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David Gibson is haunted by what he saw when the OC Transpo bus he was riding hit a Via train almost two years ago.
Now battling PTSD, Gibson shares his story of hidden wounds, anger, guilt and a life untethered by a few unforgettable seconds.
The bus stop is 386 steps from David Gibson’s front door.
His lungs fill with crisp morning air as he passes a familiar row of houses. The sun shines. His mind wanders.
What’s coming up at work today? Do I need to pick up groceries? What are we doing this weekend?
He arrives at his stop and waits in the shadow of a maple tree until the 76 express bus rolls up.
It’s not the regular driver. He figures the guy probably has the day off. He climbs eight steps to the upper deck and takes an aisle seat near the back, on the driver’s side. He likes the view from up there.
At Fallowfield station, passengers shuffle on and off the bus. A young man he knows, the son of a long-time co-worker, moves to an open seat at the front.
The double-decker pulls away and proceeds around a curve. Gibson removes his earbud headphones to reach for something in his bag. He looks out the window to the east and notices a line of cars stopped.
The next few seconds splinter into vivid snapshots: Oncoming train, flashing lights, screaming people. “Please stop!”
POOF. The moment of impact is a cloud of dust.
He grabs the headrest bar. A woman is thrown against him violently and falls into the aisle. Another man lands on top of her. The mangled bus sways from side to side like a boat in an angry sea as each train car rolls past.
The cloud of dust — or is it smoke? — is pierced by cries and moans and disbelief.
“It’s OK,” a voice calls out. “You can get down the stairs.”
Gibson and two other men help the injured woman onto a seat. He gives her a tissue for her bloodied lip and lets her use his phone. He waits with her until help arrives, peering out a window on the driver’s side where bodies and debris are scattered.
“What are you looking at?” she asks.
“You don’t want to see,” he says.
Gibson was on the upper deck of the OC Transpo bus when it slammed into a Via train on Sept. 18, 2013. Six people were killed and many others injured.
Six people were killed when that OC Transpo double-decker bus crashed through rail-crossing warning gates and slammed into a Via passenger train just before 9 a.m. on Sept. 18, 2013, at the spot where the Transitway crosses the rail line just west of Woodroffe Avenue in Barrhaven.
Words fail to express how much the families of Michael Bleakney, Connor Boyd, Karen Krzyzewski, Rob More, Kyle Nash and driver Dave Woodard lost that day.
But the wreckage of the crash and the painful memories it stirs are not theirs alone. They are shared by dozens of people who also rode the 76 that day; people whose injuries are both visible and unseen, people who often suffer in silence.
More than two-dozen lawsuits filed so far have provided glimpses at the toll on survivors and their families, but much has remained unsaid.
David Gibson walked away from the crash a different man. Flashbacks, guilt and shame have cast a pall over his family. Now, two years on, he shares his difficult and, at times, dark struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder in hopes of easing the burden faced by survivors like him.
“I don’t like the idea of becoming silent,” he says. “I think that is giving in to the accident.”
Gibson has battled flashbacks, guilt and anger since the crash.
Gibson is tall and lean. His long legs make it easy to picture him on the soccer pitch, where he’s spent much of his free time over the years. He wears athletic polo shirts and often has a pair of sunglasses perched on his head. At 53, his brown hair is just starting to grey at the sideburns.
A social worker, Gibson became head of the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre in 2003. At the bustling Rideau Street hub he oversees a staff of more than 200 people and an annual budget of $11.5-million.
He’d always taken the bus to work so his wife, Tammy, could use the family’s only car to shuttle their sons between school and sports practices. Riding the bus gave him time to review emails, decompress after a long day at work or read a mystery book.
Gibson has not read a book since the crash. He’s also quit running and soccer, a sport he played for more than 35 years. His motivation and ability to concentrate, he says, have been wiped out.
“This has been life changing. Relationships, things that were fun, hobbies, work, all sorts of stuff — it is a whole body experience, and that’s been the toughest part of all.”
Gibson and other passengers wait to give statements to police right after the deadly crash on Sept. 18, 2013.
Tammy normally left the house at quarter to nine, which gave her enough time to drop sons Justin and Colin off at school and still get to work at Barrhaven Source for Sports on time.
But she was running a few minutes late that morning and figured she’d soon be delayed further by the morning train, which typically crossed Greenbank Road at around 8:54 a.m. It never came, however, so she sailed across the tracks and arrived on time.
At 9:01, her phone lit up. It was David. She figured he must have forgotten something at home. The call was dropped, but he called her right back. “There’s been an accident,” he said. “We just hit a train.”
Tammy, in disbelief, asked a colleague to drive her to Fallowfield station, near the scene of the crash.
Meanwhile, at John McCrae Secondary School, Justin’s first-period class was working in a computer lab under the watchful eye of a substitute teacher. When the regular teacher arrived, he told students he was delayed by a detour. Something about a crash involving a bus and a train.
Justin and a friend pulled up a news website and found the story. “My mind is racing,” the 19-year-old recalls. “Was my dad on the bus? Is everything OK?”
