The story invited three angles. We chose ‘forgiveness.’
Resilience? Sure, in part. Justice? Certainly an element. But the deeper our reporter went, the more her story about the aftermath of a fatal bus crash became an exploration of forgiveness, and the complicated feelings around it.
How might a reporter approach covering a national tragedy?
For Sara Miller Llana, looking into the fallout of an accident on a Saskatchewan highway, it meant being clear with would-be sources.
“I thought it was very important to tell people exactly what I was working on,” she says on the Monitor’s “Why We Wrote This” podcast. Five years after the event, “it wasn’t a story about resilience, even though that is part of this, and it wasn’t a story about justice, even though that is part of this. It was really a story asking people to explore their own feelings and their own journey in this tragedy.”
Putting that out there meant being greeted with silence, she says. Sometimes with anger. The story plumbed complicated questions. What constitutes “enough” punishment for a driver who has showed remorse and served his sentence – but could now face deportation?
How to portray those who could not bring themselves to speak to her – let alone to forgive the driver? They sought to be understood, too. Forgiveness, with all of its nuance, became Sara’s prism.
Without it, “I really don’t think it would’ve gotten to the heart of the struggle,” Sara says, noting that everyone in the world grapples with forgiveness. “I just really think it got us to a deeper place.”
Episode transcript
Clay Collins: Welcome to “Why We Wrote This.” I’m Clay Collins, with another episode of the Monitor podcast about how Monitor writers and editors approach their work. Sara Miller Llana, our Toronto-based Americas Bureau chief, last joined the show in mid-January. She joins us again this week. Welcome back, Sara!
Sara Miller Llana: Thanks for having me!
Collins: When you were last on the show, you talked about housing affordability and inequity around access. And it’s not just a Toronto issue, but there in your backyard you found groups advocating for higher density forms of housing that could benefit both residents trying to get a foothold and those whose access to a lot of extra space was, you know, basically grandfathered in. As you explained, that meant different groups of residents beginning to consider other groups’ perspectives and needs, and so having empathy. More recently, you partnered with some colleagues to write about assisted dying, tying that to different ideas about compassion. We had Dominique Soguel on this show to talk about that story.
Now, Sara, not everything you report is heavy. You’ve recently written about Icelandic book-reading traditions and ice fishing in northern Ontario. But in one of the stories you’ve written since that one, you looked at a very sensitive issue, this time in Saskatchewan. Can you just set up the facts of the story a little?
Miller Llana: Sure, there was a national tragedy here in April 2018. It was a tragic accident on a highway in Saskatchewan. A hockey team was traveling to their playoffs, and a truck driver did not stop at a stop sign. And the bus ended up colliding into that truck. Sixteen members of the team were killed and 13 injured. Some of them are still injured today. The truck driver was sentenced to eight years in prison. And because he is not a Canadian citizen – he’s a permanent resident – he is facing deportation back to India.
Collins: Now, Mr. [Jaskirat Singh] Sidhu, the driver, you characterized him in your piece as a sympathetic character. He has shown remorse. He didn’t plea bargain. He accepted the consequences, really, of his inattention behind the wheel. But for some that isn’t enough, they may feel a compulsion to be punitive as a reaction. They see that as justice. But there’s also in some quarters, an upwelling of forgiveness. You talked to people on both sides of that. How did you ask, and what did you hear?
Miller Llana: You know, normally I’ll just send an email to someone or pick up the phone and introduce myself and say what I’m talking about. It took me days to be able to even write the email to people. I actually asked an editor and a colleague to read it. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t accidentally causing more damage by even asking this question of forgiveness.
So I thought it was very important to tell people exactly what I was working on. That it was a story about forgiveness. It wasn’t a story about resilience, even though that is part of this, and it wasn’t a story about justice, even though that is part of this. It was really a story asking people to explore their own feelings and their own journey in this tragedy. So I simply just asked the question and I got a lot more silence than I did response.
Collins: So that silence was many parents just refusing to be interviewed or declining to be interviewed. How did you reply when you got no for an answer?
Miller Llana: When I got no for an answer, I wrote back immediately and I said, “I understand exactly where you’re coming from. Thank you so much for responding. I’m so sorry for what you’ve been through.” And that’s it. And I didn’t hear back from anyone.
I got some very angry pushback. Somebody was saying that we – you know, myself and the newspaper and the entire media operation – are making Mr. Sidhu into the victim and casting them somehow as the villains. It’s one of the challenges [in] writing about forgiveness. There’s sometimes a moral judgment there : “Oh, because you’ve forgiven, you are enlightened, and because you have not forgiven, you are not enlightened.” I got some notes saying, “I thought about this long and hard. At this time, you know, I’m not willing to go there. But we understand that you feel it’s important to do this story.” I actually got a lot of silence: nobody responded. And I also got a bunch of: “Yes, we’ll meet with you.” And then, I arrived on the scene and a couple no-shows or “I’ve changed my mind”s. So that’s, some of the, the challenge here.
