A Summer of Trauma
Kathleen Gish’s story as told to Vicki Stalbird
The night of the shooting I went to bed early. Yes, I know I’m giving my age away, but it had been a long day, a long summer really, but it was perfect for sleeping that August night; warm, but still comfortable with the windows open. I was in bed by 8 p.m. and I was in a deep, restful sleep when a pop, pop, pop sound barely registered in my fuzzy brain. I didn’t really wake up. I think I rolled over. I thought it might be fireworks. The sound of popping firecrackers was not an uncommon noise in my Oregon District neighborhood, especially only a month out from the fourth of July. It was not unusual to hear fireworks all summer long.
I thought, Those stupid kids. Don’t they know people are trying to sleep?
Despite those stupid kids, I keep my windows open at night. No problem. It was too nice not to.
I looked at my sleeping husband. Like me, he was no expert on gunshot sounds, but he had often, through the years we had lived in the neighborhood just south of Fifth Street, soothed my sometimes-jumpy nerves.
“That’s just a firecracker,” he’d say. It made me feel better, even though I knew he had no idea the difference between a firecracker sound and gunshot.
We did not know about guns.
A gun, a firecracker, it all sounded the same to me. I never knew to be frightened or alarmed. Over the years of living on Green Street, only two blocks from the din of bars and restaurants and outside nightlife, I almost came to ignore and tune out the noise. It was only noise, the price one paid for living in an urban neighborhood—now over the years a typically gentrified, up-scale, urban neighborhood. In fact, most of the noise seemed a pleasant cacophony, the sounds of celebratory youth and enthusiasm, the sounds of carefree fun, sometimes mingled with a faint thump of bass and drum. What Saturday nights were supposed to be.
In my now older and married-sixteen-years state, I don’t go often to the bars and restaurants. I like take out occasionally, and at times I like to treat myself to dinner at one of the fancier places. I’m still down there a fair amount, however. I walk to work more days than not, going through the neighborhood. I get all of my presents at the shops in the district. I walked my dogs through these streets for years until they passed on. I like walking along the sidewalk, smiling and nodding at passersby; seeing friends in the shops and bars; the drone of cars creeping through the cobblestone streets, one of the few such streets left in town. Laughter. When I think of my neighborhood, I think of laughter.
When I am running, there are always people out and about in the neighborhood. Some people give me random high-fives. I love the feminist messages outside of the Beck and Call shop and the hilarious messages from the sex shop, too. My personal favorite: “Happy Halloweiner.”
It is home. Shooting or no shooting.
Sometimes my husband would say, “That might be a gunshot.”
We’d look at each other, a little wary and weary.
“Better call the police,” I’d say.
Once a month or so we did. And now, if I hear a drunk woman screaming, I’ll call. Or a gunshot.
If my husband Aaron says it’s a gun, I’m calling.
But that was always the end of it.
That night, that August 4th, 2019, summer night, I didn’t have the heart to wake Aaron. The popping sounds had stopped anyway.
I heard sirens, like they were coming closer. In my fuzzy, sleepy state, I listened to the sounds, not fully aware. It could have been a minute, two, three. Then it seemed like the sirens faded away, and I thought, sleepy: Oh, everything is fine, don’t wake him. Go back to sleep.
So, I went back to sleep.
I woke up at 3 a.m.—I wake up in the middle of the night every night—but I must have had thirty or forty text messages. Frantic friends, family, students, wanting to know if I was okay, had I heard about the shooting on Fifth Street. In my neighborhood.
That night.
There was a shooting.
The sounds I heard were gunshots. I never know what gunshots sounded like.
The sirens I heard were coming here to my neighborhood. The unthinkable had happened. Oh my God.
It is a sick feeling. The numbness. The dread. The horror. Yes, the horror.
But I am made of solid and stoic Midwestern stock. We carry on. We put one foot in front of the other. We do the next thing.
My messages. Anyone I know out on Fifth Street? No?— good. I started mentally making a list of all the people. They were all okay.
I called my parents. “Yes, we’re fine,” I told them.
We’re fine. The numbness settling in.
Outside my house, the day after the shooting, some of my neighbors, people I’d known for most of my life, are out. Their faces are a mirror of mine. Numb. Shock.