He ducked out of class to call his mom. Yes, his dad was on the bus, she told him, but he is OK.
Justin went to the school office, where he met his younger brother, Colin. A profound sense of relief left them both in tears, but they eventually returned to class.
At the crash site, dozens of paramedics, firefighters and police officers were attending to the wounded. Gibson was led off the bus by firefighters, who then carried out the injured woman he had stayed with. He’s never seen her since.
He and other passengers gathered on the north side of the Transitway. Others sat in a nearby ditch in tears. Some tried to make calls, but the lines seemed to be jammed.
At one point, police asked them to get on another OC Transpo bus to wait until they had been processed. Most refused.
In a fog, Gibson gave a police statement and was soon allowed to cross under the yellow police tape and join Tammy and her parents.
“When we saw him come towards us, it was the best moment ever,” Tammy recalls. There, by the side of the road, they hugged and cried before walking back to the car and heading home.
The impact of having another passenger thrown into him had sent Gibson limping away from the scene. And as the afternoon unfolded, the pain in his back worsened.
At a walk-in clinic in Barrhaven that afternoon, he saw half a dozen others who had been on the bus. The doctor sent him home with some heavy-duty pain relief.
Amidst his shock and pain was a growing fear about the whereabouts of Connor Boyd, the 21-year-old son of Rob Boyd, who works with Gibson at the health centre. Connor was the young man Gibson had seen move to the front of the bus that morning. No one had heard from Connor all day and his family was understandably panicked.
“Was he on the bus?” Rob Boyd asked during a frantic phone call. The question filled Gibson with dread. He had seen Connor, that much he knew. Everything else was intuition. “I can’t be sure,” he told Boyd.
That evening, Gibson was sitting in the living room with his family when the dreaded call came, confirming the worst. “There’s always that bit of hope that you could be wrong, but …,” he says, the sentence left hanging in midair. “Knowing that it was Connor just made it a hundred times worse.”
It was the first time Colin, 14 at the time, had ever seen his father cry.
Gibson and his wife Tammy in late August: The entire family has been affected by the guilt and anger Gibson continues to experience since the crash.
Nightmares soon became Gibson’s nightly companion. He would thrash about, soaking the sheets with sweat, before waking in a panic and unleashing blood-curdling screams in a voice Tammy had never heard before.
It often took her two hours to settle him down. It was as if she had a newborn all over again.
The sleeplessness lasted for more than a year and only ended last spring after his doctor prescribed medications that finally did the trick. But the cumulative lack of sleep often left him irritable, impatient and easily incensed.
“He can snap at the snap of a finger,” Colin says.
Flashbacks are another constant. Gibson calls them “intrusions” because that’s exactly what they do — take his mind hostage, whether he’s sitting in a meeting, watching television or eating dinner.
The crash happens all over again in the same series of increasingly gruesome snapshots.
Train. Lights. Screams. An arm. A body cut in two.
“It hits you like you’re being sucker punched.”
The unsettling experiences expose emotions he struggles to contain. Anger brims after each set of flashbacks, which can occur as often as five times a day, and often boils over whenever there’s a loud noise or if people come up from behind and startle him. It’s as if the crash altered his innate fight-or-flight response.
His sense of safety is tattered, as is his self-identity as the family’s protector. He had lived each day with the illusion that he was safe, never imagining something this awful could happen to him or his family.
His life had purpose before the crash. He was ambitious, confident, driven, self-assured. He had worked hard for the success he’d achieved and tried to instil that value in his sons. “You make your own best luck” was his motto.
But all that’s gone, too. “It’s like you just don’t have the wind in your sail anymore.”
He feels guilty for being one of the lucky ones who survived, yet he’s unable to coax himself into living a fuller, more joy-filled life, knowing those who died no longer have that option.
He feels guilty about the anguish his family faced that day, and in the days since.
He feels guilty complaining about the lingering pain in his back.
And he feels guilty for not telling Rob Boyd what he knew to be true that day.
Their long working relationship, Gibson says, remains professional, but it’s soaked in sadness now as each man lives through a different and solitary experience of loss.
“Every time you see him, you can’t help but feel for him for the grief and loss he’s suffered,” Gibson says of Boyd, who did not want to be interviewed for this story.
The guilt is like a cancer — it spreads. Tammy feels guilty for not contacting the boys as soon as she knew about the crash, while Justin feels guilty for going off to university in Montreal last year, leaving his family in a time of great need.
Gibson says people tell him all the time he should just get over it and move on. He often tells himself the same thing. And yet here he is two years later, feeling stuck — and ashamed.
“Why am I not able to push it aside and move on?” he wonders.
He retreats further into himself or puts on a mask so others don’t have to see what’s plainly obvious: Who David was is not who David is.
That Gibson feels so much anger, shame and survivor guilt is not surprising to Dr. Ruth Lanius, a psychiatry professor at Western University in London, Ont., and the director of the school’s post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) research unit.
