If I Don’t Make It, I Love You

MY DAUGHTERS WERE born a shade too yellow, prompting an extended stay in the nursery. You can stay if you want, the nurse told me. You can stay the one extra night or you can leave and just pick them up tomorrow. I didn’t have to think about it. I will be back tomorrow morning, I replied. Her disapproval was tangible as she brought in my release forms. That night, I slept in my own bed for thirteen hours straight. The next morning, I arrived early and eager. Okay, I thought, I can be a mother now. And, in the same breath, I will never not be ashamed of this.

Mary Kay Mace’s daughter Ryanne was the youngest student murdered at Northern Illinois University on Valentine’s Day in 2008. In her story, Mary Kay writes about the denial she first felt and how she refused to stay at the hospital and wait. “I would get up to leave, insisting I had to go find her. I was certain my daughter had run for her life . . . and that she was wandering around outside in a state of shock. I was determined to find her to keep her from freezing to death.” In the end, she stayed.

When my girls were three, I had tubes put in their ears and their adenoids removed. They had been suffering from chronic earaches, and I let a doctor who didn’t know them well enough make this decision. I didn’t question him, I did what he said I should do. When the girls woke up in the recovery room, Samantha was fine. Penelope was having difficulty coming out of the anesthesia. I was allowed to go back into recovery to see her. I shook with fear the entire way. When I reached her, she looked lifeless. She had a white blanket draped over her body and she was perfectly still. The sight of her nearly killed me. After a few minutes of my touching her and caressing her face, she began to respond. Color returned in her cheeks and she smiled weakly when she saw me. I’m so sorry, I told her, I’m sorry I let them do this to you.

When Ryanne Mace’s name didn’t appear on the list of wounded students, Mary Kay thought she would be reunited with her daughter. But, there was an unidentified female. “A police officer came to take us into a private office to ask for her physical description. They had one unidentified female fatality. We described our daughter and the officer went back and forth between us and another room, where I imagined they had a sort of a command center set up. The unidentified victim had a tattoo. I kept saying, “No, no, that’s not her.”

Our home was built into the side of a mountain. As such, there were three staircases and three floors. A nightmare for a mother with two babies. Everything was gated. Everything blocked off. My girls slept in the attic, converted to a beautiful carriage-style bedroom, and my husband and I slept in the basement. The distance between us felt immeasurable. A baby monitor was our lifeline. I could never hear them cry without it. I obsessed over the battery back up, slept with the monitor on full volume, and dreamt about fires. I was terrified that if I didn’t get to them, my girls would attempt to climb over the baby gate at the top of their stairs. I asked my father to call me every morning at 6 a.m. If I don’t answer, I told him, come and get the girls. I didn’t sleep soundly for six years. Why didn’t I just let them sleep in my room?

Mary Kay remembered something. “I finally remembered another identifying detail: my daughter had a metal splint behind her two front incisors that had been left over from orthodontia,” she writes. “After relaying that info, the next person we were taken to see was a hospital chaplain. I realized what that likely meant and I felt like I’d been sucker punched in the stomach.”

There was a time when I was told that I most likely would not be a mother. During that time, I saw a movie in which one of the characters said, “I don’t think you can call yourself a woman until you’re a mother.” I remember feeling like every dream I ever had died in that moment. I wonder now, after meeting so many mothers whose children were taken by gun violence, if it can work in reverse. Can a mother ever again just be a woman?

Mary Kay struggles with what to call herself now. “Something struck me like a ton of bricks: the double meaning of the word survivor. I survived my daughter. It’s the last thing in the world I ever thought would happen, and I couldn’t be more devastated. I didn’t want to be a survivor. I didn’t want to survive my daughter.”

A few days after I edited the final version of Mary Kay’s story, I pulled my now preteen daughters from their electronics and we took the dog for a walk in the woods. We stumbled across a gigantic pile of leaves, and the girls begged me to let them jump into them. I stood patiently with the dog, bathed in late September sun and the girls’ giggles. How lucky am I? I thought, I’ve made so many bad decisions, and yet, I was chosen. I was chosen to be their mother. Mary Kay was chosen to be Ryanne’s mother, and she will always be Ryanne’s mother.

