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Chris Lepage of Cavendish holds a picture of his late wife, Heather.
Lepage blames his wife's death in a collision in January on the province's
poor winter road maintenance.
(GUARDIAN PHOTO BY JIM DAY)
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For years, Chris Lepage has consoled people over sudden,
unexpected loss.
He realizes now, even as an Anglican priest, he wasn’t equipped to grasp the
magnitude of their pain and suffering.
“You think you understand what people left are going through, but when it
comes right down to it, you really can’t until you have to live through it
yourself,’’ he said.
Nine months ago, Lepage started living through his own painful loss.
The 56-year-old Cavendish innkeeper lost his wife, Heather, on Jan. 6. She
was standing on the roadside after her car skidded off Highway 13 near New
Glasgow. She was then hit by a vehicle that lost control on the same slippery
stretch.
Chris Lepage said he slowly, but steadily, slipped into shock when a police
officer came to his door and told him that his wife of 30 years had been killed
in a collision.
Soon, an incredible sense of loss and loneliness set in. He was simply
overwhelmed.
The woman he knew from childhood, dated in high school and for many years
cherished spending time with doing “anything or nothing’’ was gone from his life
in a heartbeat.
While he had other girlfriends from time to time back in high school, they
were few and far between.
“Heather was always sort of there,’’ he said.
“I guess we eventually realized we loved each other and decided to spend the
rest of our lives together. It ended quicker than I anticipated.’’
Lepage said the tragedy left him sorry for his wife, sorry for his two girls
and sorry for himself. He said the pain comes in waves, mercifully a little
further apart each day.
He is still left with the reality of being alone. He said the fatal collision
took from him his wife, companion, supporter and partner all in one crushing
blow.
“It’s just life altering,’’ he said.
“Your life in an instant is just suddenly, totally changed.’’
Lepage has plenty of sad company.
Many other Island lives have also been dramatically altered as a result of
deadly accidents on Prince Edward Island roads this year.
Heather Lepage was only the second road fatality of the year. Seventeen more
people have died in 2004.
Thirteen of those 19 victims were Islanders.
Many are left to mourn their loss. They include eight people who lost a
spouse or partner, 13 who lost a child, 28 who lost a parent and 34 who lost a
sibling.
Those numbers, sadly, will likely climb before year’s end.
In fact, deadly collisions on P.E.I. roads in 2004 are enroute to reaching
the highest single-year tally in more than a decade.
The 19 deaths in just under nine months this year match the most in a full
calendar year since 1998.
Twenty-one vehicle collision fatalities is the highest annual total, reached
both in 1997 and 1998, dating back to 1991, when 31 people were killed on Island
roads.
The death count will most likely surpass 21 and possibly reach the mid- to
high-20s this year, if the final three months of 2004 are similar to the same
period in each of the past several years.
Since 1998, no fewer than four people have died in vehicle collisions during
the last three months of the year. Eight died from October to December in 1999
and seven were killed over the same stretch the previous year.
So those numbers ominously point to Island roads in 2004 becoming the
deadliest in a long time.
“It’s a bad year looking at it over the last 10,’’ said Wilf MacDonald,
safety co-ordinator with the P.E.I. Department of Transportation.
“We’re in the high end right now on the fatality side. We would be in the top
five (provinces per capita).’’
MacDonald hopes 2004 is just one of those blip years that won’t come again.
RCMP Const. Charles Hibbert said the number of road fatalities have declined
considerably on P.E.I. over the past 20 years. There were 37 in 1985, but no
more than 21 in any year after 1991.
He credits education and enforcement with contributing largely to the decline
in deaths.
Hibbert, who has responded to about 50 fatal road collisions on P.E.I.,
believes Canada’s national road safety goal is attainable in this province.
The plan, called Road Safety Vision 2010, calls for a 30 per cent reduction
in serious injury and fatalities between 1996 to 2010.
On P.E.I., that means getting down to 12 to 14 fatalities a year in just six
years.
Island road deaths often weigh heavily on Hibbert, who patrols traffic and
also reconstructs collision sites to determine the factors contributing to a
crash.
Hibbert spent a sleepless night after responding to the province’s most
recent road fatality that took the life of a motorcyclist on Monday.
“Yeah, it gets to you,’’ he said.
Hibbert said he is not surprised by the high number of fatalities in the
province this year.
“We need more enforcement and we need more resources,’’ he said.
“You’ve got to realize that we’re just a small police force in a small
province.’’
MacDonald said no single silver bullet exists to reduce the number of
collisions or road fatalities in the province.
“It’s not just one thing,’’ he said.
“Enforcement is important, education is important. It’s highway design, it’s
vehicle design.’’
MacDonald said he is concerned with the prevalence of speed and alcohol as
contributing factors in the 150 to 200 collisions recorded each month on P.E.I.
He also is frustrated with the number of people being ejected from vehicles
in collisions on P.E.I. because they weren’t wearing a seatbelt.
He said a great deal of time, money, energy and enforcement has been spent
trying to get Island motorists to buckle up.
Still, looking at all the numbers, MacDonald declares Island roads as being
generally safe to drive.
However, when the snow flies, Lepage couldn’t disagree more.
He blames the “typical lack of road maintenance’’ in the winter for the death
of his wife.
He has written to the minister of Transportation and Public Works condemning
the winter road conditions.
“I insist that you upgrade your policies for winter road maintenance to at
least a level where Islanders are not risking life and property when undertaking
to travel,’’ Lepage wrote in the first of two letters penned to Transportation
and Public Works Minister Gail Shea.
Lepage said he has great stress in the winter over his daughter’s daily
drives from Cavendish to Charlottetown.
“It just absolutely scares me to death to think of her on those roads,’’ he
said.
“It’s not safe.’’ |