“It can really eat them up,” she says.
It doesn’t matter if the person who died was a loved one, a friend or a stranger, she says: Feeling guilty and questioning why someone lived and another died can be devastating.
Nearly everyone will be affected on some level following a traumatic incident. They may have nightmares, relive the experience through vivid memories, find themselves on edge or be filled with sadness and fear.
These symptoms usually fade in the weeks following the trauma, but for some 15 to 25 per cent of people, that doesn’t happen, Lanius says. These are the people susceptible to developing PTSD.
She describes it as a disorder of the brain, body and mind. What makes PTSD unique is that the memory of the trauma is not a memory of the past, but rather something the brain, body and mind experience as if it’s occurring right now.
Lanius once had a patient who had been stabbed in the neck. He would experience the feeling of blood running down his neck over and over.
Trauma can change the way a brain works. Using MRI scans, Lanius once compared brains processing flashbacks to those recalling memories. The difference was striking: The brains of people with PTSD were activated in areas associated with sensory recall, while the brains of people without PTSD fired in areas associated verbal memory recall. In other words, people with PTSD feel like they are reliving the event, not just remembering it.
Treatment for PTSD focuses on helping people learn to manage their anxiety and triggers, and deal with the intense emotions they might feel.
It may also involve reprocessing the traumatic material and helping desensitize people to it, in order to move the memory into the past so it no longer haunts them. They may always remember the trauma, but they won’t always relive it.
Gibson, who has been diagnosed with PTSD, has seen a psychologist regularly since the week after the crash — something he’d never done before. He’s also tried several different sleep aids, but nothing kept the nightmares at bay until finally, in March, he was prescribed a combination of drugs that shut down his racing mind and let him get some sleep. He also takes anti-anxiety medication every day.
Lanius says couples counselling is common for people with PTSD because the illness can affect the whole family. Tammy has sat in on a session with Gibson’s psychologist, Dr. Larry Cebulski, while Justin recently began to see a counsellor at school.
Seeing Cebulski is like a pressure valve, Gibson says. Their sessions allow him to work through any built up anger, frustration or stress, and learn mindfulness and relaxation techniques.
Lanius says that recovery is possible if survivors can accept that they have become different people following the trauma. “Even though it can feel like it’s never going to end, it is definitely worth it, and many trauma survivors have told me that.”
Fly fishing and holidays are among the few activities that give Gibson joy anymore.
Gibson does have good days, or at least good parts of the day. It’s just that the good moments are so often interrupted by the bad.
He’s at his best, he says, in the morning, and when he’s spending time with Tammy and the boys, either at home or at the family’s beloved summer place, a permanent trailer overlooking a lake near Westport.
Gibson loves fly-fishing and looks like he’s have the time of his life whenever he’s on the river, says Colin. “It’s one of my favourite times with him.”
Travelling also helps. Vacations have been a time to forget what happened and to reconnect as a couple and a family, Tammy says. Gibson may still be haunted by dark thoughts, but it happens less frequently when he’s away from the city and all that remains here to remind him of that day.
The getaways seem vitally important to Tammy, who tentatively admits to shedding many tears and having countless sleepless nights since the crash as she has struggled to keep her husband and family afloat.
“They’re opportunities to see him smile, to see him laugh and to remember that life is still worth living,” she says, eyes rimmed with tears.
Writing has become an outlet for Gibson, who began to keep a journal shortly after the crash. He’s recently compiled dozens of the passages into a book, which he’s named “Requiem for the Fallen Leaves of September.”
Tammy’s read it. Justin and Colin agree writing the book has surely helped their father process what happened to him, but neither is ready to crack the spine just yet.
The book, Gibson writes in the epilogue, has helped reduce his feelings of isolation and diminished some of the emotional impact of the crash. “I never thought in a million years I would end up like this,” he writes.
Nobody wants to talk about trauma, Gibson says. People are often left to deal with it on their own, which could lead to depression, substance abuse, breakups and suicide attempts. That’s why he’s decided to share his story.
The prevailing attitude — to get over it and move on — simply isn’t good enough, Gibson says. “I wish it was that plain and simple, but it’s not.”
He hopes his writing will help others express how they feel and bring the experience of living with trauma out of the shadows and into the public discourse on mental health issues.
“It’s my story, but I think it’s a lot of people’s story. If more people start to see it’s OK and you don’t have to feel shame or hide it, that will give me a lot of meaning, more so than a monument.”
Later this fall, the city will formally open the new Memorial Park at Fallowfield Station. It will be a permanent reminder of how much was lost that day, and hopefully give the families of the dead, as well as those who survived, a spot to gather and grieve.
The crash itself may be receding from the horizon, but there’s still all of those lawsuits against the City of Ottawa, Via Rail and the estate of Dave Woodard, the OC Transpo driver who was killed. The Gibsons met with a lawyer last month and plan to file a lawsuit in the coming days.
Gibson says he’s conflicted about the decision because he doesn’t want to prolong his own suffering, yet he must balance that with the desire he feels for some kind of justice, no matter how imperfect.
