They Were Not Given a Maybe

There was a period in my life when I sat beside a child I loved and had no idea what the future was going to look like. As a parent, that is a strange place to live. You stop thinking very far ahead. The things that normally fill your head disappear and your world gets very small. You listen closely to doctors. You watch machines you barely understand. You look for changes that might mean something. A hand moving, an eye opening, a number changing, or a sentence from somebody in the room that sounds even slightly more encouraging than the sentence before it. You become very good at finding hope in small places.

I have been thinking about that a lot since the recent shooting in Bend. I keep thinking about the families and friends of the people who were killed, and particularly about the parents. I do not know them, and I would never pretend that my experience allows me to understand what they are going through. It does not. What happened to them is different in the most important possible way.

When my family was sitting in a hospital wondering what the future might hold, we still had something. We had maybe. Maybe tomorrow would be better. Maybe the next test would show something encouraging. Maybe the brain and body would heal in ways nobody could predict. Maybe the person we knew would come back to us. Maybe life would be different from what we had imagined, but there would still be a life to figure out. Sometimes the hope was enormous. Sometimes it was almost nothing. But it was there.

And I cannot stop thinking about the fact that these families were not given a maybe.

There was no next morning to wait for, no next test, no tiny improvement to celebrate, no doctor walking through the door with a new possibility. There was no opportunity to bargain with the future and say, just give us one more day and let's see what happens. The future simply changed, and that thought has stayed with me in a way I did not expect.

People say there are no words when something like this happens. I have said that before, and I suspect most of us have. It is one of those phrases we reach for because we know there is nothing we can possibly say that is proportionate to what another person is experiencing. I think I understand that phrase differently now. There really aren't words. "I am sorry" is true, but it feels painfully small. "I cannot imagine what you are going through" is also true, but there is nothing particularly comforting about it. "Our hearts are with you" is sincere, but it still feels like we are trying to use a sentence to reach across a distance that words cannot possibly cross.

I tend to be someone who wants to solve things. If there is a problem, I want to understand it. I want to research it, figure out the options, make a plan, and find the next move. I am probably annoying about that sometimes. It is just how I have always been wired. This is one of those moments where that instinct is useless. There is no solution to offer these families. There is no clever way of reframing what happened, no piece of advice that makes the next morning easier, and no explanation that gives back what was taken. You are simply left with the enormity of the loss.

Maybe that is part of why this has affected me so deeply. My own experience taught me what it feels like to be terrified for someone you love while still having the possibility that things might turn out differently. I know what it is to wake up not knowing what that day will bring, but still believing that something could happen that would move life in a better direction. That possibility matters more than I understood at the time. Hope does not have to be rational, and it does not have to be particularly likely. When it is your child, you will take whatever version of it is available. You will take one percent. You will take a doctor saying, "We don't know yet." You will take the fact that nothing got worse today. You will take almost anything that leaves the door open.

There are also survivors, and I find myself thinking about them and their families in a different way. They will hopefully be home soon, and that means there is another day of maybe. Maybe the physical injuries continue to heal. Maybe the emotional wounds become a little more manageable. Maybe sleep comes easier at some point. Maybe a laugh returns without immediately being followed by guilt or the memory of what happened. Maybe life slowly begins to resemble life again, even if it can never be exactly the same. I know from our own experience how enormous that word can become. When someone you love has been badly hurt, you do not need certainty. Sometimes you just need another day in which something better is still possible.

What haunts me is the idea of that door being closed all at once.

When someone dies young, especially in a violent and senseless way, it is not only the life they had already lived that disappears. It is everything that was supposed to come next. A young person's life is mostly future. There were things they were going to do next week, people they were going to meet, places they were going to go, careers that were still unfolding, and families that might have been created. There were birthdays, ordinary dinners, arguments, vacations, bad decisions, good decisions, boring afternoons, inside jokes, and thousands of moments nobody would have thought to appreciate because everyone assumed there would be more of them.

For a parent, I imagine that future is something you carry almost from the moment your child is born. You do not necessarily have a detailed plan for it, especially as they get older and begin creating a life of their own, but there is always an assumption that more is coming. Another phone call, another holiday, another birthday, another chapter. You may not know what any of those chapters will look like, but you assume you will get to see them. And then suddenly there isn't another one.

I have found myself thinking about the young teacher too. A person at the beginning of a career built around other people's children. Someone with their own family, friends, plans, frustrations, hopes, and ordinary life happening around them. We use words like "victims" because we need some way to talk collectively about people after something terrible happens, but that word strips away almost everything that made them a person. They were not victims to the people who loved them. They were someone's child, someone's friend, someone whose name appeared on a phone when they called, someone whose clothes are still somewhere, someone who had something planned for later that day.

That is the part I think we sometimes lose as the news moves forward. A horrible event becomes a story. The story becomes part of a larger conversation, and eventually another story takes its place. Life around it starts moving again because that is what life does. But for the families, nothing has moved on in the same way. There is simply a person missing from all the places where that person was supposed to be.

I am not sure what a community is supposed to say in a moment like this. I am not sure there is a right thing to say. Maybe the more important question is what we do after we have run out of words. We remember. We show up. We give people room to grieve however they need to grieve. We resist the temptation to tell them when it should start feeling better. We remember that some of the hardest days may come well after everyone else has returned to normal life. Most importantly, we try not to reduce the people they lost to the terrible way they died.

I wish I had something more useful to offer than that. I don't. Mostly, I find myself feeling enormous compassion for people I have never met and thinking about them more often than I expected to.

Perhaps that is all this piece really is. A parent who once sat beside a child and held onto every possible version of maybe, thinking about the families who were denied that same chance and about the survivors and their families who still get to wake up tomorrow with maybe intact.

I know that my story is not their story. I know that fear of losing someone is not the same thing as losing them. But perhaps having lived for a while in that space between fear and hope has made me understand, in some very small way, just how precious hope is.

We had it. The survivors still have it.

And for the families whose loved ones were taken from them, the fact that they were not given that next day of maybe is something I am finding very hard to stop thinking about.