A survivor’s journey from grief to guilt to love
Torn between life and death, in that moment where fear, exhaustion and pain collide, survivors often say they choose to live. Patience Carter prayed to die. Lying on a bloody bathroom floor at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub on June 12, 2016, Carter — a 20-year-old college student who’d come to Orlando on vacation — begged God to end her suffering. Shot in both legs, terrified, tormented, she tried to hold her breath as the gunman paced nearby, talking by phone to police negotiators, saying he had planted bombs that would demolish the entire city block.
“I actually remember the point when I gave up,” she said recently. “It had to be at least two hours into our wait [for rescuers]. I was in so much pain, I was so afraid every single second, I remember thinking that he was going to shoot me again, and so I just prayed. I asked God to take my soul from my body.”
In the hospital two days after the shooting, wheeled out for a news conference, she struggled to understand why her pleas went unanswered.
“The guilt of being alive is heavy,” she told reporters.
In the five years since the Pulse massacre, Patience has repeatedly wrestled with that guilt, trying to understand why she survived when 49 others did not — including one of the two women she had gone to the club with that night. Akyra Murray, freshly graduated
from West Catholic Preparatory High School in Philadelphia, was a basketball standout who had just won a college full scholarship.
At 18, Akyra was the youngest victim of the massacre.
“You know, it’s just hard to process everything,” Patience said. “I might even say it took me five years to really process. I had to not only heal from what happened at Pulse, but I had to heal from everything before Pulse, and some of the things that have happened since.”
It’s the point most people don’t grasp about surviving, she has learned. It’s not just a matter of still breathing when the paramedics carry you off, or rehabilitating from a bullet-shattered femur, or even reaching a standoff with the demons of post-traumatic stress.
It’s having to remind yourself, over and over, that it’s okay you’re still here, that there’s no shame in being happy or finding love, even when it begins in grief.
‘The time of our lives’
Coming to Orlando should have been one of the happiest memories of her young life.
Patience had never flown on an airplane before. She’d never been on a family vacation before. For that matter, she’d never been part of a family that went on family vacations.
Her mother disappeared when Patience, the youngest of six, was just 2 years old. Her older brothers remember their mom kissing them on the forehead one night, and simply being gone the next morning. When her father struggled to take care of a toddler, she was shipped off to her grandparents. And when she was 12 and her grandmother died, Patience was sent to an aunt and uncle.
It was, she said, a sometimes abusive childhood, mentally and physically.
“Now, after Pulse, I’m all over the news,” she said. “Any mother, if they would see their child on the news, you would think, ‘Well, she’s finally going to call.’ Never happened. I don’t know if she couldn’t or wouldn’t.”
In summer of 2016, Patience had just finished her sophomore year at New York University, where she had earned a full academic scholarship. She created a circle of friends that became her chosen family.
One of them was Tiara Parker, who invited her along for the family’s annual vacation in Orlando. Tiara, Akyra and Patience wanted to go out dancing their first night in town. They searched for 18-and-over clubs and found good reviews for Pulse, where it was Latin Night.
“We were having the time of our lives,” Patience said. “It was the ideal girls’ night out —— having fun, letting your hair down, even the temperature that night was perfect. I remember just feeling like, ‘I love Florida. It’s beautiful.’ ”
She also remembers looking at Akyra’s watch at 1:58 a.m., just before Pulse was set to close, and asking Tiara how they were getting back to the vacation house. Tiara ordered an Uber. Then, gunfire.
For three hours, most of it spent hiding in a huddle of bodies in a bathroom stall, the women were hunted, shot and left for dead.
Tiara was wounded in the side but survived. Akyra was shot in both arms and her head. She lived long enough to call her brother, Alex.
The one who understood
Despite undergoing surgery and having her leg in an immobilizing brace, less than a week later Patience was on a plane back to Philadelphia. She spent the summer trying to walk again, but when she headed back to college in August, she still had a profound limp.
“People would ask me, ‘How did you get injured?’ Or, ‘Did you get that playing basketball?’ You know, they didn’t know. But I would have to then explain this terrible thing while I’m on my way to class,” she said.
When she got a check from the OneOrlando Fund — donations that poured in from around the world to help survivors and the families of those killed — she used part of it to take her siblings on vacation together to Miami for her 21st birthday. The money, a little over $115,000, went fast.
“I was 20 years old and I didn’t know anything about financial literacy, so it pretty much came and went,” she said. “I spent thousands of dollars on Uber and Lyft, especially in New York going to school because it hurt to walk. I realized later, like, ‘Wow, I just pretty much wasted an opportunity to create some sort of foundation for myself.’ ”
She made a couple of unsuccessful attempts at counseling but didn’t feel “connected,” she said.
But the one person who did understand was Alex Murray, Akyra’s brother. They had met once, at a big Thanksgiving dinner, before the shooting, and he had been the first person to visit her in the hospital in Orlando. Soon, they were talking daily.
“Obviously the fact that we fell in love right after Pulse was unhealthy,” Patience said. “I was toxic. And he was dealing with his own grieving. And we just needed to stop. So he broke up with me — but not forever.”
Months later, they met again in California, where he was working and she, a communications major, had gotten an internship with Paramount Pictures in production. When he later moved to South Florida, she followed.
Alex proposed in March 2018. Sixteen months later, in a ceremony arranged by the Philadelphia Eagles, they wed at Lincoln Financial Field, the Eagles’ home stadium.
“Something about him makes me believe that there could just be so much more happiness,” she said on their wedding day. “My deepest pain has transformed into my deepest love.”
No fairy tales
It seemed like a fairy tale ending. In Pompano Beach, she, her new husband and his young daughter have become a family, he opened a frozen-treat franchise and she works from home for a pharmaceutical marketing company. She writes poetry and songs and has self-published a book, “Survive Then Live: The Patience Carter Story.”
But reality, of course, has no happily-ever-after tidiness — for anyone. And it certainly doesn’t help the odds to tell yourself with each step forward that you don’t really deserve happiness.
“I was literally self-talking my way into depression,” she said. “It was a dark place, even as recently as six months ago.”
She and Alex began praying together every day. And one day during those reverent moments, she said, she felt God sort of whisper in her ear.
“I knew I had to learn to forgive and accept,” she said.
She had to forgive her mother for leaving — and accept herself for living.
It felt like an enormous weight being lifted.
Last Saturday, the former Patience Carter — now Patience Murray — returned to Orlando, just blocks from the former Pulse nightclub, to attend the Fifth Annual 4.9K CommUNITY Rainbow Run, and pass out frozen treats from her husband’s W.O.W Ice business. Wearing a tied-dyed, rainbow-colored T-shirt, she laughed and beamed and cheered on the runners, though lingering injuries from the shooting stopped her from joining them.
“I’m learning to lean into the joy,” she said. “It has taken five years, but I’m learning.”