Connor Boyd sat a few rows ahead of David Gibson on the ill-fated bus and died in the crash.
There are days when Gibson thinks this is never going to end; days when the obliterated man behind the mask is fully revealed.
He often arrives home from work with nothing left in the tank. The smallest things, such as a mess in the living room, might set him off. His family walks on eggshells around him.
He drinks more than he did before the crash because it helps him slide away from reality for a while. He’ll retreat into a quiet corner of the house, sometimes for hours at a time, so he doesn’t have to see or talk to anyone.
Once, while in the bathtub, during one of the darker moments he describes as a “nothingness kind of place,” Gibson took a razor blade and made several slashes across his stomach, deep enough to draw blood.
The rush of relief that washed over him was soon followed by a wave of embarrassment for what he had done to himself. He slept in an undershirt that night to hide the cuts from Tammy.
The fury that burns inside him — at himself, at the bus driver, at everything that has turned his world upside down — is never far from the surface. It reveals itself when people block the back exit of a bus or when another driver cuts him off. It’s why he seldom drives.
In July, it came to life during an ugly scene at one of Colin’s soccer matches, when Gibson became enraged with a parent from the opposing team who had been taunting a linesman.
“I’m going to f— you up,” Gibson shouted at the man.
The argument carried on to the parking lot after the game and may have turned to blows had Tammy and some parents from the other team not separated the two men.
“I knew he was either going to have the crap beaten out of him or he was going to beat the crap out of someone else and might not have been able to control …,” her voice trails off.
“He’s got so much anger because of what’s happened.”
Gibson says he wasn’t like that before. He had filters that would have prevented such an escalation, but now those filters are gone. Darkness fills the void. “It’s like you’re a shell. You’re not there and you haven’t been there for a long time.”
He is continually haunted by a single, specific memory from the day of the crash: The split second when he saw Connor Boyd one last time before the front of the bus slammed into the train and disappeared into a cloud of smoke.
“I couldn’t do a thing — this is my horror I replay. I wish it was me, not that beautiful lad. This is my f—ing nightmare and there will be no escape, no turning back. Just the realization that I am a f—ing coward not worth shit.”
Connor was the one who died that day, but he took part of Gibson with him.
Gibson at the crash site: ‘To give up is to lose who I was.’
The bus stop is 386 steps from David Gibson’s front door.
His lungs fill with warm air as he passes a familiar row of houses. The sun shines. It’s late August, 2015.
Gibson still rides the express bus to work most mornings, though now he pops an anti-anxiety pill first. His back sweats, his stomach churns and his mind relives the crash.
But he doesn’t give up. He can’t.
People ask him all the time why he still rides the bus when so many other passengers who were on the 76 that day choose a different route now, avoid double-decker buses or drive.
He rides to honour Connor and the other people who died. He rides to honour the people, like himself, whose lives remain forever changed. And he rides because it’s part of who he was and the life he once lived.
“To give up is to lose who I was, and it’s a choice I’m not ready to make.”
mpearson@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/mpearson78
David Gibson’s poems
Bus stop 4608
In 386 steps from my home is bus stop 4608.
I used to think about work, or if we needed groceries…
Now, my steps are less assured, almost hesitant.
I think about my family farewells, hugs and kisses — did I remember to say I love you?
With every step, a painful memory of what was in time a bright autumn morning.
Now, I walk with uncertainty.
Waiting for bus route 76.
Why me? Why not me?
A debt owed.
Separated only by fate.
One family’s loss, another family’s relief.
It just doesn’t seem right — it could have been anyone that autumn morning.
I beat the odds — others did not.
Am I worthy? Am I deserving?
In the meantime, I keep their memory alive as I struggle to make sense with what happened.
To make sense of something I will never understand.
The ripple effect
She describes it as the face of withdrawal,
The switch that has been turned off — but I don’t even realize it.
And, once again, they retreat from me.
They have become a witness to another person they call ‘Dad,’ but don’t understand.
I have become unpredictable to them.
I have become that someone else I don’t want to know.
How they see me, or react to me, is understandable — I just never knew.
Somehow, I get lost within myself and say and do things that are hurtful.
And, sometimes, I just don’t know who I am anymore.
Breakaway solace
In Times Square I feel safe among the thousands of strangers who walk by me.
My story is lost among the nameless humanity.
I am caught up in the neon lights of a New York minute…
It’s funny how I can feel secure when my son feels so overwhelmed.
Is it because I have started to give in? To stop fighting?
I am angry with myself for not being able to get over this.
I feel like people think I’m being dramatic. I don’t know if people understand that I don’t want to be sad and miserable either.
The nightmares that come during the night drain me of hope.
During the day, sometimes these flashbacks seem to come from nowhere — unsettling me.
These pictures in my mind should not be a part of me. These memories hold me tight, till I can hardly breath. Suffocating my spirit.
I found a place no one should ever go — I am not the person who is standing before you, I am the silent one inside…
Lady Liberty, bring me home safely.