It was many more days before I walked past the neat residential rows of houses, the short two blocks to Fifth Street—to outside of Ned Peppers, the scene of the crime. And suddenly all I could think about is Ned Peppers is the place where I used to get free drinks from some dirty old man who once lived in the neighborhood. I was eighteen years old, and now, no one under twenty-one is allowed inside. I have history with this place, Ned Peppers. A long time ago. But Ned Peppers is still here. A crime scene.
My head and heart felt enveloped with numbness, as if a soft steel wool, or maybe a heavy scratchy blanket, had taken the place of the sharp edges of the horror. I wanted to sink my face in the warmth and even though it stung, I know it wasn’t as painful, not as horrible, as being there, terrified, running, dead.
A friend of mine went down there the day after the shooting. He said he smelled burning metal. Metallic and bowels. The smell of bowels and blood. Shit. Urine.
He said it was so strong.
I imagined the smells.
He said already the street and sidewalk were strewn with flowers, candles, crosses. People milling in front of the barricades. And the smell.
I imagine it’s a smell he will remember the rest of his life. It’s almost as if I can smell it myself. It must have been horrible for him.
In the weeks that followed, I walked by these barricades several times. I walked by the growing memorials. People even placed flowers where the bullet holes had been. It’s one of those details that will be with me the rest of my life. The f lowers are nice, but the bullet holes. Here. In Dayton, Ohio. In the Oregon District. It’s my neighborhood we’re talking about.
It was too surreal, and I sank even more into the numbness that wrapped me that whole summer.
There was so much trauma.
How does one endure? How does a city endure? We had been through so much already.
It started with the rally of white supremacists, a despicable and sad group of humans who managed, despite our protests, to spew their hate here. At least we kept them to a small group. Their pathetic gathering paled in comparison to our large and vocal counter-protest. Hate has no home here.
Then the tornadoes on Memorial Day. Broad swathes of streets destroyed in seeming no pattern or fashion. That’s the way of tornadoes, and they wreaked havoc, destroyed homes, but thankfully few lives. My neighborhood was spared these ravages, but I grieved for my neighbors. I still grieve to this day when I drive by the massive mountains of concrete and steel, the seemingly constant reminders of the Memorial Day tornadoes. They will be gone someday. It will all be rebuilt. Redone. Or moved. Neighborhoods are not the same after a tragedy.
I want my neighborhood to go on. It will, but it will not be the same. The tragedy has happened. The people died. The people, so much pain. They will never be the same.
I want to help all of them. I want to make it better. To make it right. And throughout that summer, I did my part. I helped when I could.
But as the day, and then the weeks, went by, I tired of the barricades, the news vans, the trash that’s left, the streams of unfamiliar faces, the difficulty of navigating the streets, just taking a walk. I wanted to go on a normal walk, a run even.
And I still feel numb and with that numbness comes a deep, abiding fatigue.
There is something called compassion fatigue. Merriam Webster calls it: “the physical and mental exhaustion and emotional withdrawal experienced by those who care for sick or traumatized people over an extended period of time.” Or a second definition: “apathy or indifference toward the suffering of others as the result of overexposure to tragic news stories and images and subsequent appeals for assistance.”
Some days, some hours, some minutes I am these definitions. I do think of all the sick and traumatized that summer. The hate. The destruction. The dead.
But we carry on.
The barricades and police and the crowds were back on Fifth Street. About a month after the shooting, on a balmy September, they were back for Gem City Shine, a concert to help the grieving city of Dayton.
And it helped. And I am grateful for the organizers, for the mayor, for Stevie Wonder, even if I didn’t go down there. I just couldn’t celebrate. I just couldn’t stand the idea of crowds, let alone actual crowds.
Someone at the vigil yelled, “Do something.”
It seemed appropriate. Later I would see signs, t-shirts: Do Something.
The night of Gem City Shine I went to sleep with Stevie singing, “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” Or maybe it was “Superstition.” I really don’t remember, but I remember feeling happy Stevie was in town.
And it was a beautiful night, just enough breeze to flutter the curtains, warm with the slightest hint of fall weather to come.
And I felt a bit that we could recover.
I hope for recovery every day.
This story originally appeared in Facing Gun Violence: It’s Always Close to Home for Someone (2020), a publication of The Facing Project that was organized by Sinclair College and the City of Dayton in Dayton, Ohio.