Off the Shelf

Ashley

I’d like to start this whole writing project by going back to 2009. I know, that is terribly far back. I’ve been mulling over this blog for the past month, and I confess that I did not expect to go back this far in time or to start with such a heavy topic. But I’ve realized that this story is where this has to start for me, because it’s a little bit of a look into my first encounter with real tragedy. For me, that happens to be story about gun violence. This is by no means all about that, but as a trigger warning, some of the following might be difficult to hear. So if today is not the day or if this is not the time for you, feel free to shut this off and take some time for self care.If you do want to keep reading or listening, let me ask you for your patience as I broach the subjects of death and gun violence. I’ve thought about how the beauty of writing is that it can render things more visible—more “there”—to us. I want things more there. I want easier in-roads to ideas and experiences that were significant and need rendering. But when it comes to this—to a part of the human experience that is dealing with horrendous, senseless suffering, I don’t always know how to bring that to the foreground, render it for what it is in my understanding of the world and how it works, think about why it happens, while keeping my heart tender and asking myself what I can do.So this is about grieving gun violence and processing the fact that there is so much senseless suffering. This is about grief. But then it is about turning that grief into action. And by the way, I know that no one is actually expecting me to explain the absurdity of the world and its senseless violence. But I’m constantly frustrated that I don’t have the answer. So, again, I ask for your patience. I first want to try to tell this story about Ashley, so let me zoom out and begin with a question: Can anyone relate to meeting someone who is new to your hometown making you feel more at home in your own hometown? That is the feeling I had in 2007 when I met Ashley Lauren Wilks, beginning our freshman year of high school in the Portland, Oregon area. She had just moved from Denver with her family, entering our massive public school of 2,000+ students. And immediately, it seemed like everyone, no matter your so-called coolness or weirdness level, not only liked Ashley but knew her. When she asked you how you were, she meant it. She actually would smile at you. I met her on the first day of school because she was assigned the seat in front of me in English class. I still remember when she turned around in her seat to say, “so, your name’s my middle name,” like it was something that should bond us. And like little high school girls, it did. Slowly, I noticed that she wore the peace sign on everything. Her backpack had a peace sign patch, her folders had peace sign stickers, she wore bright peace sign jewelry. One day at our desks, someone asked her why she liked the peace sign so much. I forget exactly what she said, but it was something fairly straightforward, that she believed in peace for everybody. Therefore, she wore the peace sign. I remember that in English, we’d turn to small groups to discuss the books we’d read. Ashley and I and others on our side of the room would turn to each other and discuss. Do I remember which books or what we talked about? No. (Sometimes memories are just impressions). But I remember that I always found her observations insightful and funny, and she was really good at making people feel heard. We became a part of a group of softball team/swim team/English class kids/anyone-who-wanted-to-join that would eat lunch together. (Sometimes memories carry details like the texture of a sandwich). I learned about her life in Denver and her family. She also had an older brother who she really loved. We became friends, friends without any sense of pressure on our time. It was such a massive school, but she had a way of making people feel a little bit more seen—a little more there—a rare thing for one 15-year-old peer to be able to bestow upon another.Now, fast-forward to sophomore year. Ashley and I had different class schedules. I was in student government, choir, and theater. She was on two sports teams. So without realizing it, we started seeing each other only at random or at lunch. But whenever we did see each other, again, our interactions were laced with this sense of kindness. There was a fierceness in her to help correct the world, which seemed to flow out in every conversation.On one Friday afternoon in January, I was sitting with my back against some lockers in the hallway doing homework, when Ashley walked by me. She stopped to say hi. We caught up for a bit. I remember that I told her that I liked her necklace—a long chain with I think (when I see the memory) some kind of animal pendant (an octopus? an owl?) We agreed we should get lunch the next week. Maybe Friday? We didn’t make plans; we just agreed we’d figure out the best time then. She smiles, says, alright, I’ll see you next week, and walks away.The following Sunday afternoon, sitting on my bed, I logged into Myspace. I immediately saw a bulletin that was titled, “RIP Ashley Wilks.” I clicked on it, confused. I don’t remember it word for word, but I remember the gist. It said that if we’d been hearing rumors about the shooting downtown, it was confirmed that it was true. That Ashley was shot and was one of the people killed the night before in downtown Portland. The next thing I remember is weeping uncontrollably, going downstairs to find my mom, her saying, “What’s wrong, what’s wrong?” and all I could get out was, “Ashley Wilks has been murdered.” The next morning, school happened to be off for a teacher’s workday. So on Myspace, everyone was trying to figure out what had actually happened. We only knew the basics, so what follows includes slightly more than what I knew back then. Saturday evening, January 24th, 2009, Ashley and a few other students from various high schools in the area were all meeting downtown at a teenage nightclub called The Zone, located just a few minutes away from the waterfront, for a birthday party. The group was a mix of international exchange students from France, Ecuador, Guatemala, Taiwan, Peru, and Italy, and future exchange students from Oregon, who knew each other through the Rotary. Ashley had been selected to go abroad the following year. So this group of kids, mostly international students, who became friends because they had convened around ideas such as global peace and cultural exchange, were all standing on the sidewalk in line for The Zone in Portland, Oregon, the United States. The perpetrator, a 24-year-old man, walked up to a pub across the street. He pointed a semi-automatic handgun toward the group standing in line, and opened fire, shot nine people, and then he shot himself. The manager of The Zone was hit. Six students, including a girl from France, and another from Italy, who was in my speech and debate class, were critically injured and in the ICU for weeks, undergoing multiple surgeries. They survived. Marta Pas De Novoa, 17, an exchange student from Arequipa, Peru, who was studying in Washington state, was shot and killed. Ashley was shot twice in the chest. A DJ had raced outside at the sound of gunfire and saw Ashley on the sidewalk. The reports state that he came up to her and started pumping her chest to try to help her breathe. He held her, and told her to hang on, that help was coming. She died a few minutes later, in his arms, as the ambulance was arriving.It was the worst mass shooting in Portland’s history.On Monday, my friends and I started posting last words to Ashley on Myspace, posting pictures, collages, remembering her, saying goodbye. Amongst the grief, appreciation and reflection on the smart and beautiful person that she was, the posts contained things like: I can’t believe I was just talking to you on Friday. This is unreal, unpredictable. It’s one thing to die naturally; it’s another thing to be murdered. If someone as amazing as Ashley can get taken away from life without warning, then what are all of us doing here? I went back to my journal entry that Monday morning. My words were simply: “How can somebody be alive and then dead? How can someone have breath and then none? What happened to this world?”The next day, back at school, we cried together. I went to see a grief counselor. Then I went to a piano practice room. (I must have felt safer there). There was this sense of grieving Ashley’s death, wanting to remember and memorialize her life immediately. Underneath our grief, though, there was confusion. There was the sense of asking, “What happened to this world?”As we grow older, the reality of death never stops confounding us—as if death was not supposed to happen to us. And obviously, if one is of the Judeo-Christian faith, then based on Genesis 3, this is something one truly believes, that death being a part of our human experience was God’s Plan B. At this time of my life when Ashley was murdered, this was something I believed. But I also could recognize that this shooting was something altogether different than just “death happens.” This was about senselessness. There’s death, but then there’s murder, human cruelty.I remember only snapshots of the memorial service that was held for her the following Wednesday. The massive church was completely packed. Her closest friends spoke of their sweetest memories, and honored Ashley’s beautiful soul. Some friends came out from Denver to speak, too. I remember a family member calling her phone and putting the microphone up to it so we could list...