Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida still remains closed, a crime scene since 29-year old Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 58 others in a terrorist attack / hate crime that shocked the world a year ago today. It was the deadliest mass shooting by a single shooter, the deadliest violence against LGBT people in the history of the United States, and the deadliest attacks there since 9/11.
The clean white building in which Mateen killed mostly young people dancing was painted black immediately, and it now appears dense and repellant. When I was outside the nightclub the weekend before last to tape a video promoting a special episode of my SiriusXM talk show commemorating the first year, it raining heavily, for the first time in months in Orlando. To stand outside the walled off murder scene, wet in the wet, surrounded by heartbreakingly endless tributes, was unnerving enought that I couldn’t remember while speaking to camera the number 49.
An unspoken “this happened” pall hangs over city. In the office of Commissioner Patty Shehan at Orlando city hall, tributes and condolences and missives of love sent from around the world – a large percentage featuring the LGBT rainbow – fill her large office so overwhelmingly that I declared “this is the gayest office I’ve ever been in” upon being escorted in warmly by Shehan – an out lesbian – before understanding what it was I was really seeing.
As I spend time with her, I feel glad she is the one shepherding the aftermath of a happening too monumentally sick to still comprehend; has it been a year already? She awoke on that Sunday from hell discover her phone had blown up overnight and had the presentiment on her first call to say off the bat: “Is this the largest mass killing in our history?”
Her old normal is on hold at city hall – her role as Commissioner has become entirely about the massacre. The last six months have been spent planning the tribute taking place today. “We want the families to feel the love that we got from all around us. They didn’t have a chance to, to even know it was there for them. They were too busy burying their children,” Sheehan says.
Her grit – she won’t consider the job over it until she is assured full coverage for mental health care over the next five to ten years for the families whose lives are in bits is confirmed – is countered with the love of a sort of accidental mother. She breaks down at one point in brief anguish during taping when one recalling is too much (“it took so long to identify the bodies because he shot them … he shot them in the head.”) She is dealing with the economic fallout too, explaining that Mateen’s $700 investment in guns yielded millions of dollars in damage, including payouts to families, those who were at Pulse and survived, to parts of the city being shut down for a month.
Following Shehan, we tape a segment with Terry DeCarlos, the executive director of the LGBT centre in Orlando. A rugged, ex-military guy who now sports a pulse tattoo on his arm – he was alongside Sheehan and among the first to get to the destruction – he cannot answer an early question without being overcome, off emotional balance easily: “It’s been a hard year,” he says, composing himself.
He can still hear the screams of mothers running down the streets crying their children’s names, yet while in counselling, he has discovered his mind has shut out some of the things he saw. “Someone will tell me I grabbed a mom and pulled her into a building when the press was chasing her – but I don’t remember.”
DeCarlos doesn’t think he’ll ever fully recover.
I leave Orlando feeling heavy, but with a fresh dawning that whatever problems I have in my life, they can be better managed. Lately there have been many challenges for me, and in these difficult global times I’ve let it all add up, which is lazy. My problems are all champagne problems in comparison to those of my show’s guests.
Many of us focus on and complain about a lot of the crap cards we’re being dealt, it seems.
It is understandable – to a point. At some point it becomes a choice. We can make choices that better serve us: to find places or people to ease up on. We can stop trying so hard, and we can let others off the hook, be gentle with ourselves, forgive, and let go. We can choose what is worth dialing up, and what is not.
The 49 mostly twenty somethings can’t choose anything any more. I believe they would have loved one last go at the exquisite luxury that is the choice we each still have, one they never again had though, once they stepped out onto the dance floor last spring.
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