_{Speech by Tony Fiacco to Students Against Drinking and Driving, 2019}

Sometimes a thing happens that changes your life, not only your life, but the lives of all who knew you and loved you. 

On July 21, 1989 that thing happened for Shayne Michael Lolacher. He was a young man, a few months shy of his 19th birthday and ready to take on the world. Headstrong but kindhearted, he had ventured out into the world to make his mark. Old enough to earn his living and be dreaming of a family in the future but young enough to still make bad decisions. 

His last bad decision, the only bad decision that really matters, occurred that day, on July 21st. When he got into the passenger seat with his friend Brian after sitting at a bar to watch Mike Tyson knock out Carl Williams. The two boys won some money on the fight and left the bar after several drinks in Brian’s Honda Civic. They were on the way to pick up their girlfriends to carry-on with the celebrations of their winnings and while speeding, they ran a red light. I’m just going to interject here that both boys had a blood alcohol content well over .08; one was .24 and the other .23. They swerved to miss an oncoming car and hit a BC transit bus twice at an intersection between New Westminster and Abbotsford in BC. 

Shayne was roughly 6’3”, 250 pounds and they found his body on the floor behind the front seats of the Honda Civic. Picture that for a moment… an impact hard enough to take a man from the front seat of a vehicle and put him on the floor in the backseat. He was killed immediately when his aorta exploded; that’s the main artery that goes into the heart. We were told it happened so fast, he didn’t know what happened. Deep down we hope that is the God’s honest truth! 

His mother, my wife Cynthia, was at home alone with our three-month-old daughter when she got the call from his fiancé Darla. I was at work. One of our daughters, Shauna, was at Bible camp for a week, another, Trisha, was at a friend’s house down the road for a sleepover and our son, Ryan, and another daughter, Natalia, were at their mother’s for visitation in Alberta.  

I was working graveyard shift at Avonlea Minerals in Wilcox. Our crew was doing cleanup around the loading area and rail lines. 

I was taking a bucket of bentonite to the disposal area of the yard as I was driving past the shop, doors were open and I heard the phone ring. An eerie feeling came over me and somehow I knew the call was for me. As I continued to dump the contaminated bentonite our night supervisor’s voice came over our 2 way radio letting me know that Cynthia was on the phone. 

I returned to the shop, picked up the handset, said hello only to hear a sobbing voice on tHe other end of the line. It was Cynthia letting me know that Darla, Shayne’s fiancé had called. A horrible feeling came over me as Cynthia told that Shayne had been killed in a car accident.  

Everything came to a halt! I went to my shift supervisor, explained what had happened to Shayne and asked for a ride home. 

When I walked into our home Cynthia was at the top of the stairs howling as she was crying so hard. I wrapped my arms around her and crying with her and in total disbelief! Wondering how we lowered going to tell our children; none of whom were home. Trisha had a sleep over at her best friends’ place down the back alley. Shauna was at Kenosee Bible Camp. Ryan and Natalia were in Red Deer. Chantelle was 2 months old and asleep in her bassinet.  

Around six in the morning Cynthia called for Trisha to come home under the ruse that I had to be picked up from work and she didn’t want to disturb the baby. When Trisha arrived and saw me home already and her mother sobbing in bed, she knew instantly that something was very wrong.   

After a couple hours and many tears, we had to load up the car and go get Shauna from camp three hours away.   

We had called the camp ahead of time and her Counsellor and the camp administration were aware. They called Shauna and her best friend back to their cabin after we arrived so we could break the news. I still feel bad for her counsellor, she was young and took the news the same as if it had been her own brother. 

I don’t remember much from the car ride there or back. In fact, most of the next 9 days is a haze.  

There are a lot of arrangements to make when someone dies. Even more so when they die in another province and need to be transported for burial. You have to wait for the autopsy to be completed, find funding to pay to transport the body, pick a funeral home to pick up the body from the airport. Then came the really hard decisions.  

Before you can even comprehend that you’ve had to have a body shipped home, you have to write an obituary and try putting into words a description of a life barely lived; to give credence to all his remarkable traits and skills! His love of hockey and his family, his sense of humour and great admiration for his image in the mirror, his natural artistic abilities and his zest for life. 

It’s a very surreal moment when you are standing in the funeral home showroom trying to select the casket that your son’s body will spend eternity in. It’s surprising how many options there are; colours, finishes, fabrics… it boggles the mind.   

Then you have to go and select a headstone and what you want to be engraved on a granite slab in 4 lines to memorialize someone you’ve loved and lost; not to mention the colour of the stone, the font, any pictures or graphics and accessories… accessories for a headstone! Some things just seem so trite at the time! 

You have to decide, and subsequently ask, the person who will stand up in front of all the friends and family to say the eulogy.  

You have to pick the clothes they will wear for all of time.  

You have to bury your baby.  

It’s an awful thing you know, the sound of a grieving mother. They don’t just cry, or sob or bawl. They howl a haunting noise that you can never unhear. They are wild in that moment; primal and fierce, savage and raw. And so, so very wronged. It is unnatural for a parent to outlive their child. We will never, ever feel okay with it. 

By the way, to backtrack, we picked a beautiful white casket lined with blue satin.  

His black granite headstone read:  

Shayne Michael 

December 1, 1970 to July 21, 1989,  

Son, Brother, Friend 

Forever in the loving arms of Jesus

His Uncle Jimmy wrote and presented a wonderful eulogy. His sister, Shauna, and cousin, Jed, got the giggles partway through the ceremony; they were 10 and 11, and nervous. His sister, Trisha, who used to be a Young Speaker for SADD in the 90’s, did her first public speech in the church basement when she spoke at the wake about Shayne and played “Fly Like an Eagle” by the Steve Miller Band. 

He was buried in grey dress pants, with a dress shirt under his favourite grey sweater. His feet were bare. And when you reached in the casket to place a rosary or bookmark to be with him, you could hear the plastic from the autopsy crinkle under his sleeve. Because his aorta exploded he was bruised into his hands and up into his face and the funeral home had to cake on make up to try and hide the bruising. They also screwed up his hair royally which, if anyone here knew Shayne, was sacrilege!  

There’s nothing as uncomfortable as the conversation you get at a funeral as the parents of a child taken suddenly. You hear the same phrases over and over:  

“He’s in a better place”… I call BS… a better place would be sitting at a restaurant down the street with us having a laugh over some pizza. 

“If there’s anything you need, just let us know”… until you need it… then all you hear is crickets 

“I know what you’re going through, when my dog/grandma/uncle/friend died”… Sunshine, you have no freaking idea what we’re going through  

And so we continued on, facing down a dark year of firsts; first birthday, christmas, mother’s day, father’s day and worst of all, the first July 21st. This year is not the firsts, its the 29ths… and it still hurts like hell. The best analogy I’ve heard is it is like the waves of the ocean: (take what you want to use from this) 

This is a post from reddit and is surprisingly accurate, not to mention well-written: 

As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive. 

In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything…and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life. 

Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O’Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out. 

Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.