Month: March 2018

The Legacy of Traumatic Experiences

This month the trial for the widow of the Pulse shooter begins. Noor Salman pled not  guilty to all charges.

For Orlando residents this trial will bring forth a wave of memories that I’m sure many wanted to put behind them for good. The day I learned about the shooting I was sitting downtown with my fiancee at a Korean Restaurant waiting for the food to arrive, and I just sat there with tears running down my cheeks. I cried for the people who died. I cried for the people who lived. I cried for the police and investigators who had to walk into that crime scene and work. I could barely get myself together and could barely eat, and I haven’t been back to that restaurant since, just because I associate it with those feelings. (Nothing against them at all.) That whole day I just wanted to talk to my mom.

In 2011 when my coworkers and I were in the lobby at my job and a man was dragged in off the street, with his throat cut and bleeding to death, my thoughts later that week were that this was a temporary thing, a feeling that would go away and that we would all heal with time. In some ways I did, but I now recognize that kind of self talk as pure panic on my part. And I was panicking.

-I was afraid to go to work or walk into a public building for months afterward.

-I hired a therapist but found that once I was there I was unable to talk about what happened at all. I went for several months, but always talked about other issues in my life and skirted the big one.

-I was unable to tell my friends about what happened because they were so horrified when I did try to talk to them. My boyfriend at the time broke up with me two days after, because he apparently couldn’t cope.

-I had trouble eating for weeks and lost a lot of weight. I had insomnia and anxiety and ended up taking Xanax for 4 years.

-My mom did not know how to support me, but she managed when others could not.

-I am still afraid of large public buildings and feel scared to attend large events, including church services. I’ve learned to make myself do some things and decline others that I know will make me too nervous.

Even with one death, a lot of people were touched, and I was technically (physically) unharmed. There were the 6 of us working that night, plus my manager, the police officers, the paramedics, the man who brought him into the building (who continued coming in afterward but would never walk through the same set of doors again), the cleaning staff, the shitty counselor that my employer hired for (ONE) session as a group that we were required to attend, and then the friends and family of all the people there that night, plus our own doctors and therapists. This one death went on an on, and I didn’t even mention the victim’s family, or the man who committed the crime and his family.

I feel so much for people in recovery when they’ve been exposed to violence. I can’t even express how much it saddens me. To see it treated as a condition that you just get over, like having a bad cold, upsets me greatly.

I finally was able to talk about it almost 5 years later. It was in a group of my peers, and it was the scariest thing I’d even done- just articulating what happened that night and knowing that the people in the room would be horrified. Part of why I never talked about it was because I didn’t want to upset anyone else with that story. Instead, I was embraced and accepted, and ultimately, assisted.

I still know the man’s name and age when he died, and where he is buried. I know that he doesn’t have a headstone and that the cemetery he is in is not the best one in the area, since the owner died and there is no money for maintenance, so it falls to the city and their limited budget. He is in another state.

One of the men I worked with that night and I have kept in touch. His name is Brian. We both left that job within about a year of each other. It took us both awhile, each for different reasons. I started this blog and started visiting cemeteries as a hobby, and started advocating for one in particular that I felt for. My friend started a series of paintings and works of art that are dark and disturbing and make me feel uncomfortable to look at, but I love them. My favorite is a man with his features blurred, as though the paint ran unexpectedly or was smeared somehow. That painting makes me remember what it felt like to have something simmering inside me that I was unable to talk about. The feeling of being muzzled. I liked it that both of us took what we went through and did something to channel it. I wish I knew what happened to the other people who were there that night.

I should have talked to my therapist, but I’m glad that when I finally did talk about it all I was with such a supportive group of women. And my God, if you’re even in a situation to support a victim or a witness to violence, do it. Don’t act like it didn’t happen. Even if you just listen, it will make a difference.

As this trial begins I can’t help wondering how many people will support the families of the victims, the witnesses, and the officials who worked this crime; this mass shooting. The consequences of that one event will have repercussions that last for generations. Today you can still visit the building and see the memorial that people have created to the victims. Any time I drive by there are people standing there, thoughtfully reading the tributes

All photos of Pulse and the memorial set up in front of the building courtesy of Gus Leigh. You can read his work at this link.

 

 

 

Oakland African American Cemetery, Oakland, Florida

There are a lot of things about Orlando that I dislike, and sometimes progress is one of them. One morning when I was working at the Golf Channel I drove to work at 6:30 a.m. and saw a coyote walk out of the tall grass in a field across from our building and vanish into a nearby office complex. It was an interesting moment since I’d never seen a coyote before, and I sat in my car watching him intently. No one else was there. No one else saw it. And the next week the whole field had been mowed down and was now magically transforming into a storage facility for people to dump all of their crap that won’t fit inside their house.

Oakland Cemetery is facing similar circumstances when it comes to progress. Everything is happening around this site, and I’m not sure where the cemetery will fit in when the construction is completed. There are actually 2 Oakland Cemeteries, and when I saw the first one 2 years ago I thought I was in this one until someone told me recently that no, the other one was in the woods to the left, and that you had to just hike in.

Recently Shawn came home from work and picked me up, telling me he’d passed a cemetery we hadn’t been to yet and that he wanted to take me there. Guess which one it was? When we got to the site around 6 p.m. there were still a few construction workers milling around, but the cleared site is so immense that they never bothered us. They’re building something huge. The site starts right next to the first cemetery that I visited and is a desolate, open expanse of dirt until you look to the left and see an iron arch marking the entrance to the cemetery. We still had to hike over to it through the soft dirt, and then I jumped the fence to get in while Shawn looked around for another way. The arch said it was established in 1882.

At first I didn’t see anything noteworthy except for the fact that the site was heavily wooded and there were no markers. As I walked though I noticed a path and began to follow it. It dipped down into a little valley filled with all types of green ferns and oak trees dripping moss. because of the hour the moss was lit from the setting sun and looked like gold. It was a stunningly beautiful place for a cemetery and I stood there on the path for a few minutes, just looking around and taking in the beauty and odd peacefulness, since the cemetery is very close to the highway. After some time I began to see the odd marker here and there, nearly covered by ferns, and lots of white PVC pipe. In fact I was seeing it everywhere, and I know that each pipe indicated a burial. An archeology group had come out to work on the cemetery a few years ago and they marked the burials they could find with PVC. The Eagle Scouts have also at one time worked here, and from what I was able to find they were responsible for the arch and some previous clean up efforts.

The land was handed over to the city for maintenance and the chain link fence that surrounds the property was put up (there is an open entrance in the gate though, we saw it later on), but the fate of the cemetery is still unknown though it appears that they intend to leave it.

The cemetery is the resting place for many of Oakland’s founders, and also a lot of flu victims from 1918 are buried here. It hit this area particularly hard and many of the cemeteries in the area are a testament to this. It is believed that during that year up to 650,000 people died in America. The totals by state are staggering, and those numbers aren’t even certain. Most likely the numbers were higher. There is once cemetery on Orange Avenue here that is full of flu victims, and the cemetery is actually quite small. I remember reading one account of four funerals being held in one day. For a growing community it would have been devastating.

I used to feel extremely emotional over sites like this, still do sometimes. But I think after the past couple of years of looking for cemeteries that are long gone and doing a lot of reading that I feel more detached. You can stop people from doing what they’re going to do and doing it without regard for others. It’s the way things are now. It doesn’t make the site or the people buried there any less important. They’re still a part of our past and I hope this site will be preserved.

When we got back to the car Shawn spent a good five minutes pulling pernicious little stickers off of me. I was covered.