The author with her child during the Highland Park parade years ago. Courtesy of Lauren Bassi I attended this year’s Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, as I had many times before. My dad saved my two kids, ages 2 and 5, as gunfire broke out.
We all survived, but we’re still carrying the trauma from the shooting. I have attended the Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, almost every year of my life: as a small child waiting on the sidewalk for glimmers of candy about to be tossed into the crowd, in grammar school proudly displaying my first-prize ribbon on my streamer filled wagon, in my late teens grumbling with embarrassment as I marched with my mother in her first election for public office, and as an adult in a convertible while my bewildered baby girl sat on my lap and waved to the crowd. This year my husband and I celebrated our anniversary on July 3 and my parents gamely agreed to take our children overnight and meet up the next morning at the parade.
At 10:08 a. m. , my husband and I parked the car and got out to meet my father and the kids at their coveted spot in front of Ross Cosmetics where they watched the parade.
My mom was marching with township volunteers half a block from the parade’s bandstand. As we approached Central Avenue to meet up with our family, we heard strange noises and suddenly saw an entire marching band come running down the street, screaming. Surely this was an odd and terrifying misunderstanding.
My husband, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, knew differently and motioned for me to hide in the alley. Oblivious to what he was asking of me, I screamed that we had to go find our children and took off up the street. My children were safeI didn’t know yet that my father had already saved my children’s lives.
They sat on the sidewalk right under the roof where the shooter perched. As the gunfire started my dad threw himself over my children and then just as quickly picked up my 2-year-old and pushed my 5-year-old up the street as she screamed “I don’t want to die” with every step. We found them a block down in front of a grocery store, where my father handed them off to us as they shook and sobbed.
But you know all this — or a story like this. The stories of Columbine and Rochester, Sandy Hook and Charleston, Uvalde and Vegas, Orlando and Parkland. You know it could happen anywhere.
You know you aren’t safe. You might obsess over it for a few days after a shooting that feels particularly close to home. But they are things you can’t control and probably won’t happen to you, you say.
And that’s how you keep going. You don’t know what I know nowYou don’t know the terror of watching the grocery store next to you lock down. Of how we begged the clerk to keep the door open for three more seconds so my family could make it inside, screaming, “We are going to die if you leave us out here.
“You don’t know what it was like to push the door open only to realize my dad had slowed to a walk, having blown out his knee during the run and unable to go any faster. To feel a moment of safety and then watch the police creep in to tell us we weren’t safe, as the gunman was quite likely in that very store. I know what it’s like to look at my 2-year-old while trying to figure out a position to carry him that would allow me to both shield his body and still sprint like hell.
At the same time, hearing my 5-year-old tell my husband “I don’t want to die — I wanted to grow up and have my own kids” as they ran, and ran, and ran. I can’t explain how it feels to call my mom’s cellphone and hear someone else answer it, not knowing whether she was OK. I saw her on a street corner during our flight and almost collapsed with relief.
I also can’t explain what it was like to hear my 2-year-old crying once we got home, yelling “Don’t want to go back to the parade!” How I dreaded nighttime as my 5-year-old shook with every firework blast and asked me to sit next to her in bed but “stay awake and stand guard. “You don’t know what it is like to lie awake night after night, replaying the scene, your choices, the what ifs, only to reach the infuriating and real conclusion that you are the lucky ones. Your family is alive.
Alive because someone else is dead. You don’t know what I know now. I don’t want you to know.
No one should have to know. I may be happy again. But I will not have peace.
Not in a movie theater, or at work, or when I drop my kids off at school, or in a museum, or on a crowded street. Or even in my own home. I will always know where the exits are.
I will always be listening. I will always have one eye on my children. My peace has been stolen.
Not just by a single gunman, but by my country. Right now, at this moment, the only thing I am capable of doing is pulling my family close to me and riding the waves of grief and trauma, knowing the journey to recovery will be long, and hard, and painful as hell. For the few brief moments when we were able to hide in the grocery store, my 5-year-old paused from shaking to show me that one of the floats had tossed her a pack of seeds with an American flag on it.
“Look at my seeds!” she cried. “I can’t wait to plant them, and they will grow. ” In the middle of the carnage, she saw the seeds.
I don’t know what these seeds are. Whether they are hope — not a feeling, but a muscle we will build as we recover? My best hope is that these seeds are the movement we will grow, people who refuse to live in a country that believes that guns have more rights than children. Hold your people tight.
Help Lucy plant seeds. Read the original article on Insider.
From: insider
URL: https://www.insider.com/woman-was-at-highland-park-shooting-with-her-children-2022-7