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Now battling PTSD, Gibson shares his story of hidden wounds, anger, guilt and a life untethered by a few unforgettable seconds.
*****
The bus stop is 386 steps from David Gibson’s front door.
His lungs fill with crisp morning air as he passes a familiar row of houses. The sun shines. His mind wanders.
What’s coming up at work today? Do I need to pick up groceries? What are we doing this weekend?
He arrives at his stop and waits in the shadow of a maple tree until the 76 express bus rolls up.
It’s not the regular driver. He figures the guy probably has the day off. He climbs eight steps to the upper deck and takes an aisle seat near the back, on the driver’s side. He likes the view from up there.
At Fallowfield station, passengers shuffle on and off the bus. A young man he knows, the son of a long-time co-worker, moves to an open seat at the front.
The double-decker pulls away and proceeds around a curve. Gibson removes his earbud headphones to reach for something in his bag. He looks out the window to the east and notices a line of cars stopped.
The next few seconds splinter into vivid snapshots: Oncoming train, flashing lights, screaming people. “Please stop!”
POOF. The moment of impact is a cloud of dust.
He grabs the headrest bar. A woman is thrown against him violently and falls into the aisle. Another man lands on top of her. The mangled bus sways from side to side like a boat in an angry sea as each train car rolls past.
The cloud of dust — or is it smoke? — is pierced by cries and moans and disbelief.
“It’s OK,” a voice calls out. “You can get down the stairs.”
Gibson and two other men help the injured woman onto a seat. He gives her a tissue for her bloodied lip and lets her use his phone. He waits with her until help arrives, peering out a window on the driver’s side where bodies and debris are scattered.
“What are you looking at?” she asks.
“You don’t want to see,” he says.
*****
Gibson was on the upper deck of the OC Transpo bus when it slammed into a Via train on Sept. 18, 2013. Six people were killed and many others injured.
Six people were killed when that OC Transpo double-decker bus crashed through rail-crossing warning gates and slammed into a Via passenger train just before 9 a.m. on Sept. 18, 2013, at the spot where the Transitway crosses the rail line just west of Woodroffe Avenue in Barrhaven.
Words fail to express how much the families of Michael Bleakney, Connor Boyd, Karen Krzyzewski, Rob More, Kyle Nash and driver Dave Woodard lost that day.
But the wreckage of the crash and the painful memories it stirs are not theirs alone. They are shared by dozens of people who also rode the 76 that day; people whose injuries are both visible and unseen, people who often suffer in silence.
More than two-dozen lawsuits filed so far have provided glimpses at the toll on survivors and their families, but much has remained unsaid.
David Gibson walked away from the crash a different man. Flashbacks, guilt and shame have cast a pall over his family. Now, two years on, he shares his difficult and, at times, dark struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder in hopes of easing the burden faced by survivors like him.
“I don’t like the idea of becoming silent,” he says. “I think that is giving in to the accident.”
*****
Gibson has battled flashbacks, guilt and anger since the crash.
Gibson is tall and lean. His long legs make it easy to picture him on the soccer pitch, where he’s spent much of his free time over the years. He wears athletic polo shirts and often has a pair of sunglasses perched on his head. At 53, his brown hair is just starting to grey at the sideburns.
A social worker, Gibson became head of the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre in 2003. At the bustling Rideau Street hub he oversees a staff of more than 200 people and an annual budget of $11.5-million.
He’d always taken the bus to work so his wife, Tammy, could use the family’s only car to shuttle their sons between school and sports practices. Riding the bus gave him time to review emails, decompress after a long day at work or read a mystery book.
Gibson has not read a book since the crash. He’s also quit running and soccer, a sport he played for more than 35 years. His motivation and ability to concentrate, he says, have been wiped out.
“This has been life changing. Relationships, things that were fun, hobbies, work, all sorts of stuff — it is a whole body experience, and that’s been the toughest part of all.”
*****
Gibson and other passengers wait to give statements to police right after the deadly crash on Sept. 18, 2013.
Tammy normally left the house at quarter to nine, which gave her enough time to drop sons Justin and Colin off at school and still get to work at Barrhaven Source for Sports on time.
But she was running a few minutes late that morning and figured she’d soon be delayed further by the morning train, which typically crossed Greenbank Road at around 8:54 a.m. It never came, however, so she sailed across the tracks and arrived on time.
At 9:01, her phone lit up. It was David. She figured he must have forgotten something at home. The call was dropped, but he called her right back. “There’s been an accident,” he said. “We just hit a train.”
Tammy, in disbelief, asked a colleague to drive her to Fallowfield station, near the scene of the crash.
Meanwhile, at John McCrae Secondary School, Justin’s first-period class was working in a computer lab under the watchful eye of a substitute teacher. When the regular teacher arrived, he told students he was delayed by a detour. Something about a crash involving a bus and a train.
Justin and a friend pulled up a news website and found the story. “My mind is racing,” the 19-year-old recalls. “Was my dad on the bus? Is everything OK?”
