Reminders

I’m really, really starting to hate anniversaries.

Part of the modern Jewish experience (one could argue that it’s always been this way) is memorializing tragedy. Not even counting all the ways we choose to remember the Shoah (the Holocaust), we are regularly forced to; any time a white supremacist makes the news, or swastika graffiti shows up somewhere, or even when people on the left want to yell into the echo chamber of social media and using ripping up nazi flags or anti-nazi signs to declare what they think of the current administration, and so on. Beyond this, the mourner’s Kaddish is a regular part of prayer, as is the concept of yahrzeit – marking the anniversary of a loved one’s death.

It even extends to our holidays. There’s a great joke out there, that I cannot claim credit for, saying that you can sum up most Jewish holidays with one blanket sentiment. “Somebody tried to kill us. They failed. Let’s eat.” Funny, yes, but also a reminder that people are always trying to kill us. Antisemitic violence is up, world-wide, and I’ve even had someone come up to me during a convention and pull me aside to let me know about a shooting at a Synagogue, asking a) if I was okay, and b) if I knew anyone there. *Sigh* I get their intention was concern, but this was someone I had a bit more respect for – not a person I would have expected to fall into the “all Jews know each other, right?” sort of thinking.

Now let’s add onto this our stupid fucking world where people try to kill each other, for any reason. I woke up on 9/11 to a phone call from my mom asking me to turn on the TV, wake my younger brother up, and then for the two of us to start manning the phones. A significant percentage of our extended family lived and worked in NYC around then, including one of my cousins and my uncle (his father), who both worked in buildings #1 and 2. Both got out okay, but my uncle died from complications due to the crap he breathed in when the towers fell…that and he wasn’t really the same after that morning. He was having breakfast with my cousin when the first plane hit the floor where he worked…pretty much 80% of the people he knew died that day…I can’t imagine what going through that would be like, mentally.

Since my parents used to live in NYC before I was born (and when I was very young), they had lots of friends there too. The gut-punch that was even scarier to me was that exactly one week, to the day, to the hour, before 9/11, my dad and brother were having breakfast at the Windows on the World restaurant (on top of tower 1) with some of my dad’s old business partners.

…I hadn’t originally planned on delving into 9/11 when I started typing this. Whatever, it still fits.

Let’s add into the mix, now, school shootings. Rather than talk about the in general, I’m just going to mention the one I could have been caught in, had some things been different that day.

12 years after the fact, the details are all over the internet, so I don’t need to really do a recap of all that. It turned out the shooter spent the night before in the motel literally next door to my apartment building, and took the same path to Cole Hall on foot that I (and admittedly almost everyone coming from that direction) took. I was headed for the building next door, but still…

I still can’t shake the memory of what happened. I was listening to music on my headphones and walking to a history class. I came around by DuSable Hall and saw a bunch of people running in my direction waving their hands in the air. As I pulled my earbuds out I slipped on some snow/ice and landed on my ass. Someone behind me helped me up as the kids running towards us said there was someone shooting guns and to get off campus.

Everybody around me ran the other way. I stood there like an idiot for 5 seconds as the thought went through my brain “Shit. But if I went that way, maybe I could tackle the shooter or do something to help…” and then heard the first police siren, which shook me out of it. It hit me that if I went towards the shooting, unarmed, I was going to get shot (either by the shooter or by police if I got in the way). So I turned and took a perpendicular route away from campus and ducked into a Starbucks – told them there was a shooting and to keep an eye out (while ordering a drink to go) and called my parents to tell them I was okay and that the “phone lines” were probably going to be severely jammed in the near future, but that I’d be back at my apartment in 5 minutes and would hop on an instant messenger program from there. I called my professor’s office immediately after that to make sure she had heard and was not heading to class (they already had a cop guarding the lobby and her building was on lock-down), and then I went back to my apartment.

I still remember setting up a group chat with friends as we tried to figure out what happened, which building, what class it might have been…and then the pit in my stomach when I realized that it was a geology (oceanography) class. I was a dual geology/history major…I had friends who were geology professors, TAs, and students. It turned out that several friends of mine were shot. So the next two hours were me and some of my friends from the chat room trying to call news channels whenever they would start broadcasting rumors or bad info, like that the professor of the class had been killed instantly (he was being operated on at the hospital when this “news” came out) – we tried to call them to get them to shut up and not panic peoples’ families…but they started hanging up on us if we weren’t people who were “in the room” and crap like that.

…I also remember being actually, teeth-gnashing, red-faced angry (at myself) when my therapist, two years later, told me that I almost certainly had PTSD. How could that be, I asked – I was a block away when it happened! Yes, I had friends who got shot, but they survived (and most were dealing with it way better than I think I would have). Hell, even my abusive ex-girlfriend, who lived across the parking lot from where it happened (and was in her dorm room at the time) had managed to deal with it and move on.

Apparently, sitting near doors, carrying knives, daydreaming about how I could best tackle/stab someone trying to bust into a classroom I was in with a gun, and, oh yea (subject matter for this whole journal today), being unable to stop thinking about it, even 12 years later…all symptoms.

*sigh* fuck.

I don’t think a month goes by in which I don’t think about the shooting. Between that, and 9/11, and just being Jewish on the planet Earth right now, there are just oh so many reminders of death all around…maybe something would be wrong with me if I didn’t think about the shooting, and death in general, as much as I do? I can’t even sit in a Starbucks anymore with my back to the door, or else if there’s a loud noise (door slam, etc.) behind me, I spin around super fast. I was running an RPG for friends a few years ago at their house near some woods, and out of nowhere some schmuck started firing a rifle in the distance (hunting season and all that, but still close enough for the report to be heard) – to say that I was “on edge” after that would be something of an understatement.

I don’t have any epiphanies about any part of this…it’s just all hitting me at once right now, and I know I can’t really talk about it amongst my friends. Most wouldn’t understand, and the ones who would, would probably just worry more than usual (see multiple previous entries about trying to no longer burden the people I care about with my BS).

As with so many other things, lately… I just don’t know what to do anymore.