Memorial

As soon as the news started blossoming out of Uvalde, like a mushroom cloud of agony, the texts started. “Take care of yourself,” “heartbroken,” “I feel sick, horrendous,” “Hang in there…”

Hang in there.

But this was so close. Hill Country of Texas, less than a week from our own remembrance of watching our teacher murdered in front of us decades earlier (or was it yesterday?). And one more thing for me personally: These were 10-year-old fourth-graders, the same age and grade as my daughter Olivia who was killed by an impaired college student 12 years ago — the precious daughter who should have been graduating college with her friends just a few weeks before.

I couldn’t stop imagining, knowing, what their families were in for in the years to come. So many missed birthdays, Christmases, graduations — hugs, laughs, talks…life.

More texts; a beautiful prayer of grief and peace, a pointed tirade against the political posturing of inept officials, lament for the kids and their families…

As the hours passed, people pulled out their scripts and started to act accordingly. The theater of media and politics. “We’ll never forget,” “We have to change,” “This isn’t a time for politics” (says the politician), “insert cliché here.”

Didn’t we just do this 10 days ago in Buffalo? How many times before that? Enough that there is a well-worn rut of rote response. 

Each day the ache increased as the devastating details of the suffering, the incompetence, the revelations that all the arming and armoring was worse than useless— much worse— came to light. The familiar sensations of being disconnected, exhausted, angry and then overwhelmingly sad filled my body, weighted it down. I reached out to some people, pushed others away. Withdrew.

Each day the desire to drive to Uvalde increased. Not because I could do anything there, but just to bear witness, to lament. But damn, if I left town and drove to the site of every mass shooting, I wouldn’t have a job or a marriage. Of course, Jane would say go. This is different.

Instead I headed northwest, to Emporia, Kansas. I was booked to be there anyway for a gravel bike race, but had deferred just a few days earlier. I was in no shape for the mental and physical beating such a ride dishes out. But a group of friends had rented an Airbnb and in a weird coincidence, Emporia State University is home to the Fallen Educators Monument (the only national monument in Kansas, according to Google).

So within a few hours of deciding which way to go, I was on the road, the radio updating the heartbreak one gut-wrenching detail after another. The grief, the ass-covering scrambling by law enforcement, the machinations of the politicians to deflect, spin and somehow use this— even this — to stuff their campaign coffers. 

There would be three funerals that day in Uvalde. Two 10-year-olds who shared the same birthday, slaughtered on the same day as well. Three of at least 22. Precious bodies lowered in the south Texas caliche as I drove through the green hills of Missouri towards Emporia. 

I returned the call of a friend who had reached out to check on me after she heard the news. I get these now when something like this happens, from friends who know my story. It helps. For so many years I, like most all of us from Murchison, carried this alone.  

I pulled into the Airbnb shortly before my friends did, and sat on the back porch to write. I’d thrown my bike on the back of the car before I left. Hoping to bike some of the Flint Hills solo and let all this weight radiate off me, along with prayers and questions. 

My friends arrived, and we all went out to grab a bite. The talk was laser focused on the race starting the next day, a monster of a task. Three hundred fifty-plus miles to be completed in under 36 hours. And totally self-supported; there would be no aid stations along the way, no support team. The rest of the evening was spent watching them load their bikes, talking strategy, making sure every contingency was accounted for. 

I woke up early and made coffee. My friends’ race didn’t start until that afternoon, so I packed up my stuff and headed to the memorial in Emporia, promising to meet them later and see them off. 

The radio continued its detailing of events on the hourish drive over. I rolled up around 10:00am on June 3. The sun was warming up the clear sky, but a breeze kept it from getting to the promised afternoon heat. This place was so light, so open, so…undramatic. Manicured, mundane. The hum of a lawn mower drifted across the parking lot, the traffic noise filling in when it took a break. 

The National Monument to Fallen Educators sits on a slight rise at the northwest corner of the Emporia State University campus, across from a Kansas National Guard Armory. The focal point is a one-room schoolhouse circa late 1800s, something out of “Little House on the Prairie.” I peaked in the windows to see a classroom utterly unlike the one I sat in at Murchison that day. This one was quaint, orderly and homey. Mr. Grayson’s classroom, at least as it exists in my mind, will never be any of that.  A few yards away are large, black, granite stones, shiny and headstone-looking. I counted 165 names; the earliest recorded was Enoch Brown — July 26, 1765— while the most recently-etched names were from 2018. Not all the names here memorialized teachers mowed down by gun violence. The deaths came from gas explosions (nine on March 18, 1937, in Texas), fires (three nuns in Chicago, 1958), bus accidents on field trips. Three occurred when the plane taking six students to a National Geographic conference in California was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.

But the majority were shot. Murdered by students, parents of students, other teachers, strangers. 

The three teachers from Parkland, Florida, are listed; six from Sandy Hook Elementary. William David Sanders from Columbine is there, as are the teachers from Santa Fe, Texas. 

And Mr. Grayson is there. In a weird twist, he’s there twice. Once as Wilbur (Rod) Grayson and once simply as Rod Grayson. Both have “May 18, 1978 TX” etched after them. Not sure how it happened that he was listed twice, but it kind of fit with the overall feel of the monument — not so much that it was hastily put together, but more incongruously. It’s like a different committee took over every few years with a whole different vision for what to do with the space. A big misshapen quilt. There were donor names scattered here and there on bricks around the tablets that recorded teachers’ names. The etched names were close, but not of the exact same font size, so some columns had more names than others. Other monument stones were awkwardly arranged with the names of other benefactors: individuals, banks, local NEA branches, various schools. No sign of a donation by the NRA, but their presence was very much felt. 

The three stones containing the names formed half of an incomplete semi-circle, the other side waiting for more stones to be erected, more names to be recorded. But even though it’s there twice, Mr. Grayson’s name felt lost in the clutter. Or maybe not the clutter so much as the place. So far from Austin, so removed from the orange brick suburban school that moved so quickly to erase any memory of what happened that day. 

I wanted to experience more than what was happening, but I’m not sure what. I grew up with images of people folding into tears at the Vietnam Monument in D.C.; is that what I imagined would happen to me? Or maybe some flooding-back of the events of May 18, 1978, with new clarity, a new perspective? Mostly I was just annoyed. Annoyed that this was it, someone’s good-natured but underwhelming attempt at telling a very complex and violent story in a vernacular wholly unsuited for it. Thoughts and prayers, y’all. 

I took a few pictures to send to our group text and headed over to the start of the race. Vendors had booths set up for blocks and I wandered aimlessly, now utterly unmotivated to squeeze in a ride. Instead, I met up with another rider who had scratched and then saw my friends off as they headed for the start. They would go on to have an epic ride, pedaling through darkness, cramps, wheel-clogging mud, mind-numbing exhaustion, lost phones and flats. They finished in just a little more than 33 hours, caked in mud and glory. 

Maybe that’s the only monument that makes sense to me, the lives that those of us who survived that day have continued to live. Some have become educators, others lawyers, or architects. Some have written things, designed things, created things. All of us have endured in some form or fashion. All of us have had to figure this out mostly on our own, unsupported, endless miles ahead of us. All of us carry a story that, when woven together, tells a bigger story. Not one sponsored by anyone but our own grief and questions, faith and doubt, longing and trauma.

Unlike the Emporia monument, this one has a stunning serendipity to it, a complex coherence. It, too, has room for more of the story to be told, more space for memories and imagination, but it is not confined by geography or line limits on a shiny rock. It’s as endless as the gravel roads of Kansas, or better, as limitless as the imagination Mr. Grayson nurtured in all of us.