Two years after Pulse: Nightmares and hope
ORLANDO – India Godman can still feel the body that slumped against her in the darkness, shielding her from a bullet and likely sparing her life.
In quiet moments, the weight is still there, despite all her work to heal. “I’m OK,” said the 53-year-old mother of five. “I don’t ever say I’m fine. But I’m OK.”
Come Tuesday, it will be two years since that night of horror, when a lone, troubled, perhaps radicalized gunman entered Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, sprayed the crowd with bullets, and for more than three hours held hostage those who tried to hide in bathroom stalls and hallways and under fallen bodies. He killed 49 people and wounded more than 60.
Godman, who has spent two years in counseling for the trauma, said her outlook now is summed up by a tattoo along her right arm: “Strength is what I gain from the madness I survived. 6-12-16,” it reads.
Since Pulse — at the time, the deadliest shooting in U.S. history by a single gunman — the madness has accelerated across the nation.
Mass shootings — in which at least four people are killed — have taken the lives of 325 people in those two years. The most notorious of the crimes have unfolded at high schools in Parkland and outside Houston, a church in Texas, a Waffle House in Tennessee and a country music concert in Las Vegas. It was there, only 16 months after Pulse, that Orlando relinquished its tragic title after the gunman, taking aim from his hotel room window, murdered 58 people and wounded 851 others.
The shootings have come so frequently that the details have begun to blur. Less than a month after Pulse, a gunman opened fire on law enforcement officers in Dallas, killing five officers and injuring nine others and two civilians. The month after that, a caretaker at a Southern California assisted living center shot and killed four residents before setting fire to the place. And after that the targets included an elementary school, a car wash, a bank, a general store and the baggage claim area of the Fort Lauderdale airport.
“Every time there’s a shooting, we all feel like we’re reliving everything,” said Celia Ruiz, an Orlando attorney who lost her 22-year-old brother, Juan Ramon Guerrero, in the Pulse attack. “How do you move on from something when you’re constantly being reminded of it? I can’t say there’s been a healing process when nothing has changed.”
Demetrice Naulings, a makeup artist who survived the shooting but lost his best friend — and then his job and so his apartment — said that even without the other shootings the reminders of Pulse were too much.
“That’s why I left Orlando — to try to heal,” he said of his move out of state earlier this year. He doesn’t want to say where. “Everyone thinks they raised all this money and that should take care of everything and the victims should just heal and move on. You know, just give us a little bit of money and send us on our way. Well, how do I move on when I tried to return to work, but I was told I was a liability because everyone knew who I was and I had been on the news so much? I was turned down for jobs because I was a survivor.”
Patty Sheehan, Orlando's first openly gay city commissioner, said the trauma cost many survivors their ability to work and sometimes their relationships.
“Now all this emotional stuff is coming up — all of the terror,” she said. “I mean, they saw things that men who go to war don’t see.”
Sheehan, too, saw “some of the most horrible things I’ve ever seen in my life” early that morning. But, she said, she also witnessed great kindness, especially in the days and weeks that followed.
There were neighbors who pitched in to shuttle victims after ambulances filled, children who passed out paper hearts and handwritten notes, and pastors who apologized for old wounds of intolerance. There were businesses that gave away their services, doctors and hospitals that didn’t bill patients, vigils and marches and worldwide shows of solidarity – and millions of dollars donated to help victims and survivors.
There was then — and there is still — a spirit of compassion and a call to action,
“The idea that we will not let hate win is a beautiful sentiment, but it’s also a call for people to become engaged through legislation, through policy, through collaboration and advocacy.”
leaders say, even in a time when partisanship, hostility and even hatred can dominate the national dialogue.
“Still, when I go to meetings outside of our community, I have people come up and say positive things about the response of Orlando,” said Mayor Buddy Dyer. “I actually do feel that mantra — ‘we will not let hate win’ — is the way we continue to live. You’re never going to be healed from something like this… but I’m proud of our community.”
Today, Orlando has more metal detectors, panic buttons, active-shooter drills, trauma counseling, public memorials and griefstricken loved ones than it did two years ago. But for some, it also has more compassion and progress and purpose.
“There will never be a true coming back for a lot of
Christopher Cuevas, QLatinx executive director
people. It will always be with them,” said Terry DeCarlo, development and chief communications director at The Center, a nonprofit hub for awareness, counseling and other services for Central Florida’s LGBTQ population. “But many of the survivors and family members have gotten active in trying to stop the gun violence, and it’s encouraging to see them out there ... standing with the Marjory Stoneman Douglas [High School] kids. It’s a strong, resilient community, and they’ve got a heck of a voice, and they’re using it.”
Brandon Wolf, who lost two close friends in the Pulse massacre, describes his former self as “politically complacent.” But since the attack, the 29-year-old Starbucks manager has moved to Tallahassee and become an activist and public speaker. At 6 p.m. Monday, he is helping to lead the Rally to #HonorThemWithAction on the steps of Orlando City Hall — a demand for political leaders to end gun violence, reject NRA influence “and address the forgotten needs of the community.” He is driven, he said, by a sense of duty to his murdered friends and outrage over the political system that he feels enabled the shooting.
“The reality is that physical survival is the easiest part,” he said. “The hard part is that you will spend the next 15, 20, 25 years petrified of loud noises. You’ll be afraid to sleep with the lights off. You’ll need to see a therapist for maybe the rest of your life. And there are just too many people in this country who are going through that now. We can’t be OK with that.”
Christopher Cuevas sees the determination, too. As executive director of Central Florida’s QLatinx — a grassroots racial-, socialand gender-justice organization formed in the aftermath of Pulse, Cuevas has helped bridge an old divide between the gay and Hispanic communities.
“The idea that we will not let hate win is a beautiful sentiment,” Cuevas said, “but it’s also a call for people to become engaged into action through legislation, through policy, through collaboration and advocacy.”
And there is ample evidence that is happening. For the first time, a nonprofit umbrella group — the One Orlando Alliance — has built a coalition among more than 30 Central Florida LGBTQ groups and those that support them, in everything from health care and counseling to civil rights to the Orlando Gay Chorus.
Jennifer Foster, who chairs the board of directors, said the alliance first set up a private Facebook page to help survivors get connected to whatever they needed, whether it was food or mental health care or translation services. It persuaded groups to cooperate who had never done so before, and it helped promote health fairs, job fairs and HIV outreach.
“We’re looking now at how do we address immigration issues? How do we address the lack of transgender services? What do we do about the low wages for many of our workers? These are the issues we’re tackling.” Foster said. It is, she said, her duty. “Our community was changed forever, so what are we going to do about it? Are we going to become bitter and feed into the darkness, or are we going to try to reflect the love that the world showed us in those days and weeks afterward? I don’t even think there is an option. Our community has always been about love.”