The senseless shootings occurring every day in America and periodically around the world remind me of a dreadful evening in which two people died and vivid images indelibly stamped themselves on my psyche.

20 March 1981.  Pain in my side had increased throughout the day.  I finally called a friend who took me to KU.  Hours later, SWAT teams ushered each of us  to the parking garage.  When I finally got back to my apartment, I called my boyfriend in St. Louis, grabbed a bottle of scotch, and curled under a blanket, beneath my dining room table, shuddering, wakeful, still terrified.

I was lucky.  The first person killed that night stood in a hallway not ten feet from me.  I heard and felt the blast; I froze, watched as he fell, and then bolted around the corner to an eerily silent waiting room.  When I realized my reflection could be seen in a window, I darted into an examining room and shoved a table in front of the door.  I huddled in a corner until police demanded that I exit; even then, terrified, suspicious, I remained until my friend’s voice assured me that I could safely exit.

Assault rifles in the hands of police greeted me and I swear to you, I wet my pants at that moment.

A group of us crowded into one room then, for hours, waiting to be released.   A baby cried.  A doctor worked on charts, ignoring the tears trailing down his face.  He had seen horror; worse, he had seen horror visited on a colleague and a patient’s mother.

On the radio today, Scott Simon asked:  Does time heal these wounds?  

Does time heal any wounds?  I submit that it does not.  I still startle when a car backfires.  It took me years to be able to sleep in the dark again.  I cannot imagine how the families of those killed in California yesterday feel, but I know how I felt after experiencing some fraction of the horror that we see on the news every day in this country.

And now, for the tie-in: How comes this subject to a blog about not complaining?  Easy enough to explain — seeing the images of these horrific shootings, knowing how close I came to being a victim 34 years ago, how can I not be joyful?

My mother annoyed us by her repeated refrain that “God only gives you as much as He thinks you can bear, and evidently He thinks that you’re pretty strong”.  Well, that might be so.  The things that I have seen and borne might prove God’s regard for my resilience.  And time might have healed the wounds which those events levied on me; or perhaps there’s just a veneer of scab over those wounds.  But the life that I have led and the ugliness which I have felt and seen, could have made me cynical.  Inexplicably, I grow less and less unhappy each day.

I could be angry; I could be bitter; I could be afraid.  I could despise humanity in general, and certain individuals in particular.   Instead, I choose joy; I choose hope; I choose to let happiness shine from within me.

 

Read the Kansas Supreme Court opinion in the Bradley Boan case HERE.