Eulogy for the Almost

We heard him die. Shots are louder than you expect, louder than behind the rose-tinted screens of action-packed films. When the sound isn’t traveling out from speakers, there is no thrill. Bullets are cold and unyielding; the sound of the bullet skipping into the hazy summer rippled through in an uneasy array of loss and finality. Living a few blocks away from the office, I’m not sure why we only heard the last one, maybe because we were listening for it, maybe the sound was amplified as it ricocheted in his skull. 

Listening was the worst part. No blood, no gore and guts, just the dreadful, damning silence after. With an overactive imagination that took every evening working late to be a car accident and each creak an intruder, the waiting was painfully tense. I imagined the bullet finding my father, skimming his knotted back that I tried to untangle each night, lodged in his bowed legs that he iced after weekend soccer games, finding its way into his high-blood pressured heart. I imagined my father in pain while I sat empty handed in our apartment. 

My mother sat poised and stiff on our loveseat that just fit our family of three, the one she had discovered next to a dumpster and reupholstered with exacting hand-stitches. As an artist who waitressed her way to maternity insurance for me and built each crevice of our home little by little, my mother lives off of her hands- she knows manual labor, which is why she assures me now that even without my father’s office job, we’ll survive, don’t worry. 

My father called us first. Close the windows and blinds, stay indoors, don’t worry but shots were fired at work, the shooter could be in our apartment area now. My mother recovered with a harrowing breath, I love you, stay safe, stay safe. She turned on the local news channel, but quickly shut it. The rapid-fire English was just another assault. As the silence grew stifling and solemn, I knew something was terrifyingly wrong. 

She told me to go to my room as if twenty feet and a wall full of picture frames would shield me from what was happening. Instead, I hunched down on the ground of the hallway with my back flush against the cold wall to press out the rising prickles of unease as I watched my mother. Remaining rigid, her eyes focused somewhere far away. I realized she was at the edge of something, hovered at the breath between a shift in emotion, but I couldn’t decipher what brink she was standing on- what lurked at the sides of the tightrope. So I pressed my back as hard as I could against the wall and watched my mother cling to the landline phone. 

There was a queue of concerned calls from friends. Thank you for calling...yes, he’s in the office… i don’t know. Each i don’t know and well-intended call that wasn’t her husband was another dagger into her composure. We were both surviving on a cloud of surrealism, suspended by the belief that if we opened our eyes wide enough, we would wake up to delicious night. 

The phone rang a final time. It was over. The shooter had turned the last shot on himself. My father would come home once he finished his police statements- and that was that. We hugged, had dinner, and moved on. 

We laughed about how, as it was a week after the 4th of July, his first instinct was fireworks until he stepped into a hallway of “go! go! call 911.” We chuckled as he told us about someone who had hid in a trashcan and the man who was dragged out of the ladies room by the police. We giggled about the person being interviewed for a job that day who was scared away and the other one who had just landed from Arizona and was told to fly back. 

          We lounged at home like usual while a mother in the hospital with multiple bullet wounds fought to live for her now fatherless twins. We slept while another family dealt with the loss of a mother, wife, sister, and daughter who had just stopped by on her day off to finish copies. 4 wounded. 3 dead. 2 dozen rounds fired. It was shocking how quickly we forgot, or seemed to forget. 

Speed bumps don’t slow down life. As another summer of playgrounds and libraries concluded with the start of second grade, we all gathered in an assembly where we were coached to be sensitive and supportive for a classmate who had lost her mother. The thing about living in a small city is that everything is connected. I didn’t link the events until much later, but her mother was the first to die in the shooting. 

My mother’s eyes are wet as I ask her about the funeral. The family was elegant and graceful. They smiled, opened the door, and shook the hand of every person who entered. They were collected, charming, and dignified as they said their farewells. As my mother continues on about their strength, I am reminded of the image I have of her: seated, phone in hand, head held high as she listens for the gunshots. I recall the prepared poise and grace as she thanked each painful phone call. I understand her expression then, balancing between two unknowns. She was on the boundary of life and death, the brink of becoming a widow or storyteller, fireworks or bullets. The only difference separating our families is the side of the line we ended up on. I hear the echo of my mother’s words, we’ll survive, and I remember the shadow of preparation, the strengthening and hardening in my mother as she waited to hear her husband die.