grandparents, even as you forge friendships, families and romances half a word away. And love like that is enough to make you want to fly back and forth, even as diplomatic tensions between governing powers rise.

The crash of flight PS752 feels personal to me and to people across Canada because the people on board it were connectors. They were individuals and families who refused to see the world as a place of enemies or civilizational clashes. They built lives and relationships that bridged cultures and continents at a time when doing so feels increasingly difficult. By refusing to give in to fear and paranoia, they made the world feel a little more human. They connected us, in life and — tragically, unfairly, all too soon — in death. How we honour that legacy is something we should take seriously.

Filed under: Canada