When I was twelve years old, I lost my cousin. He was five months younger than me. We were close. I didn’t really understand what was happening when we drove to his home for the memorial service. The funeral was held in his catholic elementary school church. I remember the whole weekend trying to piece together the loss, in what began an endless spiral of grief. A wound would be torn open regularly throughout my teen years, well into my adult life. It left me feeling helpless and broken. In my family with an Irish catholic heritage, losing Billy left us all in disbelief. We all found our individual ways to cope with his loss.  Years later, today, I can be easily reminded of what that loss did to impact my own life. 

Tonight, my heart goes out to the loss of two children who were gunned down as they prayed in their catholic church to start their new school year. The church service is traditional, a place where children gather with their new teachers and new challenges with their friends. A place to naturally feel safe. That beauty and kindness was destroyed this morning at the hands of evil, an assailant with a cadre of weaponry that had lost their grip on the world. That person who shot these tender age children, later took their own life. In my mind, there is nothing else I have to say about the assailant in respect to their own personal tragedy. To me when a mass shooter takes their own life in the end, I call it a cop out. That person will no longer be traumatized by their own evil, as far as we know in a living society. They won’t seemingly have to endure the years of pain, all the friends and family of the loved ones, whose life they cut short. 

I thought of the children that both experienced the shooting first hand and also lost their friends. How will they piece together the days ahead? This tragedy brought back my own memories, so I am really feeling for those young tender aged friends and peers of the victims. My cousin’s death was a horrific tragedy. His friends, family and me, have found ways to keep on going in our own lives. However, not a day goes by that I don’t think about my cousin and what might have been. 

For these children today and Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis. Their journey through grief and trauma has just begun. My heart and soul goes out, to each and every one of them, and the families who lost their children today. I know the reality of loss, but nothing in my life comes close to the next hours and days ahead for those living victims and the family of those lost to pure evil at the hands of gun violence.