He ducked out of class to call his mom. Yes, his dad was on the bus, she told him, but he is OK.
Justin went to the school office, where he met his younger brother, Colin. A profound sense of relief left them both in tears, but they eventually returned to class.
At the crash site, dozens of paramedics, firefighters and police officers were attending to the wounded. Gibson was led off the bus by firefighters, who then carried out the injured woman he had stayed with. He’s never seen her since.
He and other passengers gathered on the north side of the Transitway. Others sat in a nearby ditch in tears. Some tried to make calls, but the lines seemed to be jammed.
At one point, police asked them to get on another OC Transpo bus to wait until they had been processed. Most refused.
In a fog, Gibson gave a police statement and was soon allowed to cross under the yellow police tape and join Tammy and her parents.
“When we saw him come towards us, it was the best moment ever,” Tammy recalls. There, by the side of the road, they hugged and cried before walking back to the car and heading home.
The impact of having another passenger thrown into him had sent Gibson limping away from the scene. And as the afternoon unfolded, the pain in his back worsened.
At a walk-in clinic in Barrhaven that afternoon, he saw half a dozen others who had been on the bus. The doctor sent him home with some heavy-duty pain relief.
Amidst his shock and pain was a growing fear about the whereabouts of Connor Boyd, the 21-year-old son of Rob Boyd, who works with Gibson at the health centre. Connor was the young man Gibson had seen move to the front of the bus that morning. No one had heard from Connor all day and his family was understandably panicked.
“Was he on the bus?” Rob Boyd asked during a frantic phone call. The question filled Gibson with dread. He had seen Connor, that much he knew. Everything else was intuition. “I can’t be sure,” he told Boyd.
That evening, Gibson was sitting in the living room with his family when the dreaded call came, confirming the worst. “There’s always that bit of hope that you could be wrong, but …,” he says, the sentence left hanging in midair. “Knowing that it was Connor just made it a hundred times worse.”
It was the first time Colin, 14 at the time, had ever seen his father cry.
*****
Gibson and his wife Tammy in late August: The entire family has been affected by the guilt and anger Gibson continues to experience since the crash.
Nightmares soon became Gibson’s nightly companion. He would thrash about, soaking the sheets with sweat, before waking in a panic and unleashing blood-curdling screams in a voice Tammy had never heard before.
It often took her two hours to settle him down. It was as if she had a newborn all over again.
The sleeplessness lasted for more than a year and only ended last spring after his doctor prescribed medications that finally did the trick. But the cumulative lack of sleep often left him irritable, impatient and easily incensed.
“He can snap at the snap of a finger,” Colin says.
Flashbacks are another constant. Gibson calls them “intrusions” because that’s exactly what they do — take his mind hostage, whether he’s sitting in a meeting, watching television or eating dinner.
The crash happens all over again in the same series of increasingly gruesome snapshots.
Train. Lights. Screams. An arm. A body cut in two.
“It hits you like you’re being sucker punched.”
The unsettling experiences expose emotions he struggles to contain. Anger brims after each set of flashbacks, which can occur as often as five times a day, and often boils over whenever there’s a loud noise or if people come up from behind and startle him. It’s as if the crash altered his innate fight-or-flight response.
His sense of safety is tattered, as is his self-identity as the family’s protector. He had lived each day with the illusion that he was safe, never imagining something this awful could happen to him or his family.
His life had purpose before the crash. He was ambitious, confident, driven, self-assured. He had worked hard for the success he’d achieved and tried to instil that value in his sons. “You make your own best luck” was his motto.
But all that’s gone, too. “It’s like you just don’t have the wind in your sail anymore.”
He feels guilty for being one of the lucky ones who survived, yet he’s unable to coax himself into living a fuller, more joy-filled life, knowing those who died no longer have that option.
He feels guilty about the anguish his family faced that day, and in the days since.
He feels guilty complaining about the lingering pain in his back.
And he feels guilty for not telling Rob Boyd what he knew to be true that day.
Their long working relationship, Gibson says, remains professional, but it’s soaked in sadness now as each man lives through a different and solitary experience of loss.
“Every time you see him, you can’t help but feel for him for the grief and loss he’s suffered,” Gibson says of Boyd, who did not want to be interviewed for this story.
The guilt is like a cancer — it spreads. Tammy feels guilty for not contacting the boys as soon as she knew about the crash, while Justin feels guilty for going off to university in Montreal last year, leaving his family in a time of great need.
Gibson says people tell him all the time he should just get over it and move on. He often tells himself the same thing. And yet here he is two years later, feeling stuck — and ashamed.
“Why am I not able to push it aside and move on?” he wonders.
He retreats further into himself or puts on a mask so others don’t have to see what’s plainly obvious: Who David was is not who David is.
*****
That Gibson feels so much anger, shame and survivor guilt is not surprising to Dr. Ruth Lanius, a psychiatry professor at Western University in London, Ont., and the director of the school’s post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) research unit.
“It can really eat them up,” she says.
