Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Are You Still Affected by That?

It was probably a year ago that I lost a friend. I had actually lost her months earlier, but it was about a year ago that I noticed.

One year ago I was trying to figure out why I was having trouble communicating with this woman who had been my friend for seventeen years. Searching my soul and my memory, I contacted the exact moment when I felt I could simply no longer connect at a heart level with this person. It was the moment when she asked me, over the phone, “Are you still affected by that?”

You see, a little over two years ago a terrible tragedy happened at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee. A man by the unremarkable name of Jim Adkisson entered the church with a shotgun and opened fire in the sanctuary, during a children’s play.

My family and I were delayed that day, so we pulled into the parking lot right behind the first cop arriving at the scene. Thankfully, we were spared the sight of the event that torn apart the lives of so many in our community.

This happened on July 27 of 2008 and I had talked about this with my friend several times in the months past. This former friend lives in Ecuador, where I was born and raised, but she is from another country. When she first arrived in Ecuador she got married and then divorced about seven years later. She had a baby, whom I adored. During the end of her marriage I often stopped by at her place to help her out with the baby, and keep her company. When I got married, she organized a party for me and baked me a quinoa wedding cake. A few months later, I moved to the United States.

For fourteen years we kept the long distance friendship strong. On December of 2008 she married a man she loves. In Ecuador what counts from the legal standpoint is what is called the “civil” marriage, which is the legal contract that starts a marriage, and after that people are free to hold a religious ceremony of any faith if they wish, but priests and ministers are not allowed to hold wedding ceremonies unless the couple can present the “civil” marriage certificate.

She believes in astrology and numerology and she thinks some dates have special meaning over others, so she had chosen the Winter Solstice for her “civil” ceremony and she told me over the phone and in an email that she was having the religious ceremony on the Spring Equinox. However, she never sent me an official wedding announcement or an invitation.

Towards the middle of March our lives and the lives of the people in my church community were shaken again by the release, after the court hearing, of the “suicide” letter that Jim Adkisson had left in his truck before he went in the church with a shotgun hidden in a guitar case. (He had expected that he would be killed by the police after he had killed as many people as he could.)

Jim Adkisson had decided to plead guilty to all counts to avoid the death penalty. During the hearing, knowing that church officials were seating behind him, he pretended to scratch the back of his head with his middle finger. He showed no remorse – his only regret being that he only got to kill two people and injure a few more.

During this time, I kept expecting to get a note or an email with the confirmation of the date for my friend’s religious ceremony, but the note never came. The Spring equinox came and went in the midst of volunteering in several church committees, organizing a free energy healing event for members and friends of the church, and providing support to friends through conversation and company. I also had to admit to myself that I would have to let go of a weekly class I’d been teaching, because I could not concentrate enough to take care of all the logistics involved with the advertising and planning of the new cycle. I would also sometimes forget what I was saying in the middle of a sentence – and that didn’t bode well for lectures.

By the end of May there was a message in my inbox, with some beautiful photos of her wedding... accompanied by an angry note of how hurt she was and how disappointed she was on me as a friend that I didn’t sent her a congratulatory note for her wedding.

I immediately called her on the phone and apologized (though looking back I am not sure an apology was needed) and tried to explain to her what had been going on here with the hearing and all the sadness at the church. That is when she asked: “Are you still affected by that?” It had only been eight months from the shooting, it was such an unexpected question. After that I don’t remember anything else that was said, only that I felt something close in my heart towards her.

Because I valued this friendship and didn’t want to stay with my heart closed to her, I wrote her an email about how I felt, that she should ask such an insensitive question. Weeks went by and she didn’t answer my email but one day she found me online and instant-messaged me. During this chat I asked her why she had asked that question: “are you still affected by that?” like she was talking about a fender bender that had happened 20 years ago.

Her response was that she didn’t expect me to call her and she spoke without thinking because she still was so hurt that I wasn’t with her in spirit on her wedding day (for which she sent no announcement).

This woman, who holds a doctorate in psychology and has a successful private practice as a therapist, continued on to say that I shouldn’t be as affected as I said I was by the events of July 27, because “I wasn’t even there when it happened.” In her infinite knowledge and wisdom she added that the bulk of any grieving, anyway, is done on the first six months.

When I insisted that I felt offended by her question, she added, irritably, “I already told you I spoke without thinking.”

I could tell that she was still feeling very resentful so I tried to tell her about the aftermath of the tragedy, because you see, Jim Adkisson didn’t just kill two people and hurt another seven.

Several of our church elders passed on in the weeks following this event. Our pastor had to hold six funerals in less than two weeks. I tried to tell her about the people who still have pellets in their bodies, about my friend’s father who lost an eye and now struggles with depression, about the heart attacks and the recurrences of cancer, the high incidence of illnesses and surgeries that followed the tragedy.... the young people who had nervous breakdowns and had to quit their jobs, those who were not able to get re-employed and ended up having to file for disability... the people who never struggled with weight issues before this, who are now battling obesity... the beautiful couples that are now divorced... and the sorrows that hurt so deep we can’t even talk about them. I tried to tell her so many things, but she only waited for a pause so she could say “you were self-centered.”

I had to tell her that to say the things she was saying meant she didn’t really understand the magnitude of what had happened here. She insisted she did. Then I asked her if she would have posed that question to the people who were at Columbine or Virginia Tech... she didn’t know what to say.

That was the moment I knew this friendship was over. It was over because this former friend could not understand the most important thing about me in relationship with the events of July 27 of 2008, and which is: I do not want to not be affected by that – because it happened, and it matters.

It matters because people I loved are no longer around us. It matters because I had to explain to my children what guns and murderers are much sooner than I had wanted to. It matters because we had to adjust own beliefs about evil, and this has influenced the way we live today.

It matters, because the shooting originated a cascade of events that changed the future, not only of this church, but of the whole Unitarian Universalist Denomination – evidenced by the creation of “Standing on the Side of Love,” a new and very powerful social justice campaign.

It mattered to me and my family in another unexpected way: with the new concerns about safety, all the wonderful “extracurricular” activities that were available for families at the church had to be dropped until they could be offered again under new safety standards. For our family, as Hispanics living in the buckle of the Bible belt, with no extended family in the area, this meant going back to the feelings of isolation we had felt when we first moved to the area.

It has been a long haul for our family to find a sense of community in East Tennessee, without the support of the church. There has been a good side to this too: we have found friendships in some very unexpected places.

Today, though we feel blessed in many ways, I cannot help mourn the loss of what was my church, TVUUC, before the shooting.

I know so many people I love still struggle every day with what happened in much deeper ways than have affected me and my family, and I wrote this for them, so they know it is OK to still be affected by that. We will always be affected by that – because it happened, and it matters.

You have a right to still be affected by that, and you also have the responsibility to take care of yourself; to take the necessary steps to get yourself back to wellness; and to ask for help if you need it... and do this until you find yourself feeling some days like you are no longer affected by it, while knowing that it has changed you forever.