In talking about the van attack in North York on Monday that killed 10 and injured 14 others, the word “tragedy” was coming up a lot. Certainly it applied, but it didn’t quite seem to encompass the emotion inspired by the murderousness of what happened.

“Horror” was more like it. “Terror.”

This was, in many ways, the heart of Toronto: near the top of our long main street; in a neighbourhood that is the fastest growing area of the city, a one-time suburban block that has become an urbanized centre, its population a mixture of affluent established senior citizens and young families, of established Canadians and new Canadians from Iran and Korea and other places; living in million-dollar detached bungalows, concrete apartment towers and glass condominiums, side by side by side. It’s close to a subway interchange but also has easy access to our highway system — the focus of the city’s most recent cars-versus-bikes debate. You don’t see it often on postcards, but it is a prototypically Torontonian place. A place that feels like home to many of us.

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And when the images and video began coming Monday in the aftermath of the rampage, that sense that this was our home, and these were our people — that it could have been any of us, our friends or family out there, just walking down the sidewalk — heightened their power.

Shoes strewn in the road. Fire hydrants upended. Eye witnesses describing bodies flying through the air, one after another, of a stroller split in half. The dead — our dead — draped in orange tarps, out there on the sidewalk near where we visit the library, or get our passports renewed, or visit the dentist. Near where we live, the blood of the victims streaming into sewer grates.

It was horrific.

There, in the middle of that, while the fear and anger and bottomless grief were still welling up, the images and video of Const. Ken Lam, confronting the alleged killer head on, apprehending him. “Just doing my job,” we’re told he said. But in doing it, and in how he did it, providing an example for all of us. Becoming a symbol of how to confront terror.

Videos of the scene recorded how the driver — who had, remember, just allegedly finished killing and injuring dozens of innocent bystanders and endangering hundreds of others — claimed to have a gun, and gestured repeatedly in a quick-draw motion holding his mobile phone as though he were aiming a firearm, Const. Lam refused to panic. Standing just a few metres away, pointing his own gun, he calmly and forcefully told the man repeatedly to get down, and approached him. The suspect shouted “Shoot me! Kill me!”

Lam took him alive.

Courage is not about the absence of fear or anger or extreme emotion. The definition of courage is, when experiencing those emotions, refusing to let them govern your behaviour. Staying true to yourself and your values, doing what you know is right, and necessary, despite the heightened emotion.

Courage is finding it in yourself to rise to an occasion rather than being diminished by it.

That’s what Lam showed us: courage.

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He, and so many other Torontonians we have since learned about, and continue to learn about. The paramedics who took charge of the scene. The police who secured the area. Those at Sunnybrook hospital who received and treated the injured.

Local businesses that opened their doors. Condos in the area that opened party rooms to allow a traumatized community to gather.

And the regular bystanders, the non-professionals who sprung into action. Such as Aras Reisiardekani, a local resident who CBC reported ran from his home to perform first aid on those who’d been struck. “There was no time for emotional hysteria,” he told the broadcaster.

Courage.

An example for us all in the city, as in the coming days and weeks, we all process our grief and anger and fear. Whenever a public mass-killing attack like this happens, whatever the motive or method, the people touched by it are faced with a question of whether — or how — it changes them. Do we close up, wall ourselves off, become harder and more fearful of each other? Do we compromise our values in the name of increased security?

Or do we band together? Realize that the things that occasionally make us vulnerable are also the things that make us strong? Confront the threats that face us while refusing to let those threats define us?

Toronto, on its best days, is an open place, a welcoming place, a reassuringly trusting place where diverse communities lift each other up. It’s a peaceful place. These ideals we claim are not always ones we live up to, but we loudly proclaim them because they reflect our communal values, the city we want to be, the city we are when we experience our greatest success.

Courage is facing terror, and feeling it, and refusing to be terrorized. It is being who you are, who you most want to be, in the most stressful of situations.

“We are united in our grief over this devastating loss of life,” Mayor John Tory said in a statement Tuesday morning. He went on, “Toronto is a city that will not be cowed, will not be afraid, and will not waver in the values we hold dear.”

That’s courage he’s talking about. Many Torontonians have already shown it to us. None more visibly and dramatically as Const. Lam.

As we grieve our dead in the coming days, the whole city will keep the victims in our prayers. Let us also carry Lam’s courageous example in our hearts.