Highway to Heaven
On November 7, 2017, New York firefighter Tommy Maher set off on an 18-day, 9,500-mile road trip to some of the most ordinary places in America. They did, however, all have something else in common: Each town had been home to one of the 58 victims of the October shooting in Las Vegas. Maher wanted to honor them by performing an act of kindness for the victims’ neighbors. He was inspired by a fire-department friend who died during the 9/11 rescue. That man’s body was never found, and since then Maher has been determined to mark the deaths of others in noble ways.
The first stop on his tragedy-inspired trip was Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, the home of Bill Wolfe Jr. Maher’s good deed there was at a Laundromat, where he taped envelopes filled with quarters to each of the machines so that patrons could have a free wash. In other cities, Maher left a large tip for his server, bought lunch for the staff of a pediatric urgent care clinic, or simply offered strangers a flower. At each stop, he gave one person in the community a bracelet bearing the name of his mission, Honor58, as well as the name of that community’s victim. The person with the bracelet promised to continue his mission of spreading kindness.
Maher documented his journey on Honor58’s Facebook page. Before long, his Facebook followers—some of whom had survived the Las Vegas shooting themselves—took up Maher’s cause and began launching their own 58 acts of kindness. “Many of these survivors have emotional and physical scars from that day,” says Maher. “And in a way, they’ve found these acts of kindness to be an avenue to begin to heal.”