It doesn’t matter if the person who died was a loved one, a friend or a stranger, she says: Feeling guilty and questioning why someone lived and another died can be devastating.
Nearly everyone will be affected on some level following a traumatic incident. They may have nightmares, relive the experience through vivid memories, find themselves on edge or be filled with sadness and fear.
These symptoms usually fade in the weeks following the trauma, but for some 15 to 25 per cent of people, that doesn’t happen, Lanius says. These are the people susceptible to developing PTSD.
She describes it as a disorder of the brain, body and mind. What makes PTSD unique is that the memory of the trauma is not a memory of the past, but rather something the brain, body and mind experience as if it’s occurring right now.
Lanius once had a patient who had been stabbed in the neck. He would experience the feeling of blood running down his neck over and over.
Trauma can change the way a brain works. Using MRI scans, Lanius once compared brains processing flashbacks to those recalling memories. The difference was striking: The brains of people with PTSD were activated in areas associated with sensory recall, while the brains of people without PTSD fired in areas associated verbal memory recall. In other words, people with PTSD feel like they are reliving the event, not just remembering it.
Treatment for PTSD focuses on helping people learn to manage their anxiety and triggers, and deal with the intense emotions they might feel.
It may also involve reprocessing the traumatic material and helping desensitize people to it, in order to move the memory into the past so it no longer haunts them. They may always remember the trauma, but they won’t always relive it.
Gibson, who has been diagnosed with PTSD, has seen a psychologist regularly since the week after the crash — something he’d never done before. He’s also tried several different sleep aids, but nothing kept the nightmares at bay until finally, in March, he was prescribed a combination of drugs that shut down his racing mind and let him get some sleep. He also takes anti-anxiety medication every day.
Lanius says couples counselling is common for people with PTSD because the illness can affect the whole family. Tammy has sat in on a session with Gibson’s psychologist, Dr. Larry Cebulski, while Justin recently began to see a counsellor at school.
Seeing Cebulski is like a pressure valve, Gibson says. Their sessions allow him to work through any built up anger, frustration or stress, and learn mindfulness and relaxation techniques.
Lanius says that recovery is possible if survivors can accept that they have become different people following the trauma. “Even though it can feel like it’s never going to end, it is definitely worth it, and many trauma survivors have told me that.”
*****
Fly fishing and holidays are among the few activities that give Gibson joy anymore.
Gibson does have good days, or at least good parts of the day. It’s just that the good moments are so often interrupted by the bad.
He’s at his best, he says, in the morning, and when he’s spending time with Tammy and the boys, either at home or at the family’s beloved summer place, a permanent trailer overlooking a lake near Westport.
Gibson loves fly-fishing and looks like he’s have the time of his life whenever he’s on the river, says Colin. “It’s one of my favourite times with him.”
Travelling also helps. Vacations have been a time to forget what happened and to reconnect as a couple and a family, Tammy says. Gibson may still be haunted by dark thoughts, but it happens less frequently when he’s away from the city and all that remains here to remind him of that day.
The getaways seem vitally important to Tammy, who tentatively admits to shedding many tears and having countless sleepless nights since the crash as she has struggled to keep her husband and family afloat.
“They’re opportunities to see him smile, to see him laugh and to remember that life is still worth living,” she says, eyes rimmed with tears.
Writing has become an outlet for Gibson, who began to keep a journal shortly after the crash. He’s recently compiled dozens of the passages into a book, which he’s named “Requiem for the Fallen Leaves of September.”
Tammy’s read it. Justin and Colin agree writing the book has surely helped their father process what happened to him, but neither is ready to crack the spine just yet.
The book, Gibson writes in the epilogue, has helped reduce his feelings of isolation and diminished some of the emotional impact of the crash. “I never thought in a million years I would end up like this,” he writes.
Nobody wants to talk about trauma, Gibson says. People are often left to deal with it on their own, which could lead to depression, substance abuse, breakups and suicide attempts. That’s why he’s decided to share his story.
The prevailing attitude — to get over it and move on — simply isn’t good enough, Gibson says. “I wish it was that plain and simple, but it’s not.”
He hopes his writing will help others express how they feel and bring the experience of living with trauma out of the shadows and into the public discourse on mental health issues.
“It’s my story, but I think it’s a lot of people’s story. If more people start to see it’s OK and you don’t have to feel shame or hide it, that will give me a lot of meaning, more so than a monument.”
Later this fall, the city will formally open the new Memorial Park at Fallowfield Station. It will be a permanent reminder of how much was lost that day, and hopefully give the families of the dead, as well as those who survived, a spot to gather and grieve.
The crash itself may be receding from the horizon, but there’s still all of those lawsuits against the City of Ottawa, Via Rail and the estate of Dave Woodard, the OC Transpo driver who was killed. The Gibsons met with a lawyer last month and plan to file a lawsuit in the coming days.
Gibson says he’s conflicted about the decision because he doesn’t want to prolong his own suffering, yet he must balance that with the desire he feels for some kind of justice, no matter how imperfect.
