FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — It was supposed to be a day filled with expressions of young love at a high school in one of Florida’s safest communities.
But the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine’s Day 2018 turned it into a day of agony, confusion and despair, a day that created excruciating wounds that have yet to heal and, for some, never may.
South Florida vowed never to forget the fallen, the 17 students and staff.
Alyssa Alhadeff. Scott Beigel. Martin Duque Anguiano. Nicholas Dworet. Aaron Feis. Jaime Guttenberg. Chris Hixon. Luke Hoyer. Cara Loughran. Gina Montalto. Joaquin Oliver. Alaina Petty. Meadow Pollack. Helena Ramsay. Alex Schachter. Carmen Schentrup. Peter Wang.
Across the country, Parkland has become a synonym for the wanton violence that has been plaguing schools in the United States.
The youngest students who were at Stoneman Douglas that cruel day have graduated. Many have gone on to college or found other ways to proceed with life, as have their parents and acquaintances. But for many in our community, the shootings were a wound from which they will never fully recover.
Here are some ways community members have found to cope, four years after the killings that Americans still associate with a national scourge that has no fixes in sight.
Cantor Malcolm Arnold, Congregation Kol Tikvah
It’s the other school shootings that are now the hardest.
Malcolm Arnold has been the cantor at Congregation Kol Tikvah in Parkland since May 2000. The cantor’s most difficult times now are when more shootings happen in schools. “When you see this happen at another school, and another school, and another school, another loss, and you know exactly how that affects the families, it hits home.”
Kol Tikvah is the Jewish synagogue that handled the funeral service for Meadow Pollack. Two other families — of victims Jaime Guttenberg and Alex Schachter — are congregants.
In the days and weeks and months after the inexplicable tragedy in Parkland, Arnold was nonstop trying to keep everyone else together. He has seen firsthand that “till this day they bear the scars of what they experienced, as well as the teachers and professionals who work there.”
The passing of years has helped him somewhat: “Time does have its strengthening factor.”
But this four-year mark, similar to past years, is a painful reminder of the “loss these families have endured. For them it’s not over.” Arnold said the majority of congregants were affected. But temple leaders had to decide how to go forward.
In the beginning, he had to struggle privately.
“To lead a memorial service, to lead shiva service [the formal mourning period in Judaism] at someone’s home, to attend the many funeral services we attended were very difficult,” he said.
“But as clergy we are there for our community, our congregants. In our private time we get to break down when it becomes too much, just like any other person.”
Now what gives Arnold comfort is watching heroes step up, the parents who have advocated for school safety and gun control. Arnold sees Parkland parents on television “so brave and so committed” in their activism. Arnold said seeing them makes him feel the hope of so many, who turned “tragedy into something that serves the greater good.”
Arnold will lead a prayer for those who died at a community memorial service Monday, and read out loud the names of the 17 victims. “It will not be easy,” he said softly. With emotional support from other clergy, “we’ll put on a smile for each other.”
Amy Kenny, Yoga4MSD
After the shooting, counselors flooded the high school and the community, offering the opportunity to talk about survivors’ grief. But Amy Kenny, a Stoneman Douglas physical education teacher, has found a different kind of therapy works better: yoga, meditation and mindfulness, or awareness of the present moment without judgment.
Meadow Pollack, a senior in Kenny’s class, was among the 17 killed. After the massacre, with Pollack and other students in mind, Kenny started Yoga4MSD, a nonprofit that encourages the teaching of yoga as a way to share a message of solace and goodwill.
Kenny sends teens and young adults for training to become yoga and mindfulness instructors. The program has trained 20 teachers, almost all former Douglas students who are under 25 years old.
“I wanted to give back to the community in the only way I knew how, through yoga and meditation,” said Kenny, 51, who has taught at Douglas for eight years. “These practices have expanded my own healing, not only the physical yoga, but mindfulness and movement.”
Besides teaching yoga at Douglas and at sites around Parkland, Kenny has coordinated with several national organizations that have been helping to mend the community, including the Onsite Foundation, which works with trauma victims, and the Center for Mind Body Medicine, which trains leaders to work with teachers, counselors, students and school nurses to support rehabilitation after stress.
Contact with these national healers has aided Kenny on her own therapeutic journey.
“They have changed me in so many ways,” she said. “I have more gratitude for every day. The trauma is so deep. The fact that I’ve been able to help so many others heal has brought so much to my life.”
A time to mourn, a time to dance
At the Dance Theatre of Parkland, they wore an orange ribbon.
They wore it for four years, in honor and memory of Jaime Guttenberg, the competitive dance team member whose life was lost at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
Last summer, after Guttenberg would have graduated high school, the instructors at the dance school where she spent more than a decade honing her love of the art made a painful decision — to retire their use of the orange ribbon during dance competitions.
The symbol had come to define the last four years, but in that time, the dance students who attended Stoneman Douglas in 2018 graduated and moved away. Guttenberg’s schoolmates are gone.
“The kids now dancing on the team weren’t in the building on that day,” said school director Michelle Gerlick. “Her graduating class has grown up. We don’t want to be reminding the new kids that there could be a school shooting. You can’t keep reliving it.”
Gerlick said she and the instructors at the school will hold on to the memory of Jaime Guttenberg, but there’s a generation of new students coming up who didn’t know her, who don’t have firsthand memories of that tragic day. At some point, the memory has to endure without the constant reminder.
“We just want the kids in our school to be kids,” she said.
There will always be a place of honor for Jaime Guttenberg at the Dance Theatre at Parkland. She wrote it herself in November 2017. “Dreams and dedication are a powerful combination,” she wrote.
The words remain on the wall at the dance studio. Along with an orange ribbon.
