LAC-MÉGANTIC — They are known as the orphans of Lac-Mégantic — 27 children and adolescents who lost either one or both parents in the train disaster last year.

Among them are four children who lost both parents.

Of all the mourning that has gone on since the deaths of 47 people in the July 6 derailment, the sorrow of these children has been the most poignant, the most fragile and in some cases, the most difficult to deal with.

There are still some children, say social workers, who believe that their parents are alive and that it’s only a matter of time before they come back home to hug them.

“Since these children never saw a body at the funeral, they are still waiting for their mothers and fathers,” said Josée Masson, director-general of Deuil-Jeunesse, a Quebec non-profit organization that dispatched social workers to Lac-Mégantic to support the children in mourning the deaths of their parents.

“Some of the children are too young to truly understand the concept of death,” Masson added. “But with time, as they grow older, these children realize their parents won’t come back and they start the process of mourning.”

According to both the United Nations Children’s Fund and Deuil-Jeunesse, an orphan is a child with at least one deceased parent. The term “half-orphan” is no longer used.

In Masson’s experience, Deuil-Jeunesse has never had to come to the aid of a community so beset with sudden death as Lac-Mégantic, with the fallout of so many orphans all at once.

In the weeks after the derailment, the orphans who lost both their moms and dads were placed in the homes of foster parents, some of whom were also mourning the passing of family members or friends. Deuil-Jeunesse and authorities were careful to make sure these children did not have to leave Lac-Mégantic.

“We didn’t want them to be uprooted from their community,” Masson explained. “In general, when a child has lost both parents, we want them to experience the least loss possible, and therefore we suggested that they stay in their milieu and among their friends.”

It’s a hard, merciless reality that when a mother or father dies, the surviving parent is often overwhelmed and “resigns” from his or her role, with the result that the orphan is “abandoned” and shuffled off to other family members or a foster home, Masson noted.

This, however, did not happen in Lac-Mégantic, Masson said, as families and friends united in their grief and rallied around their orphans.

“The people in the community are working together and supporting each other,” she said.

Still, in the aftermath of the disaster many adults could not stop themselves from lying to the children, acting out of a misguided concern for the impressionable minds of the innocents. Some children were told that there was no derailment, but that a film crew was in town shooting a disaster movie. Others were given the false reassurance that their parents were alive, even as forensic crews combed the rubble for human remains.

So Deuil-Jeunesse approached the parents, whether on soccer fields or in daycares, and broached the delicate subject of the consequences of failing to tell the truth.