The day I made the decision to leave my babies in the hospital overnight without me, my father caught me standing outside the nursery watching them. Tears streamed down my cheeks. “Get used to it, honey,” he said to me, “being a parent is nothing but heartbreak.” It’s the only time in my life I wished he wasn’t right.

AMYE ARCHER, EDITOR

JANUARY 2019

The following students were shot and killed at
Northern Illinois University:

Gayle Dubowski, 20

Catalina Garcia, 20

Julianna Gehant, 32

Ryanne Mace, 19

Daniel Parmenter, 20

UNIDENTIFIED

By Mary Kay Mace

Mary Kay Mace’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Ryanne, was murdered in the shooting at Northern Illinois University.

On Valentine’s Day, breaking news reported a shooting at our daughter’s college, Northern Illinois University (NIU). My husband, Eric, and I were at our respective workplaces when we received separate calls from other people telling us about it. After a couple of hours trying in vain to reach our daughter by phone, we met at home and hopped into the car for the one-hour trip to NIU. We drove along with an impatient, nervous energy, hoping with all our might that we were overreacting and she was safe.

When we were almost there, I told Eric to turn into the hospital we were about to pass. I’d suddenly realized that campus was probably locked down and that we wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near it. There, we were able to ascertain that our daughter was not on the list of the wounded, but a police officer came to take us into a private office to ask for her physical description. They had one unidentified female fatality. We described our daughter and the officer went back and forth between us and another room, where I imagined they had a sort of a command center set up. The unidentified victim had a tattoo. I kept saying, “No, no, that’s not her,” and I would get up to leave, insisting I had to go find her. I was certain my daughter had run for her life, leaving behind her cell phone and belongings, and that she was wandering around outside in a state of shock. I was determined to find her to keep her from freezing to death. But the officer kept persuading us to stay by telling us that we were in the right place to get the best information as they were able to piece it together. After hours of this, I finally remembered another identifying detail: my daughter had a metal splint behind her two front incisors that had been left over from orthodontia. After relaying that info, the next person we were taken to see was a hospital chaplain. I realized what that likely meant and I felt like I’d been sucker punched in the stomach. That’s when my head started spinning and my heart lodged in my throat. I kept saying over and over, “I don’t understand. How can this be happening?”

It took another couple of hours before we were told that this unidentified victim had been brought to the hospital and was now ready to be viewed. The coroner told us what we could expect to see and that we couldn’t touch her or even get too close. I listened, while steeling myself for what was about to happen. He was trying to prepare us for something no parent should ever have to do. His face, his voice, Eric’s hand in mine, all of it felt unreal, like a bad dream from which I would never wake. The coroner opened the door. My gut tightened. I could see instantly that my child was no longer lost, she was gone. My heart detonated.

At nineteen, my daughter, Ryanne Elizabeth Mace, was the youngest of the five students murdered in the shooting at NIU. Ryanne was a beautiful person through and through. She was incredibly bright, insightful, funny, friendly, curious, trustworthy, and kindhearted. She was nonjudgmental and treated everyone with respect. And, apparently, she had just the tiniest streak of rebellion in her to have a tattoo she kept secret from her parents. If anything, that made me even prouder of her than I already was.

Ryanne had the gift of being able to make people feel comfortable. She actively sought out ways to connect with others and nourished that connection once she found it. Her friends all went to her for advice because they knew not only how stable and well-grounded she was, but also because she was encouraging and supportive. Ryanne was there for her friends, through good times or bad. But she wasn’t that way just with her peers. She was able to foster good relationships with people of all ages and backgrounds within her sphere: children, coworkers, customers, teachers, and family members like my father. Ryanne and my father were kindred spirits. Despite their difference in years, they reveled in having deep discussions about philosophy. They sometimes conversed with one another in French. They made a point of reading the same book at the same time so they could analyze it in detail the next time they saw one another. How many young adults would take the time out of their busy lives to do that?

Eric and I were well aware of how blessed we were to have such a wonderful and loving kid. Ryanne was majoring in psychology with the goal of becoming a therapist because she was committed to helping others. In fact, her murderer was someone she would have tried to help.

