When Burnaby RCMP Cpl. Laura Hirst is asked to remember the last time she saw her cousin-in-law Lisa McCully, there is a long silence on the other end of the phone line.
McCully was one of 22 people gunned down in Nova Scotia last April during the worst mass shooting in Canadian history.
But just three months earlier, Hirst had been visiting her native Nova Scotia and talking to McCully – who had actually spent a few years in B.C. in the 1990s teaching at Burnaby schools – at a kids’ hockey game.
The two had met in 2007, after McCully had married Hirst’s cousin, and Hirst said they were “kindred spirits.”
At the hockey game, the pair had been talking about cancer – Hirst’s mom had recently been diagnosed and given a year to live. McCully had lost a brother to the disease a few years earlier.
Remembering that time, Hirst’s voice breaks.
“She just made you feel relaxed,” Hirst says. “She could take a heavy conversation, like people dying or being sick with cancer, and just make you feel like whatever happens, it’s going to be OK.”
McCully had even invited Hirst to stay with her at her seaside home in Portapique to help Hirst cope, but then COVID hit and that visit never happened.
On April 19, when Hirst got the news McCully – a mother of two young children – had been one of the people killed in a shooting rampage by a man dressed as an RCMP officer, she went numb.
First came the headlines reporting a deadly mass shooting in Portapique and then the confirmation on the phone from a cousin who lived nearby.
“It was numbing, and all I thought about was her children. Where were they? Are they OK? I was devastated,” Hirst says.
Hirst wasn’t able to attend the funeral service or go back to mark the anniversary of the tragedy this year, so she did what she could on the other side of the country.
On Sunday, she took part in a 10-kilometre run that was organized to honour McCully, an avid runner.
And on Monday morning, she participated in a private memorial service at the Burnaby RCMP detachment.
To pay tribute to each life lost on April 18 and 19, 2020, the detachment planted 22 flowers – 21 in the yellow, white and blue of Nova Scotia’s provincial flag and a single red flower to honour RCMP Const. Heidi Stevenson, the lone Mountie killed in the attacks.
“I think it’s important to remember and honour those who were lost,” Hirst says.
Follow Cornelia Naylor on Twitter @CorNaylor
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