I hope you had a pleasant Valentine’s Day last week.
For me it was a nightmare.
By way of explanation, although February 14 last week was a beautiful day, Valentine’s Day is a struggle for me because my wife Gail died of a stroke exactly six years ago on Valentine’s Day, 2018. It is not a holiday for me, but the anniversary of the day that I lost my Valentine of 48 years — an anniversary celebrated and anticipated in the media for weeks on end before its arrival, a hot-button trigger that I endure every year.
Valentine’s Day 2018 was also the day that Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School was shattered by the murder of 17 students and teachers in Parkland, Florida, earlier that morning on the same day that I lost my wife.
And on this year’s Valentine’s Day, as in 2018, there were still more innocent people gunned down as they went about the peaceful days of their lives, this time at a joyous Kansas City celebration over winning the Super Bowl.
And so I hope that Valentine’s Day last week was pleasant for you, as Valentine’s Day should always be. If you were able to look beyond the horror of the morning news, I hope that last week’s Valentine’s Day wasn’t a nightmare for you, as it was once again for me, and as it will be forever for Parkland and Kansas City mourners.
As I write this, I am wearing an orange T-shirt that says “March for Our Lives” that I picked up at a rally in Naples, Florida, on March 24, 2018, just six weeks after the Parkland murders. It was a rally organized by Moms Demand Action, calling for better gun control legislation in Florida and elsewhere.
On the back of that T-shirt are the words: “Never Again.”
At that rally, as I listened to high school students and their parents pray for a time when we might send our children to school without worrying about their never coming home again, tears coursed down my cheeks. I wept for the children, of course, but also for my wife.
Because it’s one thing to watch people grieve on TV. It’s quite another thing to feel your empty heart echo with pain over the loss of a loved one, and then to watch others with the same pain on their face and the same empty echo in their hearts.
My wife was 68 years old when she died — too young by my standards, and yet not atypical when you look at statistics concerning strokes.
But those victims at Parkside were children. They were teenagers, with their whole lives ahead of them. There should be nothing typical about the end of their lives at such an early age.
And yet, with more than 600 mass-murders in America per year, can you call mass-murder in America anything but typical?
And at the heart of those mass-murders is guns. In particular, guns designed for the express purpose of mowing down other human beings, and sold on the open market with little regard for who might want them, or for what purpose. Guns that can be legally carried openly, as they are in Missouri, or concealed, as they are in Florida.
But hey, we love our guns, don’t we? We don’t want anyone snooping around to see if we’re fit to own them or what we intend to do with them, do we? Or what that angry, reclusive guy down the block might want to do with them?
And so, with mass-murders occurring on average about twice a day in America, I guess you might say that Valentine’s Day last week was pretty much a typical day.
For you, maybe. Not for me. For me it was a nightmare. Again.
But I am lucky, I guess, because I have nobody to blame for my wife’s death. I burn with no rage at a monster who aimed a gun at my child and pulled the trigger. No fury at politicians with the power to address the problem, but who valued NRA endorsement dollars instead. No anger at voters who put those politicians into a government that has the ability to do something about it, but not the will to do so.
For me, Valentines Day only brings sadness and sorrow. It is worse, I am certain, for Parkland and Kansas City mourners, who are additionally burdened by the understandable rage, fury or anger they must rightly feel over their avoidable loss.
I hope that you had a pleasant Valentine’s Day. I didn’t. Because for me—and for the people of Parkland and the people of Kansas City — Valentine’s Day will always be associated with sudden death.
I hope, on that day of love last week, that you spent some time thinking about who — or what — you love most in the world.
And I hope you think about it on election day, too.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.
