By now, I assume you have heard all about the mass shooting that occurred on Monday here in Boulder. I know many of you read my email about this on Wednesday, because we’ve been flooded with emails, phone calls and text messages of condolence and support. We only got one nasty hateful political email, which is just an indication of how polarized our country has become on the topic of guns.
The event is already fading from the national news, but the healing process has not even begun here. We are all still finding out about all the people we know with connections to those lost, but also those who were traumatized by the day’s events, who will carry this trauma for months, days….even decades. My kids are traumatized because they know people who lived across the street, who work at the store, who were at the store during the incident. My many friends in the neighborhood (since we’ve lived here 31 years, and my kids went to school in that neighborhood for many years) all have connections to someone lost or traumatized.
I have finally gotten through the several hundred messages sent, and I thank you for your heartfelt words of kindness, and wishes for healing. Until this happens in your community, you just cannot understand how deeply it impacts the residents. You don’t have to know one of the victims to be deeply traumatized. People who worked in the many businesses in that shopping center, now don’t want to come back. People who work in similar retail shopping settings are afraid to be at work. I went to pick up meds for my sick cat at Walgreen’s yesterday and I have to admit I felt kind of sick to my stomach. Sophie says her friends in the college dorms are terrified to go outside. We’ve all been crying and not sleeping, all week.
When Sophie took a driving lesson from Top Cops, one of the instructors was an off-duty policeman who had been one of the first responders to the Columbine High School shooting in April 1999. (Happened one month after we started our business.) He was in the National Guard response team that had to ‘clear’ the library. I just spoke to another friend who is experiencing deep depression from Monday’s event, and she mentioned she knows the photographer who documented the Columbine event. All the people who have experienced this type of trauma are potentially triggered by a new event like this. Now we have a whole new expanding ripple of people affected by this one pebble, this one event. So you see how many layers of impact this is having on the community. Columbine. Aurora. Now Boulder.
I share this with honesty from my heart because we all have to think about all the communities affected over the years, and decades, by this public health scourge. All I can say is, call your senators and vote from your heart, in honor of those lost.
All of us at eQuilter are so grateful for the empathy and compassion you have shared with us over the last few difficult days. Now more than ever, we need the strong net of support which we find in our quilting community.
eQuilter is donating to the community healing fund, and we have reached out to our contact at the Boulder Emergency Task Force, to see how we might help in the future. In the meantime being able to go to work and be around beautiful fabrics every day is helping to keep us sane.
with hope for the future,
Luana and Paul
