Another day, another shooting

Or-here we go again.

Trigger warning: This article contains some hard to read stuff about school shootings. If you’re not in the space to handle that right now, please do not read!

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After Sandy Hook, I became an advocate for gun reform in this country. I won’t rehash here how we all thought Sandy Hook would be the last, or how we assumed almost two dozen dead first graders would somehow bring our lawmakers to their knees. We all remember what happened and we all live with that outrage everyday. And even if we manage to somehow push down our feelings of dread and sadness, with each new shooting our heartbreak and rage grows to the point where shoving it down feels near impossible.

I, like many people, spent way too much time emailing, writing, calling, and trolling Mitch McConnell and his friends in the senate to care about the leading cause of death among young people in this country. A danger, to be clear, that is almost entirely preventable. Still, nothing.

So in 2018, I embarked on a mission. With the help of my co-editor, Loren, we reached out to hundreds of survivors and asked if they would be willing to write about their experiences living through a school shooting. We thought if people could just hear the stories of those who lost children, those who lost friends, those who were shot and survived, those who hid under desks and in closets thinking it would be their last moments on earth, those stories would change everything if we could just get them into the right hands…right?

We spent almost two years gathering stories: listening, carefully editing, drawing out the story while trying to subdue the pain I knew we were kicking up for many of the survivors. Some hadn’t shared their story in twenty years, some told it so many times they couldn’t bear to tell it once more.

I spoke with a mother who survived the Thurston High School shooting only to be faced with dropping her daughter off at the same building almost twenty years later. I spoke with a Sandy Hook mother who struggled to comfort a daughter who lost her favorite teacher and all of her friends in less than an hour.

I spoke with a father from Parkland in October of 2018, only eight months after the shooting. I could hear the rage and sadness quivering in his voice as he walked through his son’s room and read to me from the unfinished novel lying on the bed. His oldest son was dead, his youngest shot and living with the trauma of loss and survival at once. I hung up, threw myself onto my daughter’s bed and sobbed until I couldn’t breathe. I will never forget the echo in that boy’s room.

Loren and I had countless phone calls between us filled with tears. I often felt like we filled our bodies and our hearts to the brim with loss. I brought a darkness home with me sometimes and it lived in my house. Near the end, a good Samaritan who believed in the project donated her quaint farmhouse in Woodstock, NY, where we spent three days straight crying together as we made our final edits.

The final product.

The result is If I Don’t Make It, I Love You: Survivors in the Aftermath of School Shootings, a collection featuring over 80 narratives from 21 different schools spanning 50 years. The book was published in September, 2019, just six months before the world closed down. Around the same time, Loren became a new mother and while she tended to her beautiful new baby, I traveled where I could promoting the book.

I found myself mostly speaking to advocacy groups. Groups of parents and community members who wanted to know how to make this stop and maybe they thought I had some insight, but I didn’t. Each time, I felt I let them down by not having some answer to all of this, some secret formula to make the country come to its senses. I just shared the stories and sometimes I cried while doing so, and often the audience cried while listening. We just sat in our grief together for a while.

Then, something happened. In December, 2019, I was invited to a reading of the book by the Sandy Hook contributors to be held in Newtown, Connecticut. Then, a reading in Parkland, Florida, near the anniversary. I read in State College, PA, and discovered one of our contributors whose son had been murdered at Virginia Tech drove two hours to hear me read others’ stories and to meet me. Then again in New Jersey I found another contributor in the front row.

Columbine contributor Jami Amo signing books at an event in Philadelphia.

It was in those moments that I realized what the real purpose of our book was. It wasn’t for lawmakers to read- although we did send a copy to every sitting senator and only ONE, Senator Bob Casey from Pennsylvania, bothered to even acknowledge the gift. No, the purpose of the book wasn’t about the politicians, it was about the people in our pages, those who were brave and selfless enough to share their stories so that others might hear them and feel less…alone. It was for the contributors to feel like someone was listening. And we were.

I hosted a panel in San Antonio, TX, featuring contributors and survivors, Megan Doney and John Fox. John saved a woman’s life during the University of Texas-Austin shooting in 1966. He was 17. 54 years later, he still breaks down when he talks about that day.

Three years ago, I stood on a stage with Parkland survivors and read from our book for the last time. That was also the last time I have been able to engage with the issue of gun reform on a political level in a real way.

This project has changed how I channel my energy.

Now, when the next shooting is plastered on our screens, I can’t help but think of Megan and John and Jami and the Sandy Hook mom and the Thurston families and the unfinished novel on that sweet boy’s bed. I have come to value these people so much, their stories are buried so deep in my heart, that I feel physical pain imagining how they must feel watching the most powerful country in the world continue to sacrifice its children and teachers to gun manufacturers.

In my time working with survivors, I have witnessed the wounds left from one of these shootings and I have yet to see one completely healed.

So while I cannot bring myself to engage politically, I am not sitting idle. Instead of marching, furiously campaigning, or attending rallies, I have thrown my focus on the survivors. They need us. The political changes are still dire and that change will come thanks to the millions of advocates doing this work every single day, but that change takes time, and these survivors do not have time. They need help NOW.

There are hundreds of thousands of gun violence survivors out there who need access to health care, mental health resources, and vital social services. Many need help surviving in a world that seems to have forgotten about them rather quickly. Gun violence is not only a mass shooting problem, it’s a community danger, a neighborhood issue, it’s a country-wide nightmare.

This week, we suffered yet another school shooting. More dead kids, more dead adults, and more lives destroyed. It’s hard to know what to do. Just know you’re not alone. It can be heartbreaking to feel like we’re all just banging our heads against a wall. I understand the urge to keep banging. But it’s also okay to recharge before the next fight.

If you, like me, are tired of spinning your wheels with senators, filibusters, and people who seem to care more about demonizing art and literature than solving the greatest crisis facing our country, don’t despair. You can still help in a real and meaningful way.

Here are just a few survivor-centric organizations you can donate to, volunteer with, or simply follow and share.

These groups are only a tiny fraction of the organizations working to connect survivors with the services and help they so desperately need. So, if you don’t see one here you like, try finding a local org.

The Rebel’s Project

Survivors Empowered

Survivors Lead

And if you’d like to buy our book, please know the proceeds go to foundations that support gun violence survivors through organizations like those above.

I’d like to leave you with this: we can’t all throw up our hands because then the bad guys win. But we can help hold one another up when we need it. So maybe you take a break from the news and the outrage and you donate to a survivor fund today, and in a month or so when you’ve had time to recharge, you scream at your tv again and you hit the capital steps to troll Mitch McConnell in person.

The important thing is we live to fight another day and we support our fellow Americans when their government refuses.

xo

Amye

PS- sorry so ranty.