Of Mothers, Sons and Actions that Leave Us Eternally Changed…

It always happens this way.

A shooting takes place in our nation. A person and/or others are killed while going about their day.

Voices cry out, those of the bereaved family members and others in shock and anger.

Stories of the incident make a virulent trek across the news and Internet.

I lament the loss and losses of life that no amount medical technology and prayers can replace.

Then it hits me.

I recall the event that forever changed my and my family’s life.

Monday afternoon, August 15th, 1994, at 1:14 pm in the afternoon I was shot–twice in the left wrist, twice in the neck–by a man whom we later learned had been a shooting spree in both the adjacent and county where we live.

Trained in medicine I knew that my neck wounds constituted trauma. The next 60 minutes were critical.

The nearby emergency room that saw to me made immediate preparations to transfer me to the local trauma center 10 minutes away.

Three floors up from the emergency room of that same hospital, my husband, a surgeon, had been performing a procedure in the operating room.

It’s funny the things you consider when chaos lands and suspends your life in a tight balance.

I felt horrible that someone on the emergency room staff would need tell him, interrupt his surgery. I did not want to upset him. I also worried for the patient on whom my husband had been operating, and for him.

During the ambulance ride to the trauma center I instructed my husband how to care for daughters then 6 years old and 24 months.

I even told him the person I wanted him to marry, a woman I felt would serve him well as a wife and would nurture our children.

Death casts a chilling effect.

Clad in his blue scrubs, he begged me to stop speaking, insisted everything would be alright.

The paramedic attending me began to cry, as was my husband.

“I think you’re going to be okay,” the paramedic affirmed my husband’s statement of my condition.

One of the bullets tore through my neck. The other remained lodged at the side opposite from where it had entered.

The surgery took four hours during which time the chief of surgery comforted my husband and assured him his best surgeon was taking care of me.

Surgeons over at our local children’s hospital made pleas to the US Congress then in session and debating gun control, to enact stronger gun laws. We had barely, if that, recovered from the shooting at 101 California Street.

The entire East Bay rumbled in chaos as hospitals sought to treat the other the other five victims.

Those connected to the medical community where my husband practices erected a wall of silence as they waited and wondered about the state of my condition.

Our eldest daughter went home with the owner of the school she attended. Our second, and then baby, daughter, remained with the daycare provider.

I had been the 5th of six women shot by the assailant who on August 15th, 1994 resumed the mission–directed by the Book of Leviticus, he later explained–and that he had begun in the neighboring county.

Not until the case had reached the local D.A.’s office did the authorities piece together the picture of his actions.
The sixth victim, a mother like me, had been rushed to Children’s Hospital while police officers cornered the assailant, ran him down and took him into custody.

This action took place only after he had shot the sixth and last victim of that day in the head.

Luckily none of us died.

And I went on to not only walk and resume doing my life as it had been prior to the event. I even learned to swim.

Five years later I gave birth to our third and last child, now an adolescent.

Our two older daughters, now adults, have entered college, complete graduate school. Our eldest is presently a second year law student.

And yet the scars remain.

Bring up the topic, my husband goes silent.

Our eldest articulates her emotions quite often in telling me what it was like for her to go to summer school one morning and then learn that afternoon that her, “...Mommy had been shot in the neck.”

“When Mommies get shot in the neck they die,” said one child.

She did not see me for an entire week.

Our middle daughter, then yet to speak, has for nearly the two first decades of her life expressed a constant anguish and fear of losing me.

She has expressed this fear through incredible anger verging on rage when I am late, a constant habit of mine.

A psychotherapist, I figures out the basis of her anger by accompanying her on visits to her psychotherapist’s office and finding a way to step back and observe my daughter less as my daughter and for a brief moment, as I would a client.

Presently she takes an antidepressant that has allowed her to articulate her feelings about my tardiness.

I have learned to be on time when it comes to meeting her.

She continues as she has done since the onset of adolescence, to approach me at least three time each day with, “Mommy can I have a hug.”  I will never deny her.

The warmth of her back, my arms embracing her, is a gift for which I can never offer adequate thanks.

Each day I thank God for sparing my life, and the quality of my life.

I am not paralyzed from the neck down, as is one of my husband’s patients, also shot in the neck by a man who went on a rampage inside the office of the registrar of a college in the Midwest.

I did not die as did Trayvon Martin.

And neither was I rendered brain dead, the fear we all held for the women, who shot after me, sustain a bullet in the head.

A shooting that injures people leaves all involved severely changed.

Some of us wear our wounds.

For others of us the wounds remain hidden, but the scars roil and sear forever alive in our hearts and minds.

Our psyches never forget.

The bullet that hits one or more people injures the souls of any and all connected and witnessing the event.

We will never know the full truth of why George Zimmerman fired a bullet into the body of Trayvon Martin.

I doubt that Mr. Zimmerman will ever find a way to articulate his intentions.

Like our middle daughter, who sustained the wound of nearly losing me, her mother, prior to gaining the capacity to express herself in words, George Zimmerman will struggle, at best to make sense of his actions.

As for the parents and family of Trayvon Martin, we are all with you.

Sadly, your son, forms the link in a long chain of killings that plague our nation, starting with in recent times, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, and continuing to F. W. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on through to Virginia Tech, with myriad incidents between those times splattering our hearts with crimson and despair.

We are a nation at war with itself and fighting for its soul.

Why I and the others who he shot remain alive rests in large part to Fate, and the shooter’s decision to buy smaller caliber bullets because they were cheaper.

Each day that I give thanks for the great mercy and state of grace I wonder the price of my life in comparison to those who have not experienced such luck.

It is survivor’s guilt I suppose in wondering, “Why me, and not them?”

Two mothers have lost their sons. Trayvon Martin’s mother will never again hear the voice of her son.
George Zimmerman must live with his actions until death, actions that have rendered him and his soul transformed for the remainder of this life and for those lifetimes to come.

“The greatest miracle is a change of heart,” said Gautama, The Buddha.

One year later to the day that I and five other women were shot I stood with my family at a resort in Mexico. It was a Tuesday afternoon.

The activity that preceded dinner that night involved writing a wish on a piece of paper, tying it to a balloon and releasing that balloon into the air.

I pray, as I wrote then, that our nation will find a way to do battle with itself by looking inward and developing love and compassion as opposed to continually seeing the other as our enemy and not our sister or our brother, a part of us, essentially ourselves in the eyes looking back at us.