It was difficult because, the people who didn’t want to hear from me, we didn’t know exactly how to put that in the story. And at first I actually didn’t. And it was the editor who said: “I think we need to really find a way to represent this side, otherwise it’s just silence. We are not acknowledging their pain.” So, we thought long and hard about doing that and realized probably the best way was to be totally transparent about the fact that a lot of people refused to speak to us.
Collins: So it sounds like a second challenge, then, was: How do you approach portraying people who didn’t want to be interviewed or who by implication weren’t ready to forgive?
Miller Llana: We really made sure to present their feelings that were out there on the record, whether that was in victim impact statements, whether it was in the media. There was a fundraising campaign that Mr. Sidhu’s wife put online in August, and that got a lot of negative reaction. And I included some of that, not because I wanted to undermine her cause in any way, but just to show that there are a lot of people in this country who don’t forgive him and who understand, especially the families who don’t forgive him.
Everybody in this piece who had forgiven him was really adamant that theirs was not the [only] right way to be. They did not judge anyone who couldn’t be where they were. So it was really important for me to not also do that.
Collins: There was a lot of complexity in your story and I, I really want listeners to go and read it because it’s a powerful piece that gets into everything from deportation as punishment to what one of your sources called “the expectation of forgiving.” As with your housing crisis story turned empathy story, you hung this story on the deep application of a value: on forgiveness. So typically, when you’re starting a story, is the value going-in angle, or is it a discovery that happens during the reporting?
Miller Llana: I can’t answer that because I think it’s both. In this case, I did know that I wanted to explore forgiveness. Now that doesn’t mean I didn’t second guess myself. And in fact, a copy editor asked me if in retrospect I am happy that we explored it through that lens. And I thought hard about that. And I decided that, yes, I do think that because if … we had just stopped at resilience or if we had just stopped at justice, I really don’t think it would’ve gotten to the heart of the struggle, which is the story. And it’s also something that literally everyone in the world grapples with. So I just really think it got us to a deeper place. Other times, the housing story that you mentioned, for example, no, I did not know that it was empathy. I started reporting that because the housing issue is just such a big crisis here in Canada and, and many other places in the world. But as I started talking to people, the notion of empathy surfaced itself. And so then I refocused the story around that angle. So it really depends on what the story is.
Collins: Hmm. I think it’s fair to say that, around the staff, people think of you as an early adopter of this kind of universalizing approach that we’re trying at the Monitor. Has it become a little bit easier and more natural over time?
Miller Llana: Well, I have to say that in some ways this new approach, um, doesn’t feel very new to me. You know, it’s new in terms of the product that we’re presenting. And I, and I love the way that it’s tagged because I think the reader gets it so much more easily. But, you know, looking for the value, or the universalizing of a story is just something that I’ve always naturally done. I’ve been really doing news features and feature stories most of my career, and it’s just a very natural fit for me.
Collins: Right. You wrote a companion column for your story that detailed how hard it hit you personally. Um, we’ll provide a link to that too. What about this story would you say is most likely to stay with you and how do you hope it will help people who read it?
Miller Llana: The first thing that comes to mind is the Thomas family and the tattoos all over Mr. Thomas’ body. They lost their son, Evan. You know those growth trees that people put in their door frames when their children are growing? He actually had that tattooed onto his back. It was just such an expression of grief, but in its own way also moving on. You know, he wanted to keep a part of him with him, everywhere he goes, forever for the rest of his life. I think that’s what will stick with me.
In terms of, you know, how I hope others relate to this. I will say I have probably gotten more email about this story than any that I’ve ever written. They talked about how it helped them grapple with notions of forgiveness or people that have hurt them or people that they’ve hurt, and how to move forward from that. And I mean, that to me is exactly how I want readers to respond.
I was so honored that these parents and the people impacted in this community were willing to sit down and tell their story. I asked one of them, you know: “Why, why? Why is she talking to me?” And she said, if there’s anyone out there in the world dealing with any kind of grief, and her words or her experience helps them, that’s why she’s willing to talk to me.
Collins: That’s really nice. Well, thank you, Sarah for this story, for talking about this story and for all that you do for the Monitor.
Miller Llana: Thanks so much for having me.
Collins: Thank you for listening. For more, including our show notes, with links to the stories that we discussed, and to more Monitor reporting on forgiveness, go to csmonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Jingnan Peng. Our engineers were Tim Malone and Alyssa Britton. Original music by Noel Flatt. Copyright The Christian Science Monitor, 2023.
