We Are the Light(11)

“Spiritual handholding,” Darcy calls it.

Shortly after the tragedy, Robin Withers—our town’s head librarian, whom I mentioned before—organized a support group of sorts for the survivors. I can’t imagine you weren’t contacted and given an invitation to join, but as you have never attended any of the meetings and still aren’t responding to my letters, there is no way for me to know for sure. I asked Robin whether you had been invited and she assured me that you had been, but perhaps she lied to me. I don’t know why she would do that, but anything is possible in this crazy new world, especially since grief makes people do all sorts of funny things.

At first, the meetings were therapeutic. Grief counselors volunteered to speak with us collectively and individually. I spoke privately with a nice man named Travis, but I felt a little awkward about it, even though he was kind. Halfway through our session, I started to feel like I was cheating on you—so I stood up, told him I had a Jungian analyst to confide in, and then excused myself. He followed me out into the YMCA gym. They had set up makeshift rooms using portable screens and curtains.

And Travis kept saying it was important for me to work through everything properly, as I was facing what he called a “monumental psychological task”—one that he confidently said he could help me navigate.

I could tell that Travis was sincere, but he wasn’t going to put a Jungian lens on things—like we do—and so I felt he would only be messing up what we had already started. I thought about the sanctity of our therapeutic container, keeping the steam in to cook the rice, and making sure the alchemical process remained uninterrupted. I smiled and thought, Karl would be proud.

I did, however, attend the lectures and “circle shares” and sat through all the crying and tried to allow the best of my soul to love the best of everyone else’s soul. And sometimes I held the hands of the other victims or let them soak my shirt with tears. And it felt purposeful, being there at these meetings where we all communed and tried to make sense of what had happened.

Every night, I asked Darcy if I could tell the group about my numinous experience, arguing that it would be cathartic for everyone to understand that their loved ones did not suffer and were not afraid, but were instantly transformed into higher beings who were far more beautiful and enlightened than humans could ever be. I had felt the awesome benefits of that knowledge and it seemed like I was cruelly hoarding a panacea. Darce argued against my disseminating that information, proposing that my Jungian analysis with you had prepared me to be the perfect vessel for the sacred, meaning I was able to contain the divine knowledge without psychologically cracking or mentally dissociating or suffering a disintegration of the soul.

“Telling the unprepared and the uninitiated could literally render them insane,” Darcy argued. “It’s only for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. The mystery is not for everyone. This is the esoteric.”

But what if it is also universally medicinal? Balm for the soul? I kept thinking. I don’t believe I’d be able to do anything at all—not even get out of bed in the morning—if I hadn’t seen the dead rise up and transform, if I wasn’t having nightly conversations with an angel who wraps her wings around me and makes me feel whole again. The feathers my wife leaves behind as proof have saved me over and over.

“There will be a task,” Darcy says, “and you will know it when you see it.”

So I kept my mouth shut about angels and all the rest, but I tried to help the others in the ways I mentioned above.

All of The Survivors—which is what we had begun to call ourselves—got together on December 26, for a second Christmas of sorts, only we didn’t open presents or eat a ham-and-pineapple dinner or sing carols or even exchange cookies. We just sat with each other in the library. And almost everyone cried into each other’s bodies as we talked about how impossible it had been the day before to simply be around those who weren’t inside the Majestic during the tragedy, because they didn’t understand. And they really didn’t—not even Jill.

You probably saw that Mark and Tony—the couple who restored and owns the historic Majestic Theater—hired someone to drape a huge black silk sash over the cathedral-like face of the movie house, in memorial of all who were killed. They also declared that the theater would be closed indefinitely out of respect for the bereaved, which most would consider to be a nice gesture. But neither of them had been there the night of the shooting, so they really don’t get that a black silk sash doesn’t do much to heal anyone. Also, going to the movies had always been Darce’s and my equivalent of going to church. “It’s where you go to restore your faith in humanity! It’s where you go to believe! To laugh and cry and smile like a kid again,” Darce used to say, and I agree. We went at least once a week. So Mark and Tony shutting down the movies felt like an extra punishment in some ways. And the community’s additional loss depressed me greatly.

I couldn’t make myself cry with the others, because I had winged Darcy comforting me every night.

Sandra didn’t cry a single tear at the meetings, nor did she hug or hold anyone. Instead, she fumed. I’m not suggesting that she wasn’t sad about losing her husband, Greg, especially since they have two elementary-school-aged children, who thankfully weren’t in the theater when the shooting happened, but were home with a babysitter. Even though Sandra never approached me, I would notice her pulling members aside and sort of lecturing them in the corner of whatever room we were in. Her face was always tomato red, but not from crying. Sandra was an exploding volcano. And she was always wagging her index finger in people’s noses. Sometimes little beads of spit would fly out of her mouth, almost as if they were trying to escape the heat of some terrible furnace.