It’s very difficult to describe the debilitating grief that has consumed us over the past ten years. At times, I felt like it was actually possible to drown in despair. And even though I’ve gotten used to my new default state of constantly longing for her, there are still times when I have the wind knocked right out of me all over again, such as on the ten-year anniversary of Ryanne’s death when seventeen people were killed at a high school in Parkland, Florida. I watched, heartbroken as parents in Florida waited for the calls and texts that would never come.

I struggle with what to call this new existence of mine, this new identity. Eight years into my grief journey, I went to a “Wear Orange” event on National Gun Violence Prevention Awareness Day. One of the organizers who was familiar with my story tried to hand a button to me. It had the word “survivor” on it. At first, I reached out to take it, but then withdrew my hand.

Something struck me like a ton of bricks: the double meaning of the word survivor. I survived my daughter. It’s the last thing in the world I ever thought would happen, and I couldn’t be more devastated. I didn’t want to be a survivor. I didn’t want to survive my daughter. I think people prefer the word “survivor” over “victim” because it sounds more empowering. Maybe people believe it to be more accurate since some of us suffering the aftereffects of gun violence weren’t actually shot, nor were we present during the incident. Rather, we’re the loved ones of the actual victims whose lives were cut short. We are grievers. I spent years struggling to understand the “why” of the NIU massacre. I couldn’t reconcile the fact that my Ryanne was the victim of a premeditated murder by someone who’d never even met her, much less had been wronged by her in some way. The “how” of it, I found out easily. The gunman bought his guns legally, despite a lengthy history of mental illness. That’s what set me on my new path in life of advocating for commonsense gun violence prevention laws. Through my activism for change, I have found another identity, one I think Ryanne would be proud of, Gun Reform Advocate.

Red flag legislation was recently enacted in Illinois called the Firearms Restraining Order Act. I believe it may have stopped the NIU gunman from committing his horrific act. Even though Illinois is now safer, I will still spend the rest of my life doing everything I can to save other parents from having to identify their child on a cold, metal table. I will do everything I can to save other children from suffering Ryanne’s fate. I know this is what she would’ve wanted. I know if she were here today, she would be alongside me. I can think of no more meaningful way to honor her memory.

SOMETHING HAS TO CHANGE

By Patrick Korellis

Patrick Korellis was taking a geology class in Cole Hall where the shooting occurred. Patrick was also the first injured student to graduate, and became the alumni liaison to the university’s advocacy and support group.

I sat in my geology class as a gunman with a long trench coat kicked the door open, pulled out a shotgun, and shot at us. I got under my desk as I heard my classmates screaming and crying. When he stopped shooting, someone in my classroom yelled, “He’s reloading!” I ran toward the door. He shot again, and I felt a sharp pain in the back of my head. I touched my head. Blood ran down my neck, all over my hand. I had no idea where I was shot or if I would survive. I had to escape.

When I made it outside, a police officer found me and got me an ambulance to the hospital. Upon my arrival, the doctor rolled up my left sleeve. I had blood and a big bruise. I was shot in the arm, and I didn’t know it. I watched as more stretchers arrived carrying my classmates. There were 150 people in my classroom, five were killed, and twenty-one others were injured. The gunman had a shotgun and some handguns. If he had a high-powered assault weapon, I wouldn’t be here today.

Ever since Sandy Hook, I’ve been more vocal about the shooting, and meeting with my politicians to see if anything can be done. I’ve met with Senator Durbin four times, after different mass shootings, urging him to plead with congress to get something done. Nothing happened. He tried, but couldn’t get enough votes. I’ve connected with victims from Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Aurora, Orlando, Las Vegas, and more. We share a common bond, and we need each other.

Ten years later, on February 14, 2018, I was back at the NIU campus for memorial events to remember my classmates. I was in a room with the families of the victims, and other survivors, when news broke about a shooting in Parkland, Florida. Some of us were looking at our phones in disbelief. A shooting on the anniversary of another shooting.

