Parenting & Family Quote by Lucien Bouchard

Grief is being framed here as a collective relapse into innocence: "the continuation of everyone's childhood". Bouchard’s line isn’t poetic ornament so much as a strategic moral appeal, yoking adult public life to the one period we all remember as credulous, open, and unfinished. Childhood, in his telling, isn’t just an age bracket; it’s a shared mental state that gets reactivated when we look at children. We project possibility onto them, and that projection is precisely what makes their sudden absence feel like an injury to the community, not only to a family.

The phrasing does quiet rhetorical work. He stacks "full of life, full of intelligence, full of a sense of wonder" like a closing argument built from character witnesses, insisting on presence before naming loss. It’s also a lawyerly tactic: establish the value of what’s been taken so the verdict - "terrible" - lands as unavoidable rather than sentimental. "Within an instant" compresses time to the point of scandal; the subtext is that such deaths feel not merely sad but wrong, a violation of the expected narrative arc.

Contextually, this reads like a public response to tragedy, meant to create permission for communal mourning while sidestepping political blame. There’s no perpetrator, no policy, no angle - just a blunt insistence on the obscene speed with which meaning can be erased. The restraint is the point: by refusing flourish, he makes the horror sound administratively undeniable, the kind of truth that survives press conferences and still stings afterward.