How can we make sense of the incomprehensible?

The gull lay bleeding in the sand at our feet, yellow webbed feet pointing skyward, wide black eyes a mix between panicked and uncomprehending.

A moment earlier, she had been soaring above Lake Manitoba, one of many gliding across a gorgeous blue July sky.

But now, on her back in the sand, a pulsing bleeding wound where her left wing was so cleanly severed by a power line, I am watching my children go from learning to skip stones to realizing the horror that had just dropped at their feet.

We’d stopped at The Narrows for lunch and a swim, partway to a sun-dance ceremony near Crane River. It had been a perfect day, a rare one where my three children seemed to be getting along. Lake Manitoba was positively gleaming, and only a handful of families were on the beach.

I had just been chatting with another mom, a fellow teacher, about the challenges of domestic harmony, laughing and trading parenting slogans like “All feelings are welcome, but all actions are not,” when we were both suddenly focused on what exactly those feelings should be, and how to coach our kids through it.

My boys leaned over the gull and looked to me to help it. “It’s bleeding. What can we do? How can we help it?” Another child had recovered the severed wing in nearby tall grass and was carrying it back to the bird.

How can I tell them there’s nothing we can do but watch it die? How can I be powerless to comfort this creature or the eyes that look to me for safety and a promise that all will be right?

How horrific that tragedy and death can fall at our feet on any given day, that at any time we may have to make sense of the incomprehensible for our children. Now, as a nation, we are having to do this, to confront the impossible yet ever-present fact we can do everything right and still be unable to protect our children.

I was pregnant with my first son when the Sandy Hook mass shooting took place in the U.S., when 20 kindergarteners and six adults were murdered in their school. I had been painting the baseboards in the nursery, and put down the brush and cried.

A few years later, 19 fourth-graders and two teachers were killed in Uvalde, Texas, when my son was in the same grade.

But that was America.

We have gun laws, we have better mental-health support and free health care. These horrors don’t happen here.

We think: not here, not in Canada, not our children. We think: not on a day so perfect, or so normal, or in a place so out of the way, so peaceful.

We have to comfort ourselves with these lies, because to consider the reality and the risk is unfathomable.

We have solid gun laws, we say. We have a good health-care system.

It’s taken me a couple of weeks to even begin to think about the recent school massacre in Tumbler Ridge, B.C. At first, as a parent, a teacher and a Canadian, I thought perhaps I could lock it out of my conscience, that I could hold the grief of those affected without considering the horror that summoned it, and what it means for the safety of all our children.

My eldest son is now in Grade 7, the same as the student victims who were killed at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School, and I am brought again to realizing the intractable and absolute vulnerability that is parenting.

With Tumbler Ridge, we are forced to consider that even on the normal days here in Canada, we may find ourselves at a narrows, at a place between two realities, a pin dropped between the before and the after.

Somewhere within us we know this is possible, though even considering we may not be able to protect our children is a horror we can hardly bear.

With Tumbler Ridge we must face the reality that on summer days or in the dead of winter, tragedy and agony can fall at our feet at any moment, and demand we take control of a new and incomprehensible reality.

winnipegfreepress.com/rebeccachambers