You Never Know
You never know.
It was right after the Uvalde shootings May 24, 2021 and my adult son, Zach, reached out to Greg, the local “broker/agent” who connects Columbine survivors with counterparts in those schools that have just experienced a shooting. “Can I be of help here?” Zach asked, thinking he might be of help to an Uvalde teacher or to offer the message: “I’ve been there. It is difficult but you can get through this, and it can get better.” Greg replied, “I’ve got Uvalde covered but you could help by representing Columbine at the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, DC next week on June 12th.”
This second March for Our Lives (the first one occurred back in 2018) was hastily organized by a group of “tough and eloquent young survivors of the recent massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida.”(where did this quote come from?) Intent on capitalizing on the outrage over the Uvalde shootings and hoping to send a message to congress “that a comprehensive and effective bill be immediately brought before Congress to address these gun issues”, Zach said he was willing to go. Greg went to work booking Zach along with a fellow teacher who was also a student at the time of the shootings, Chris, their airline tickets, local transportation, and lodging.
You see, Columbine survivors are seen as the elders of school shootings. Nothing you want to aspire to, of course. But they bring a certain ethos after 23 years of managing the post-traumatic elements of their own experience. When they speak, people listen. The rally included a large contingent of Marjory Stonemen Douglas kids on stage, tagged as speakers along with the Newtown kids—now 16- and 17-year-olds there in a show of support and hopefully a convincing presence to tip the balance. Zach was backstage in support of the speakers and was there to be on hand with media requests (he ended up being interviewed by MSNBC twice during his time in DC).
This march had managed to bring together about 50,000 protestors to the Washington Mall. After several speeches and rallying cries, a moment of silence was invoked to honor those who had lost their lives. At this moment, a pro-gun protester appeared to storm the stage throwing an object into the crowd and screaming “I am the gun!”. For a moment, pandemonium ensued, people were seen cowering on the floor or running away. The two groups of kids on stage were whisked away by the security guards while other guards started sealing off the area from anyone else violating the space. The protester was apprehended, and it was quickly determined that he didn’t have a weapon, was acting unilaterally with no accomplices and was promptly hauled off to jail.
The kids were spooked though. They were retraumatized, many were crying or shaking or both and they all were sent into their own private hellish nightmare. Zach and Chris approached the place where the kids were holed up and of course, the security guards tried to stop them, urging them to turn around. But they said, “We’re from Columbine. We think we can help.” The security guards recognized immediately that they were just what this situation needed and allowed them to talk with the kids.
I don’t know what Chris and Zach said exactly. All I know is that two years after being in that room with them, several of them are still in correspondence with Zach. They claimed that he had changed their lives and helped them through one of the hardest moments since the shootings and they wanted to stay in touch because they trusted his advice. Zach said, “We didn’t say anything that another adult wouldn’t have said to calm them and reassure them, but we had an instant connection and they listened to us."
It took Zach by surprise to realize what the power of being an elder in this unwanted tribe of school shooting survivors could mean. It's like how Dr. Rachel Remen said in My Grandfather's Blessing: “It has been my experience that presence is a more powerful catalyst for change than analysis and that we can know beyond doubt things we can never understand.” I think more than what they said, Chris and Zach brought presence. And more than any sagely advice, something in the way they said it, their tone, their voice quality, their meeting their eyes with a knowing connection, their body language, their deep empathic and empathetic connection changed everything, changed everyone in the room. Dr. Remen also captures this when she described her own patients reflecting back their experience with her treatment, "...they would give me example after example of how they were able to use this insight to change their lives. Nodding sagely, I would have no recollection of the event at all. Clearly, I had been used to delivering a message of healing to them that did not originate in me.”
To me, when I metaphorically wrestled this story out of Zach with a little relentless questioning, it became clear that he delivered a message of healing that did not originate in him but because of him and who he was just like with Dr. Rachel Remen experience. It was who Rachel was that made all the difference.
This difference resurfaced some two years later in a plenary session at the Parliament of World Religions. My wife, Teri, and I are in the audience of what was reported to be 10,000 attendees listening to a very articulate Harvard University Sik student describe what had changed her life and turned her into a passionate advocate for social justice.
As we learn in the course of her speech, she was a member of the Sikh temple in suburban Milwaukee on Sunday, August 5, 2012 what a gunman went on a rampage killing 6 members and left terrified congregants hiding in closets and others texting friends outside for help. The suspect was killed outside the temple in a shootout with police officers. But her speech wasn’t about that day or how it had galvanized and changed the course of her life.
Teri wrote to Zach and described it this way (I couldn’t have said it any better 😊): “This morning at the plenary session of the Parliament we heard a young woman named Tarina Ahuja, a student from Harvard speaking on how to engage and awaken young people and engage them in issues of conscience (conscience, not consciousness, although maybe one and the same in this case).
Anyway, toward the end of her speech, she told the story of the defining moment in her life when she decided to dedicate herself to a life of social activism and service. It turned out it wasn't the day when she and her family experienced gun violence against members of the Sikh community in a Milwaukee suburb while at temple but rather a day a decade later when she attended the second March for Our Lives in Washington DC. in 2021.
She made a strong point, that what galvanized her into her life's work was not the act of violence against her Sikh community in 2012, but the acts of kindness she experienced when a person tried to jump on the stage that day as you described it and people began to flee in fear and panic. She was changed by seeing total strangers taking care of each other in that situation -- protecting each other, helping each other up off the ground, holding each other, calming, soothing, reassuring...these acts of kindness, some of which you and Chris extended that day -- these are the acts that she said today from this very large and public stage 'she would never forget' -- the acts that would always sustain her hope and belief in the good of people, even of total strangers.
Her name is Tarina Ahuja -- she has a website if you want to see if you recognize her. Just wanted you to know that the good you did that day was part of a good that in her mind still outweighs the terrible meaningless suffering she experienced a decade earlier.
Never doubt the power of a good thought, word, deed. Love you. Mom”
As they say in the old country, you never know.
Now as an author, I am finding that I have that same “you never know” experience. I was stunned to hear from my original CF&I teacher, who taught my 2015 funerals certification course that I have now been teaching since 2018, that one of my poems was the core poem she used at both her ex-husband’s funeral in May and at her 56 year-old daughter’s funeral just this past June. She teared up as she told me. I did not expect the gush of tenderness that flowed between us and the connection that was made in a poem I had written with my own dad in mind. So here we were in a connective thread of sentiments and words and remembrances from this one poem connecting her former husband/current friend, her daughter and my dad.
“According to those who have returned from a near-death experience, we are all here to grow in wisdom and learn how to love better. As we each do this in our own ways, we slowly become a blessing to those around us and a light in the world.” —Dr. Rachel Remen
May it be so. You never know.
The Shared Poem
This Day We Remember You
May we be so blessed
that like you
when we go,
we go in Love.
To this moment,
we add our wonder
to the mystery
of the wake in your death--
a wake of what you chose to believe,
a wake of what you wanted to become,
a wake of what you strove to unite.
To this moment,
we add our wonder
to the mystery
of the wakening in your death—
a wakening to your legacy of love,
a wakening to the love that continues with you,
a wakening to the love that continues through us.
To this moment,
we add our wonder
to the wake of a grief that inhabits us,
to the wake of fond memories that occupy us,
to the wake of wonder
of where we go from Here.
May we be so blessed
that like you,
when we go,
we go in Love.
May we be so blessed
that when we remember you,
we re-member the wakening moments
and live this day in Love.