These victims from Parkland were now a part of the same group I was, a group no one wants to be a part of. I did reach out to some of the victims, and some have joined a private Facebook group started by one of the survivors of the Columbine shooting that I’m a part of, too. We all were there to offer our support to these victims in the group. I really hoped this would be the last mass shooting in this country. I can’t take it anymore, and ten years later, it has gotten harder, not easier. There needs to be a change, and I stand with the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that are speaking out, trying to make a change.

FROM OUT OF TRAGEDY—HOPE

By Joseph Dubowski

Joseph Dubowski’s twenty-year-old daughter, Gayle, was murdered in the shooting at Northern Illinois University.

We think we know the way our stories are supposed to go. We write the scripts for our lives one paragraph or page at a time. We rehearse for the really big scenes, the ones we think will matter for us: How am I going to ask her out? What should I say? What will I say if she says “Yes”? What do I do if she says “No”?

We select our wardrobe for that job interview, or for that big promotion. We select a school, go to college, or to trade school. We plan our careers, our families, our vacations. And on a large scale, life is routine, follows a pattern, and we think we know what is expected of us in the seasons of our lives: get a degree, find and marry that special someone, start a career, have children, put children through school, attend their weddings. Based on these expectations, we think we know what should come next.

On February 14, 2008, at around 10:40 p.m., someone effectively held my script in front of my face and lit it with a match. They told us—Laurel (my wife), Ryan (our son), and about a dozen friends who had met us at Kishwaukee Hospital that night—that a girl matching our daughter’s description had died after being airlifted to a hospital near Rockford, Illinois. Our twenty-year-old daughter, Gayle, who had been a sophomore in college, was dead from gunshot wounds she had received in the shooting that had taken place at NIU that afternoon. Suddenly, everything I thought I knew about my life felt like it went up in smoke.

And so began our journey through the valley of the shadow of death—Gayle’s death—an event that would threaten to put a cloud of sorrow over what was left of our lives. I still recall some of the images from those six days that followed the shooting at NIU. Dark and terrible, sad and fierce, melancholy and painful. Flowers and candles in the snow, tearful nights and tearful dawns, crushing loneliness and emptiness even while surrounded by tens and even hundreds of people tending to our every need and wish. Anonymity to celebrity, and back to anonymity again, all in a span of ten days. Ten days of hunger but not eating (at least nothing healthy). Ten days of sleeping but not resting. Ten days of endless motion, all the while feeling like the world had stopped. Then the world started again, but left us behind.

There is a time after a major catastrophe such as 2/14 (shorthand, in the vein of 9/11), just as happens most of the time after anyone’s death, when the cards stop coming, the phone calls cease, and the friends and neighbors return to work and stop dropping by as often—or stop dropping by altogether. I hear it from others who have lost a loved one, and I have experienced it myself. No one wants to stay in the valley. But few I have talked to over the past ten years know the way out. And not knowing the way out, they stay in the valley, and write the story of waiting for their loved one there.

But this is not the story of someone who stayed in the valley, nor of one who wants to forget the valley and the lessons learned therein. I have the advantage now of having passed through the valley and can look back on the past ten years with a sense of gratitude and awe, and hope. Gratitude for the lessons I learned about faith, hope, and forgiveness; awe of the resilience of people; and hope that comes from knowing one can overcome grief and find life enjoyable again.

Tragedy and trauma don’t make us who we are; they just reveal the cracks. One area in which our “cracks” show can be our faith. Faith is simply belief, the deep-down understanding that drives our moment-by-moment existence, our choices about how we live. After a traumatic event we go back to examine what we believe to be true of God (or the absence of a faith in God), of the world around us (as a safe place), of the nature of the people around us (are they reliable?), and of ourselves (do I have what it takes to cope?).

This questioning of what is trustworthy is normal and healthy. The problem arises when we refuse to question, leading to fear and anger. We think that what we know is so, and so any attempt to question our faith is perceived as weakness, a threat. This was one of the first things that I noticed after identifying Gayle’s body in Rockford that night. Her sudden death called for me to question what I believed about God, about people, about the world as a safe place, and the reliability of the people in my life. The very foundations on which my life had been built were shaken as by a magnitude 8.7 earthquake, the epicenter right beneath my feet. I don’t think I could have stayed on my feet save for the people around me holding me up.

