Seven Minutes for the Rest of My Life.

Seven Minutes for the Rest of My Life

Today is Tuesday, May 22, 2018 and we live in Houston, Texas. The climate here is hot but we are also feeling a different kind of climate, the one we’re all feeling around this country, fear for our children. A mass school shooting just happened 20 miles from our house. We are so close to this one that my husband’s blood donation could have helped one of the victims. This climate weighs heavy on me. Several school districts are on “high alert,” because so many guns were brought to schools in backpacks and so many threats were made on Monday. My 4th graders school district is included on their list.

For the last 12 years I have spent May 21st preparing for May 22nd, making plans to stay positive and plan something special. It’s the day I lost my dad to suicide, suicide by his own hand gun. The gun I saw on his night stand, under his pillow; the one he used to instill gun safety in me and my siblings. There’s also another family grieving today, the family affected by the murder of their loved one, at the hands of my dad, that day, with that same gun.

We were the tragedy of our small town and thrown into a whirlwind for weeks trying to piece it all together. We had funerals, read suicide notes, had family gatherings, read about it in our newspapers. We had to go to his house and see his bedroom and all the things he touched last. I remember losing an entire chunk of time in my total shock. I have no recollection of the month that followed. I can still feel the sting from remembering the sobbing hugs on the couch, and the nights crying myself to sleep. In the 12 years since, I have had children of my own, and I can too easily imagine the parents of the victims going through these same motions. Except, it is for their innocent children, who were murdered at school.

Rather than lose sleep last night over how to commemorate my dad’s life today, I laid awake with my husband devising a plan to remove our daughter from school early, like today. We discussed carefully avoiding upsetting her too much for asking her to abruptly abandon her friends and forfeit the fun end-of-the-year activities her 10-year-old mind is concerned with. As a parent, I want to genuinely consider her needs and wishes. Placing the adult worries of the world so actively in her life is confusing and hard for her to understand. Saying, “your safety is my top priority” doesn’t resonate with her level of reasoning as much as it does for a parent. I’m riddled with guilt and urgency, and a mild feeling of over-reacting. How can I channel my 1990’s 10-year-old self as to relate in context of the world my 10-year-old is living in?

Today we agreed to let her go to her last day of school. She needs closure before we move to another state this summer; and she requested this with reason. To say the words, “we are taking our chances” by sending her to school today sums up that climate I was talking about earlier.

I woke up way too early this morning, had coffee with my husband, spoke about the dreaded “May 22,” and heard my daughter snooze her alarm. As time went by I realized that she did not snooze her alarm, she turned it off, so I went upstairs to wake her up. I stroked her hair and told her the time and she grabbed my arm as to pull me into her bed. I crawled into her bed and laid behind her and noted the time, 6:53am. I made a decision to lay there for 7 uninterrupted minutes just holding her before we started our usual morning routine. As I spent these split seconds thinking about time management, as all mom’s do, another thought entered my mind, “What if this is the last 7 minutes of snuggling I get with her for the rest of my life?” This thought was actually real for me because I was soon sending my daughter to her public school, where she could get murdered. I know I cannot be the only parent that quietly has a thought come into her mind like this, especially these days.

So, for those 7 minutes I snuggled her in my arms, like a little spoon. I laid my ear on her back to hear each pump of her heart push her blood through her body, giving her life. I listened to each deep breath because she was already fast asleep. And I played out every worst-case scenario in my mind and squeezed her every time it physically hurt me to consider it as a possibility. I laid in regret for agreeing to send her to school. I laid there having an internal monologue with myself about how everything will be fine, it would never happen to my daughter, it would never happen at her school. And then my heart sank, the parents who buried their children who were killed in a school shooting, probably said the same thing. These were the most torturous and most sentimental 7 minutes, and the time went by too quickly.

I rolled over to check the clock, it is 7:00am on the dot. I kiss her cheek and moved her hair out of her face and told her that it is time to get up now. The morning routine starts and ends the same as it always does. We have fruit and spinach smoothies, I brush the tangled knots out of her hair, we get in the car and we drive to school. The police are around every corner, it seems. Their presence does not soothe me because they are as much victims to this as these children are. I told my daughter how it just doesn’t get any better than her and how much I absolutely love her; she plants a big kiss on my lips and we say goodbye. I watched her walk into the building until I couldn’t see her anymore. I drive away only because the precession of cars filled with the other parents dropping their kids off at school starts moving. I drove my 2 miles home thinking about how, on this day, 12 years ago, I hugged my dad goodbye and watched him drive away until I couldn’t see his car anymore, then I never saw him again. So, now I fill my moments with productive things to do, and wait for this day to be over, for so many reasons.

-Haley Handera

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