Tamara Asay will never forget the sickening feeling in her stomach every time her father, an RCMP officer, left to work on “something big.”
As a girl, Asay pretended this didn’t bother her. But in her mind, the what-ifs kept playing over and over again until his safe return home. That anxious, nervous childhood personality has followed her into adulthood, she says.
The family moved to St. Albert in 1992 and Asay’s father retired from service 12 years later. Since then, she never felt her stomach tighten again, until Saturday morning, when two RCMP officers were shot at Apex Casino.
“As soon as I heard that I got that feeling in my stomach that I used to get. It’s so sad,” she said.
The RCMP has always been a tight-knit community.
Asay remembers her mother staying in touch with other officers’ wives throughout her childhood. And today, the RCMP has a greater support system in place to look after the families when the “what-ifs” take on reality.
But that doesn’t take away from the worries many families experience when an officer leaves for a dangerous job. A job that takes “a special kind of person who can face the ugliness and unnecessary part of this world on a daily basis.”
The shooting of the two RCMP officers in St. Albert this weekend has been a “close to home” scenario for Asay. It’s also taken away from the safety the family found in the community since they first moved to St. Albert, she said.
While you never know if something could happen to your parent or partner on the job, the risk that RCMP and police officers end up in a dangerous situation is far greater, she says.
Asay is now part of a group of volunteers raising funds for the families of the two St. Albert officers. She said the support she’s seen for the RCMP is tremendous. But she also wishes it would come out more often, when nothing grave happens.
“It’s important people realize the pressures (police and RCMP) face and deal with,” she says. “Many RCMP families don’t announce what goes through our minds, what we stress about.”
