In the shadow of loss, a mother’s long search for happiness
There’s a look Sandy Phillips came to know each time she arrived somewhere a gunman had made famous. Her road trip through mass shooting sites went on for a decade and always seemed to have a new stop. When she reached it, she’d lock eyes with someone and see the catatonia, as plain as the weight of every leaden step they’d taken since the news that upended their life.
She, too, had inched through days when all the world’s laughter went silent and its beauty was lost. In a morning fog, she’d question if it all was a nightmare, and in the black of night, when the grisly visions clawed her awake, she’d lie there wishing it was she who had died. Life became a torturous cycle punctuated by her own sobbing. She was sure she was creeping toward insanity.
Now she found herself in Newtown or Parkland or Uvalde or whatever fresh hell had just been put on the map. She had lessons to share, advice that could only be amassed by someone who’d lived through the same. So, she’d clasp the hands of the mourning and ask about the ones they’d been robbed of and mouth words that could surprise her as much as those who listened.
“You will,” she said confidently, “find joy again.”
She repeated it more times than she can count. She’d show up at the school or nightclub or church or wherever the latest battle erupted in this new American war, and she’d say them to the parents who put children in tiny caskets and the partners who never got to say goodbye. She knew them to be true even if she had to repeat them to convince herself.
It would be a journey, she told them, to rediscover happiness. A journey she was on, too.
Here is life before Phillips’ daughter was shot: She is sharing her dream house with her dream husband and has just landed her dream job. She goes to cocktail parties. She is fun to be around. Come summer, there are carefree vacations, and at year’s end, there are Christmas trees in every room. All the teenage strife that once occupied her San Antonio home has faded. Her son is suddenly a responsible adult. Her daughter has blossomed into a poised and professional woman, on the cusp of college graduation and eager to make a name for herself as a sports reporter.
And here is life after: The dream home is lost to bankruptcy. The dream job is abandoned. She and her dream husband barely want to leave the house, much less fake their way through socializing. Even her best friend of decades has tired of her gloom. There will be no vacation. There will be no Christmas. All of that ended with a middle-of-the-night call on July 20, 2012, that caused her to slide down the wall, screaming the same two words over and over.
“Jessi’s dead!” she bellowed. “Jessi’s dead!”
Just hours earlier, she’d texted back and forth with her daughter, Jessica Ghawi, the electric 24-year-old who oozed so much enthusiasm, kindness and impulsivity that she reminded her mother of a Labrador puppy. From the time she was a little girl, she was marked by her empathy, befriending the friendless and comforting the crying. She was fiery, she was silly, she was irrepressible. She sailed down a mountain dressed like a banana the first time she skied. She sweet-talked her way to the front of the airport security line when she was late for a flight. Her smile sparkled, her conversation never ended, she stopped traffic in a dress.
And now she was gone.
Details dripped out from inside the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, where Ghawi was among the dozen killed, lives ended by a man with guns he never should have had.
And, for months, Phillips sunk into a paralyzing haze.
“This really happened. This is not a dream. This is my life now,” she’d realize when she awoke.
Before, when headlines flashed of Columbine and Virginia Tech and Fort Hood and so many others, she absorbed the horror of it all for just a moment before turning away and returning to her safe and happy life. Something had to be done, she knew, but she left the task to others.
Now, it felt as if her whole identity was challenged. How could she ever again believe the idea that her country was the home of life, liberty and happiness, when her daughter’s life and her own happiness had been taken?
She felt her daughter nagging at her, not just to rise from bed day after agonizing day, but to do something more.
As the first Christmas that Phillips would not celebrate neared, another shooting erupted, this time at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. An anti-violence group reached out, asking if she might consider visiting Newtown to meet parents of the dead. She said yes and found herself in a room where she saw that familiar expression.
“We looked like that five months ago,” she said to her husband Lonnie, who had been in Jessi’s life since she was a little girl and saw her as a daughter of his own.
There, they met David Wheeler, who recalled learning of the shooting that claimed Phillips’ daughter. “Those poor people,” he thought at the time, pausing just for a moment before returning to work. Now, two of those people were before him, and he was living through the same.