There is no mistake that questioning one’s foundation and noticing the cracks is frightening business. Seeing Gayle’s body—which just two weeks earlier I had seen and held so full of life, lying stiff before me—opened ugly cracks in my foundation. It demanded my reevaluating everything about what I believed God would and would not allow. I did not believe I had a “Get Out of Suffering Free” card in the game of life, but I did not expect to be dealt the card I held. I learned that our happiness is not assured by having rigid beliefs and expectations. Our ability to handle tragedy hinges on our willingness in time of testing to examine and refine our expectations according to what is truly important to us and what is certain to last. At the same time, unmet hopes, dreams, and expectations—if unresolved—can have a crippling effect on our capacity for happiness. I had no idea how to resolve them.

The death of Gayle ten years ago led me to the study of grief and resilience, as I returned to school to earn a master’s degree in applied child and family studies, with a specialization in marriage and family therapy from NIU—crossing the same stage Gayle would have crossed had she lived. As a psychotherapist, I have learned that hope and expectancy are the factors most important in predicting outcomes in therapy—and in recovering from trauma. They’re more important than anything I directly do in the therapy room.

This calls to mind a New Testament passage I shared with my wife the afternoon following the shooting. In 2 Corinthians 1:3–4 we read, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.” In reflecting on that passage, I assumed that God could comfort us in our pain and loss, and believed that he would when all was said and done. But with that comforting came an obligation, once we had been comforted, to do for others what God had done for us. Looking back, it seems that I had a hope and expectancy that someday, somehow—and I had no idea when or how—we would overcome the pain.

After losing Gayle, we heard things like “You never get over the loss of a child,” and other despair-inducing, ambiguous, and unhelpful statements. Sometimes these statements came, unfortunately, from people whom we sought out for comfort and guidance in times of sadness and grief. If we’d simply heeded such information, we may have sought out other information and emotions to match this untruth. (A more accurate statement would be “You will never forget Gayle.” That statement would’ve been more comforting—especially if followed by “. . . and neither will we.”) Fortunately, we’d already been introduced to information more helpful to us (in the form of the Grief Recovery Method®) and quickly dismissed this damaging comment.

Today I’m grateful for the wonderful family, friends, church, community, and the university, all of whom supported us through the healing and rebuilding of our lives. I’m grateful for the Grief Recovery Handbook, which introduced us to the actions we needed to take in order to move beyond grieving our daughter so we could again enjoy fond memories of her, and begin letting go of the dreams and expectations of plans we would never get to see her fulfill. I’m grateful for the gift of forgiveness—choosing to forgive Gayle’s murderer makes it possible for us to live without bitterness and anger blackening every day like never-ending starless night. I’m grateful for the life circumstances that gave me time for healing my own broken heart before having to do a lot of other things. And gratitude is also key in recovery and growth in the aftermath of trauma and tragedy.

Trauma and tragedy not only reveal the “cracks” in our worlds and lives, but they also reveal our ability to adapt, to rebuild, and to grow. Adapting and rebuilding do not mean that we forget what was. Some of us try, and in doing so we waste precious energy and time thinking we will somehow avoid the pain. We try keeping busy, embracing work, activism, charitable endeavors, and the like. Some, if not most, of these are for the greater and long-term good. They provide an outlet for the fear and anger that drive us, which in themselves are among the most common responses to loss, whether it be the loss of a relative, a friend, or the loss of safety/security. And most people do this because they know more about what they are doing in the wake of loss than they do about dealing with the pain itself. But, what if completing our grief and saying goodbye to the pain of grief and loss were possible? What if we could move beyond grief? What if our hearts were not “permanently broken”? What if we started after a mass shooting by healing broken hearts first, and then—with hearts scarred but healed—got busy with making the world a safer place?

Over the years since the February shooting in 2008 at NIU, I‘ve learned much about grief and healing, and it is in this area that I see some of the greatest opportunity in the wake of gun violence. Teaching and helping others complete their grief brings greater connection between people, makes them better listeners, and improves the mental and physical health of those who experience that recovery from loss brings. And it may just be what prevents more shootings—for many a shooter was a fragile soul who never learned how to grieve.