My Love Receipt.

I thought I was in trouble for partying.

When the director of campus safety is knocking on your door without warning in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon, he’s not congratulating you on being a model student. He’s not letting you know that you’re totally safe and to have no worries. For me on April 28th 2021, it was letting me know that my dad’s been involved in a shooting in Watertown and I need to pack my bag. A trooper will rush me up north to be with Mom, in the meantime we have to wait in his office. Our Dean of Students is there waiting for us. She has a staff of more than 30 people. She’s not there to let me know that everything is going to be okay either. She’s there to tell me she just wants to be with me while we wait for the trooper.

I thought he got shot protecting a stranger at the Salmon Run Mall, or Sams Club. Sam’s made more sense because he always bought office supplies there for the Bridgeview office on random weekdays.

Uncle Mike decided to take me up north instead. He told me to stay off my phone until we got to the hospital. We talked about the players on his team getting into trouble, my cousins, and Easter. As we drove into town he told me we had to meet at Aunt Mary’s first to pee. I told him that was smart and a good idea while we wait to see if Dad’s for sure at Samaritan or not.

Except the Dean, the director of Campus Safety, and Uncle Mike all knew something I didn’t. He never made it to Samaritan.

365 days later, a whole trip around the sun without my father.

We only had 20 years together, 7 of which I probably treated him shitty like a typical teenager does, even though he raised me to be anything but.

Gabrielle and I have officially joined the dead Dad’s club, and my mom the Widow’s club. It’s the worst, as you can imagine. For a while my cousins and I joked that it’s rock bottom. But that’s exactly what it feels like. What I also later realized, however, is that we joined a much more niche, much more traumatizing, frustrating club: the survivors of Gun Violence Club.

Approximately 104 other Americans died by gun violence on that same day last year. It wasn’t just Breonna Taylor, or the freak hunting accident you heard about in addition to my Dad and Maxine. Over the last 365 days, it was thousands of other Americans.

It didn’t take me long to start pointing fingers and filling out a “responsibility pie chart” in my PTSD therapy binder regarding who’s to blame. American gun culture, the NRA, the Second Amendment, and Republicans rank close to the top of my list. And there they shall stay for a long, long time.

The NRA has fooled Americans since the 1970’s making people think individual gun ownership is constitutional even though it never was, all for their own financial benefit. Meanwhile Republicans turn a blind eye as that same NRA lines their pockets.

One local Republican who literally lives on Watertown’s Public Square didn’t bother attending the community vigil that was held there just days after their murders, one of the biggest tragedies his district has ever seen. Another actually tweeted on the night of their murders (in response to President Biden’s State of the Union) that she will never waiver in her defense of “OUR” Second Amendment. Another sent a mailer to our house in June that was actually addressed to my father that advertised all he has done to protect the Second Amendment in Albany. Talk about tone deaf...

It’s haunted me that just days after their deaths I had a microphone at that vigil where I could’ve made this BS clear. Shouted my anger, pointed my finger and maybe taught people something new. I’ve realized now that I have my whole life to do that and can take a breather for now, figure out who I am now with this new trauma, and without my father in my life.

Amongst all the rage at that time was and still is, real, raw, barren, grief. Elizabeth Gilbert wrote: “Grief has its own timeline. It has its own itinerary with you. It has its own power over you, and it will come when it comes.” Boy has that rung true. We said a year ago how the grief comes in waves. It still does, just less frequently but more intense. It becomes more real and the gap in my life more wide.

In fact, as I made so much progress to work through my post traumatic stress, the raw grief I have sometimes isn’t even brought on by the tragedy or horror of it all anymore. It’s brought on when I see or hear stories of people helping others, friends being there for one another and showing up. It reminds me of the people who walked down my sidewalk a year ago, and those who cried with my mother and I in Aunt Mary’s living room. The people who showed up, and sat in my grief with me. Who shook my hand in the calling hours line, who wrote a card to us. That’s what makes me cry when I think about our tragedy. It feels weird to have such emotional gratitude associated with this time, yet that’s exactly what I have.

Glennon Doyle wrote: “Grief is Love’s Souvenir. It’s our proof that we once loved. Grief is the receipt we wave in the air that says to the world: Look! Love was once mine. I love well. Here is my proof that I paid the price.”

I wish I could turn the receipt into a blanket and wrap it all around me, turn it into a cape, a robe, a cardigan, a flag and let the world know the price I (we all) have paid. But what I really want to do is use the receipt for a return, and get them back.

But we can’t. Instead the world keeps spinning and revolving, today proves it can even make a whole lap around the Sun. In the meantime I picked up a tough bus boy/host job at a restaurant, I moved to Washington DC for 4 months where I worked an internship and did school, only to then move to Europe for 4 months too.

365 days ago I would’ve said “F*ck that” to studying abroad as I wailed on Aunt Mary’s floor. As I uncovered and worked through the PTSD in my therapy later that spring, it would’ve seemed unsafe to send me to two cities so far away from home for so long. Yet here I am having almost completed both. It’s honestly a triumph.

Glennon Doyle also wrote that “Grief is a cocoon from which you emerge anew.” I wrote when I got to Copenhagen in January it felt as though my cocoon has just blown across the Atlantic Ocean and planted itself on a new branch in Denmark. I still think that’s true. But maybe it’ll start to break open on the way back home, after a whole year has passed and navigating a new world, a new life without my Dad.

I can feel it in my bones, I’m settling into my values, making clear decisions on who I wish to spend my time with, what I spend it doing, and most importantly making sure I’m taking care of myself along the way. It feels good, it feels like growth. It feels freeing.

Maya Angelou wrote: “You are only free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all. The price is high. The reward is great.” I know this probably makes no sense to you, but I think I’m finally starting to understand it. Brené Brown would call this “the wilderness.” I’ve learned that not only do you have to build the courage to brave the wilderness, and cope with your experiences in it, but you must become it. You don’t need to necessarily belong anywhere, just to yourself.

For me that looks like today. Trying to define what this day means to me and will moving forward. The wilderness is this new “anniversary” that will come each year. But I don’t belong to it, and it doesn’t belong to me unless I let it.

The wilderness has been walking the streets of Copenhagen anxious in this new city where they all speak this insanely hard language called Danish. The wilderness is watching women bike or walk by me who give me chills because of their uncanny resemblance to Maxine. It’s the confusion after realizing that I haven’t yet mistaken anyone for my father. The wilderness is looking myself in the mirror after I got done brushing my teeth one morning and realizing that it’s me. I’m the one who has the uncanny resemblance to Terry O’Brien. The wilderness is putting that toothbrush back on the shelf, and pretending that that epiphany never occurred.

It’s going back out into the Danish streets, belonging nowhere, yet everywhere at the same time, and waving my love receipt proudly in the air.

The price is high. The reward is great.

-Lelan