AJIJIC, Mexico (AP) — There’s a look Sandy Phillips came to know each time she arrived somewhere a gunman had made famous. Her road trip through mass shooting sites went on for a decade and always seemed to have a new stop. When she reached it, she’d lock eyes with someone and see the catatonia, as plain as the weight of every leaden step they’d taken since the news that upended their life.
She, too, had inched through days when all the world’s laughter went silent and its beauty was lost. In a morning fog, she’d question if it all was a nightmare, and in the black of night, when the grisly visions clawed her awake, she’d lie there wishing it was she who had died. Life became a torturous cycle punctuated by her own sobbing. She was sure she was creeping toward insanity.
Now she found herself in Newtown or Parkland or Uvalde or whatever fresh hell had just been put on the map. She had lessons to share, advice that could only be amassed by someone who’d lived through the same. So, she’d clasp the hands of the mourning and ask about the ones they’d been robbed of and mouth words that could surprise her as much as those who listened.
“You will,” she said confidently, “find joy again.”
She repeated it more times than she can count. She’d show up at the school or nightclub or church or wherever the latest battle erupted in this new American war, and she’d say them to the parents who put children in tiny caskets and the partners who never got to say goodbye. She knew them to be true even if she had to repeat them to convince herself.