Facebook-famous father learns new lesson from Fort McMurray fire
His words, scrawled in the dark at an oilsands work camp after he ran from the Fort McMurray fires, were written for friends and family — but resonated around the world. Big newspapers, national broadcasters like CNN and tens of thousands of regular people shared his Facebook post on how the threat of losing his home taught him to be more grateful.
JC MacIsaac now wishes he never had to learn that lesson, even now that he knows his home is safe.
"It just seems so random and trivial. How can we rejoice in something when our neighbours stare in disbelief at a pile of ashes?" he said during an interview with CBC, one of just two media outlets he has spoken with since his post went viral.
His thoughts today, even in the face of news his home was saved, have less shine than those he shared just over a month ago.
"It's actually calming for me to reassure my daughter that her toys don't matter, and that the few personal items we got out are more than we need," he wrote in his infamous post. "Tell your loved ones they are loved and make time for a family dinner. Everything else is bullshit. It does not matter."
Those thoughts came less than 24 hours after the Fort McMurray evacuation, when MacIsaac had no idea whether his home was still standing. More than a month later, he knows his house in Abasand survived. But over the last couple of weeks, the stories he has heard of tears and loss and ashes — have thrown shade on his hope.
"I know how happy I should be," he explained. "But when I measure it against the devastation that surrounds us, I feel guilty. I surely did not deserve to lose my home and everything in it. But neither did my neighbours."
His wife and their two tiny daughters stayed with family in Nova Scotia while MacIsaac returned to his job in the oilsands. This week he went back home, alone, to see what's left of his basement flat.
"We thought everything in Abasand was gone. I was certain I was going to sit in that car and hold my daughter while we burned," he said of the last time he saw the neighbourhood.
Today, he said "everything is a little bit more dirty, a little bit more dangerous" — and a lot more perplexing.
He's finding it difficult to reconcile what he learned the day of the fire with how he feels now.
"There's nothing wrong with liking nice things. But at the end of the day, they don't matter," he explained by phone from Nova Scotia just a couple weeks ago, before he returned to Fort McMurray.
Yet after he visited his house, he felt a flood of relief to see all the things that "don't matter" were OK.
"There is an outside chance, even though our house is fine, that we can never live there again. But everything I owned is untouched. My most cherished items. My grandmother's photo. We have all those things," he wrote in a text.
The day of his visit, MacIsaac retrieved his wife's makeup bag and his eldest daughter's pink cowboy hat that she's been missing since they left. These are small comforts that he has now realized are worth a lot.
"Every single home that was lost was someone's home. That niche in the world they worked day and night to carve out. Their grandmother's photos are gone. Their children's toys are gone."
The gratitude lesson he learned the night of the fire will never leave him, he said. But it's more nuanced now: He's counting blessings, at the same time that he's acknowledging grief.
Because he has now realized that all the material losses in Fort McMurray have destroyed something even more precious — normalcy.
"I look forward to the day when people are complacent again. When they can be just a little bit ungrateful for how good we truly have it because life has returned to normal," he said.
"Everyone always says you don't think it could happen to you, to your community. And I truly hope we can all feel that way again."
