Death in the cold: A daughter relives her father's tragic passing

Raphal Andr's deathlast month, just outside an overnight homeless shelter that had closedfor reasons related toCOVID-19, prompted outrage and disbelief from many Quebecers.

For Gabrielle Vachon-Laurent it was a plunge back in time, to the day she learnedher father haddied.

Over video-conference, in the midst of a busy office at the Native Friendship Centre in Trois-Rivires, she radiatescalm. She says there's magic to talking to strangers. She laysout the dramatic events of her adolescence in a matter-of-fact tone of voice.

Twelve years ago, when she was 16, Vachon-Laurent was awakened one winter morning by her grandmother. Her father had been found dead. Some passersby had discovered his body in the street at dawnin the Innu community of Mani-Utenam, near Sept-les, on Quebec's North Shore.

"They told us he had been using drugs. And that he'd been wandering outside without proper clothes. They found him in the snow," she said.

Her father, whose name Vachon-Laurent prefersnot be made public,wasn't homeless. But shesaidwhen he was using, there were days on end when he didn't go home.

'I knew he had a problem'

At the time, Vachon-Laurent lived with her mother and two sisters 300 kilometers away, in their home community of Pessamit. The day before he died, her dadcalled, wanting to visit. The request prompted a difficult decision. Vachon-Laurent is the one who made it.

"I knew he had a problem and I had seen what that did in our house the anger, the violence. So I said no, he couldn't come back," she said.

The next morning, he was gone.

When Vachon-Laurentread about Raphael Andr, she imagined his family getting the news of his death. She wondered what his life had been like before he ended up on the street. And she started thinking about her father.

He wasn't always around when Vachon-Laurent was a child. Like Andr, hehad done prison time. During that period, it was normal for her and her sisters to go visit him in jail.

"We had a calendar with dates and times, and we knew that was when we were going to see him," she said.

The heavy burden of tragedy

They thought of jail as a safe place for their dad to be.

When he was home and using, there were sudden flare-ups of anger, which he took out on her mother.

Vachon-Laurent's mother eventually kept him away from the family home in Pessamit. But he was always there on special occasions. There were Christmas gifts and birthday wishes. When her father died, amid the anger and the confusion, Vachon-Laurent felt like any other adolescent girl who loses her dad.

"I missed him. There was that paternal side that was always there. But there was so much anger. I kept asking myself why did this happen to myfamily?" she said.

Vachon-Laurent felt burdened by the weight of the tragedy. She felttrapped in a cycle she couldn't get out of. She found it hard to think about the future.

She credits her mother for sending her to aschool near Baie-Comeau. There, she perfected her Frenchand started to develop self-confidence and a sense of possibility.

But it was at Kiuna College in Odanak where programs are designed for Indigenous students that Vachon-Laurent started to find answers to her questions. She studied the history of the residential school system, something she'd always known about, but had never really felt directly connected to.

"I started seeing how my family had been hurt by their terrible experiences in that system," she said. "I could see that it had really left a scar on me, too.''

Once she could place her own family's experience in the context of that history, Vachon-Laurent moved a little closer to being able to forgive her father.

Vachon-Laurent has been thinking about the deaths of Raphael Andr and Joyce Echequan (the Atikamekw woman who died in September at the Joliette Hospital after recording personnel using racial slurs). She draws a straight line between the two: vulnerable Indigenous people, alone in the system, and unable to get the help they needed.

Her own work at the Native Friendship Centre puts her at the intersection between Indigenous people in need of help and a system that often isn't sensitive to their cultural and historic difference.

"Whether they come to the city to study or to work or they're homeless, the biggest difficulty for First Nations people in the city is finding the support they need," she said.

Vachon-Laurent describes the natural solidarity that springs up between Indigenous people in a place like Trois-Rivires:"If I need a car seat and I ask, someone will come up with one."

But there are some problems that can't be solved neighbour-to-neighbour. When people are in need of psychological support or medical help, the Centre helps Indigenous people find the entry point to get services in the broader community.

But Vachon-Laurent dreams of more. She wants to create a network that would provide accompaniment and translation services to Indigenous people once they're in the system, and sensitivity training to the people they turn to for help.

Vachon-Laurent feelslife has given her the tools to do that. But she still has days when she's wracked by self-doubt, and goes back to thinking the circumstances of her childhood mean she wasn't destined to be happy or fulfilled. When she looks around her, though, she can measure the distance she's travelled since that winter morning when her world came apart.

"I look at my son and he has such admiration for his father. And my partner is so wonderful. I'm raising my child the way I would have liked to be raised," she said.

In the days sinceAndr's death, Gabrielle's been thinking about how hearing her grandmother's stories of her dad's happy youth helped soften the blow of his death.

"That's what you hold on to," she said. "It made me think my father made a success of his life's mission, despite his tragic end."