Lessons in the Wake of Mass Murder

As the clerk rang up my peanut butter, bread, and cherries, I glanced over my shoulder and could not miss the bright orange turban. A tall young man in the self-check lane, chatting lightly with a young white woman. Although I went to public school in polyglot Northern Virginia with many Sikhs, learned in Sunday School that Sikhism is one of the great world religions, and have a few Sikh colleagues, until this month I knew little about them or their faith.

The glimpse of the orange turban reminded me of some of the things I have learned since the shootings at the gurdwara in Oak Creek: grief, hospitality, sanctuary, doubt, neighbor, intimacy.

A photograph of a former mayor of Oak Creek, sobbing, seeking comfort in her husband’s stoic shoulder. Her feelings were my feelings, etched more sharply: grief.

From a letter to the editor, I learned that visitors to the Golden Temple in the Punjab can stay as guests for several days, asked only if they like what they are seeing, not to pay for the privilege: hospitality.

From several news stories, an opinion piece, from comments made at the memorial service held on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus, I learned that you can enter a gurdwara at any time, through a door from each of the cardinal directions. If you go on Sunday, or perhaps in the middle of the week, you will be offered food. Worship and nourishment: sanctuary.

As I loaded my daughter into our car, the young man with the turban and the white woman walked to their car, parked next to mine. She was wearing denim cutoffs. He was holding a bright blue package of Oreos. He seemed so carefree at the moment; I did not want to remind him of what had happened, just because I was thinking of it at that moment. I looked away.

In Colorado, you cannot tell by looking at a stranger that they might have been at the movie theater, or infer that they know someone who was there. Here in Milwaukee, though, our survivors, our male survivors anyway, are marked. Their dress reveals their faith. The liberal in me rebels against allowing myself to assume anything about someone based on their appearance. Did I look away to spare his feelings, or my own? Doubt.

Yet the murders in Oak Creek felt different to me from the ones in Aurora a few weeks ago, as awful as they felt. Daily, I pass among people for whom Oak Creek is home. I remember after 9/11 disbelieving a New Yorker who angrily insisted that if you were not there, you could not feel what they had felt. But now I feel what proximity brings. Not just our own grief, but inescapable, forceful reminders of what those among us might be feeling as we greet them. Neighbors.

I looked him in the eye. “How are you doing?” I asked. Not a nod, a hollow “how are you?” but “How are you doing?” He answered, not quite lightly, “I’m doing all right.” I knew he meant, “As well as could be expected under the circumstances.”

Intimacy.

Lessons in the wake of mass murder: grief, hospitality, sanctuary, doubt, neighbors, intimacy.