*****
Connor Boyd sat a few rows ahead of David Gibson on the ill-fated bus and died in the crash.
There are days when Gibson thinks this is never going to end; days when the obliterated man behind the mask is fully revealed.
He often arrives home from work with nothing left in the tank. The smallest things, such as a mess in the living room, might set him off. His family walks on eggshells around him.
He drinks more than he did before the crash because it helps him slide away from reality for a while. He’ll retreat into a quiet corner of the house, sometimes for hours at a time, so he doesn’t have to see or talk to anyone.
Once, while in the bathtub, during one of the darker moments he describes as a “nothingness kind of place,” Gibson took a razor blade and made several slashes across his stomach, deep enough to draw blood.
The rush of relief that washed over him was soon followed by a wave of embarrassment for what he had done to himself. He slept in an undershirt that night to hide the cuts from Tammy.
The fury that burns inside him — at himself, at the bus driver, at everything that has turned his world upside down — is never far from the surface. It reveals itself when people block the back exit of a bus or when another driver cuts him off. It’s why he seldom drives.
In July, it came to life during an ugly scene at one of Colin’s soccer matches, when Gibson became enraged with a parent from the opposing team who had been taunting a linesman.
“I’m going to f— you up,” Gibson shouted at the man.
The argument carried on to the parking lot after the game and may have turned to blows had Tammy and some parents from the other team not separated the two men.
“I knew he was either going to have the crap beaten out of him or he was going to beat the crap out of someone else and might not have been able to control …,” her voice trails off.
“He’s got so much anger because of what’s happened.”
Gibson says he wasn’t like that before. He had filters that would have prevented such an escalation, but now those filters are gone. Darkness fills the void. “It’s like you’re a shell. You’re not there and you haven’t been there for a long time.”
He is continually haunted by a single, specific memory from the day of the crash: The split second when he saw Connor Boyd one last time before the front of the bus slammed into the train and disappeared into a cloud of smoke.
“I couldn’t do a thing — this is my horror I replay. I wish it was me, not that beautiful lad. This is my f—ing nightmare and there will be no escape, no turning back. Just the realization that I am a f—ing coward not worth shit.”
Connor was the one who died that day, but he took part of Gibson with him.
*****
Gibson at the crash site: ‘To give up is to lose who I was.’
The bus stop is 386 steps from David Gibson’s front door.
His lungs fill with warm air as he passes a familiar row of houses. The sun shines. It’s late August, 2015.
Gibson still rides the express bus to work most mornings, though now he pops an anti-anxiety pill first. His back sweats, his stomach churns and his mind relives the crash.
But he doesn’t give up. He can’t.
People ask him all the time why he still rides the bus when so many other passengers who were on the 76 that day choose a different route now, avoid double-decker buses or drive.
He rides to honour Connor and the other people who died. He rides to honour the people, like himself, whose lives remain forever changed. And he rides because it’s part of who he was and the life he once lived.
“To give up is to lose who I was, and it’s a choice I’m not ready to make.”
mpearson@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/mpearson78
David Gibson’s poems
Bus stop 4608
In 386 steps from my home is bus stop 4608.
I used to think about work, or if we needed groceries…
Now, my steps are less assured, almost hesitant.
I think about my family farewells, hugs and kisses — did I remember to say I love you?
With every step, a painful memory of what was in time a bright autumn morning.
Now, I walk with uncertainty.
Waiting for bus route 76.
Why me? Why not me?
A debt owed.
Separated only by fate.
One family’s loss, another family’s relief.
It just doesn’t seem right — it could have been anyone that autumn morning.
I beat the odds — others did not.
Am I worthy? Am I deserving?
In the meantime, I keep their memory alive as I struggle to make sense with what happened.
To make sense of something I will never understand.
The ripple effect
She describes it as the face of withdrawal,
The switch that has been turned off — but I don’t even realize it.
And, once again, they retreat from me.
They have become a witness to another person they call ‘Dad,’ but don’t understand.
I have become unpredictable to them.
I have become that someone else I don’t want to know.
How they see me, or react to me, is understandable — I just never knew.
Somehow, I get lost within myself and say and do things that are hurtful.
And, sometimes, I just don’t know who I am anymore.
Breakaway solace
In Times Square I feel safe among the thousands of strangers who walk by me.
My story is lost among the nameless humanity.
I am caught up in the neon lights of a New York minute…
It’s funny how I can feel secure when my son feels so overwhelmed.
Is it because I have started to give in? To stop fighting?
I am angry with myself for not being able to get over this.
I feel like people think I’m being dramatic. I don’t know if people understand that I don’t want to be sad and miserable either.
The nightmares that come during the night drain me of hope.
During the day, sometimes these flashbacks seem to come from nowhere — unsettling me.
These pictures in my mind should not be a part of me. These memories hold me tight, till I can hardly breath. Suffocating my spirit.
I found a place no one should ever go — I am not the person who is standing before you, I am the silent one inside…
Lady Liberty, bring me home safely.
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