Three years later, I still shop at the Safeway, which is a few blocks from where we live, but will not park in the first line of parking spaces outside the store. Nor will I walk from Safeway to Walgreens through the covered walkway where so many people died.
January 8, three years ago, I had parked four slots from the front of the main Safeway entrance, which provided me a front row seat to the horror that unfolded a few minutes after I arrived. When the FBI agent led me to retrieve my car the next morning, corralled as it had been by crime scene tape, my legs trembled when I realized just how close I had been.
Five months ago I tried parking in the sixth slot from the front of the Safeway entrance to see if I could do it. It was a wicked hot August afternoon, and I dreaded the longer walk across the black concrete that was mandated by an enduring fear of parking too close. I knew I would never again in my life park in the fourth slot but thought maybe, just maybe, I could handle space six.
As I pulled in, my heart beat hard in my chest and my breath was ragged and brusque. I tried breathing deeply a few times to calm myself. “Not worth it,” I thought, and backed up and drove around to the line of spaces on the far side of the shopping-cart holder, my line of demarcation that provides some sense of safety.
Another hot day, three months earlier, I had tried and failed to make the short walk along the covered sidewalk that runs from Safeway to Walgreens. This is hallowed space that I have, since that day, been unable to step into. It is where so many were trapped and where the dead lay for many hours after the shooting. It is where my friend Gabe went down. I know exactly where Gabe was when he died, and I always nod a silent prayer each time I come and go at Safeway. But I cannot physically enter the space and instead make a long loop out into the parking lot and then head back toward Walgreens even in 110 degree weather.
It has taken much therapy, yoga and breath work to reach the three-year anniversary mostly intact. It has taken oceans of tears and many shared stories with other “survivors” to come to terms with the anxiety and fear that were among the legacies of that day.
This is what I know to be true: Grief and anxiety never are fully banished from the human body. Witnessing the mass murder and wounding of people you care about exerts upon your body multiple levels of stress that knit with your bones and blood. Like a blueprint etched deep within, I have learned not to fight the strange tics that grief and anxiety still require of me but to also listen to and heed the courage that they have bestowed upon my life.
A year ago, my name appeared in bold on the front pages of the Arizona Star when I told the truth about the sexual perversion of former Pima Community College Chancellor Flores that damaged so many lives. The year before that, I wrote several blogs for the Tucson Citizen that helped crack open the whole PCC mess, ignoring warnings that telling the truth might cost me my job.
I do not think either of these would have happened had it not been for all that I saw on January 8, 2011. Coming face-to-face with the suddenness of death reinforced the choice I had to be fully present and out-loud with this one life that is mine. The death of Gabe and the others infused me with a courage for which I am grateful.
I still get nervous when I go inside a bank where robbers have been known to carry guns. I still jump when cars backfire and, every now and again, when I get up in the middle of the night, my heart catches with a panic that Jared Loughner might be under my bed and will get me just like I feared a faceless bogey man beneath my bed when I was a child.
But I also stand proud that all the grief and anxiety have strengthened my own voice, compelling me to tell the truth of what I see in the world in ways that might help change it for the better. This gift of voice, along with the enduring tics of anxiety and grief, are what I shall carry the rest of my days.
