Tonight marks two weeks since the explosion and fire at Lakeland Mills in Prince George that killed Alan Little and Glenn Roche.
Twenty-two of their colleagues were injured in the tragedy and a handful of them still remain in hospital with a long, excruciating road to
recovery ahead of them.
To say the events of that night will change the lives of everyone working in the sawmill and planer mill that night, and the lives of their friends and families, is a ridiculous
understatement.
There's the deep grief and the haunting, horrific memories of men being burned while running for their lives. There's the mourning for the Little and Roche families.
There's the mental and physical injuries for the survivors, which will remain for a lifetime.
As a story in Saturday's Citizen pointed out, there are also financial issues that have to be faced.
For the millworkers, mortgages won't wait for long and car payments, lines of credit and
other obligations won't wait at all.
Paperwork has to be filed for Employment Insurance and other financial support.
Meanwhile, tough decisions will have to be made under extreme duress about every household expense.
Can we afford to keep the second vehicle?
Can we afford the gas and insurance on our new truck?
Can we afford to keep our children in minor hockey and dance?
How will we pay off the credit card that covered our anniversary visit to Las Vegas last fall or our family holiday to Disneyland at
Christmas?
How will we make up that lost income?
How long until I can go back to work?
How long will it take to find work?
Decisions will be made. Some of them will be right and some will be wrong but a decision will be made and will have to be lived with. Often, the choice will be between a bad option and a worse option. Most choices will bring other problems and worries to the surface that will need to be dealt with as well.
And through the crisis, life will change and the new normal will emerge.
It's too soon to say what it will look like for any of the Lakeland victims but a new life is already starting to take shape.
There are only two certainties in life after April 23, 2012 - it will be different from before and its outcome will be unpredictable.
Psychologists have done extensive studies on people during and after excruciating personal loss, hoping to learn from both the people who never seem to recover from the worst moment of their life and the people who somehow bounce back even better than before. How does time stay frozen in that tragedy for one person while another finds the strength to build a new life and even find happiness?
Cognitive psychologists who specifically study happiness, like Daniel Gilbert, the author of Stumbling On Happiness, admit there's no real way to predict who can emerge and who can't from life-changing crisis but there are some common
characteristics among the ones who do.
For starters, they experience and imagine time differently. They don't remember bad times as well as the good. Their plans for the future are fewer and more flexible. They don't dwell too much on either the past or the future but live in the moment.
They also experience the present differently. People who emerge from crisis as good or even better than before see themselves less as the lead actor in the movie of their life. They more deeply appreciate the effects they have on others and others have on them.
And, perhaps most importantly, they have more flexible definitions of happiness and sadness. They can be happy and sad at the same time. They don't force themselves to be happy for appearances. They don't expect happiness to come their way just because they're a good person. To tie it all together, the people who accept the randomness of happiness (and of life itself), rather than actively look for it only in the places they believe it should be, are more likely to cope during life-altering
crisis. There are difficult weeks and months ahead for the victims of this disaster but hopefully for all of them, the days will eventually be brighter and easier, the nights less dark and painful. If they are patient and we are supportive of them, they will eventually stumble on a new kind of happiness.
It won't be the same as before. It'll be sadder and wiser but it will be appreciated more than ever.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
