Thoughts on Uvalde, a year later

(Author’s note: I wrote this blog post almost a year ago, after I had read about the horrific events at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Sadly, so much is still the same. Gun violence has become more prevalent and nothing is done to address the real problem–the prevalence of weapons of human destruction.)

LOSING A CHILD is the most gut-wrenching experience that can happen to a parent. It isn’t supposed to happen. Your children aren’t supposed to die before you. But it does happen sometimes, and we become members of a club no one ever wants to join. 

Their little faces remain forever young in the photos that surround you, haunting you, like phantom pieces of your heart.

I lost my 11-year-old son to a rare and devastating illness many years ago and I am still haunted.

There are so many emotions; pain, despair, rage. The questions; why them? Why now? What did they/I/we do to deserve this terrible thing happening?

When numbness finally comes it is a relief from the pain, but it is always with us, like a severed limb that will never regrow. 

I write this not to gain sympathy but to draw attention to what the parents of those 19 children in the small Texas town are facing. It will affect not only them, but their other children, their nieces and nephews, their grandchildren. It will ripple out throughout the families and neighborhoods, and eventually to the next generation.

The parents in Uvalde will live the rest of their lives asking the questions. And the terrible thing is; that despite so many of these hideous incidents, and their increasing frequency….. NOTHING substantial has been done to prevent them. Why the lack of courage to make change? Americans pride themselves on living in the land of the free. Where is the freedom in having to go to school surrounded by armed guards? Having to live in constant fear?  Is that freedom? 

I moved to Portugal three years ago and feel safer and more free here than I ever did in the US.