eQuilter Blog

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

It is very hard to start writing to you tonight. I am sure by now almost all of you have heard about the shooting here in Boulder, and the 10 people who died. All I can do is speak from the heart and share what we know, and how we feel. So many of you have called, emailed and texted to see if we are ok, and to send your sympathies. Thank you. It means a lot to us.

Everyone here at eQuilter is safe. As far as I know all of our staff families are safe. Our bodies are safe, but for some of us, our hearts and souls are torn in half. We live in a time when every week there seems to be another event like this, and we wonder if it will happen in our community. Some of us sigh, say “not another one”, and turn off the TV or radio. Some of us become gun control activists before the violence comes to our home town. Some of us watch the news, and decide to speak up and take action.

This event has impacted our family very deeply. Our oldest son lives down the road from the King Soopers. He used to go to elementary school and middle school just up the road from there. We have many dear old friends who live in that neighborhood, and who shop at that store. Sophie (our daughter adopted from China) was still upset about the racist attack on Asians in Atlanta, when this happened, touching our local community.

As we checked in with our friends to make sure they were ok, we found out that some of them had been at that store earlier in the day. Some of our friends lost a neighbor. Many of them have friends or family who were caught up in the trauma. My kids’ former music teachers live across the street and saw the whole thing unfold, and we followed them on Facebook to try to understand what was happening…and fearing for their safety. Another friend’s son worked there, and is now curled up in a ball in the dark in his room, terrified.

As we scan the list of names of those we lost, there were a few names and faces I recognized….people I’ve met over the years, since I’ve lived in this community since 1990. My kids grew up here, went to school here, played soccer and took music lessons here. We know that in the coming days more of our friends will share that they lost someone close.

This is one town, one event out of many, that has happened too many times….and if we can’t stop the madness it will happen again. I sincerely hope it does not happen to your community. For some of you, I know it already has. I have a friend in the industry who lived down the street from the Sandy Hook shooter. I have known many families broken apart by gun violence. This is a humanitarian issue that has a common sense solution, but we have allowed it to be politicized and we have become polarized. We need to come together in the middle place to craft a solution and stop the madness. I invite you to join me in speaking out, supporting groups working for common sense solutions.

Many years ago I had the experience of a man walking into my store, randomly threatening to kill me with a knife, in my retail shop in New York. I managed to keep him talking until the police came…20 minutes later. The longest 20 minutes of my life. He walked away…they let him walk away because he hadn’t hurt me…and he stabbed someone else a block away. That was in 1989 and the trauma can still flash back on days like this.

But because of this my heart goes out in a very personal way to those who have experienced this trauma. We have been crying for 24 hours here, and it is not over yet. Please send your prayers for comfort and peace to those who lost loved ones here, and those who have suffered this senseless violence in the countless other gun attacks in the USA. We are better than this.

…with love for our fellow humans,
Luana and Paul

* The quilt above is “Chautauqua – Sanctuary” which was made for the Sacred Threads exhibit. It depicts our iconic Boulder Flatirons, and it is where Paul and I got married.