How I Helped My Son Through the Virginia Shootings

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First, I grabbed hold of him — a hard hold, with my arms around him. This was not a loving embrace from a mother, but a purposeful, healing move to center him in a tactile way. It was meant (despite my own internal fears and worry) to convey complete calm, strength, and confidence in him.

Second, when I felt his body relax to the slightest degree, he became open enough to move out of this hold — and leave the room to take a hot shower. This coping mechanism has brought him (and still brings him) back to “what’s normal,” in terms of a daily morning routine of showering and getting on with his work, errands, and friends. It also provides another bit of distance between the internal distress he’s feeling to a physical realm of calm.

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Third, after he showered came the hard part. He has always wanted to go back to the news — TV or online — to get the latest updates. But then we’d be back in the bog again. So it takes a bribe: I hand him some money and ask (not demand; he’s a millennial, after all) if he wants it to take out a few friends for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and maybe a movie that day. Again, this moves the interior tumult into another physically and therapeutically soothing realm.

On the day of the Virginia shootings, however, the answer from him was “no.”

At this point I needed to check him for any sounds or indications of an allergic or other physical reaction. With that done and ticked off as fine — now I went for broke.

I have a montage of videos at the ready that I had his uncle (a software developer) put together years ago. It depicts some of the worst 20th-century disasters of inclement weather — tornados, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis — and the wreckage left in their wake, along with historical events, including documentary footage of World Wars I and II.

Nine out of ten times, my son watches this; kids with with OCD and Asperger’s thrive on repetition. The purpose of my approach was to put the shooting disaster into historical perspective with a worst-case scenario in order to bring him into a conversation that required focus and logic — like the cold, hard math formulas he loves with absolutely no emotional load attached.

I said, “This shooting was a tragedy and people were hurt. And so far it looks bad, but right now the only one dead is the gunman. Right?”

He nodded in agreement.

“We also know this evil could have been far worse — it might have been a massacre of all those innocent and good men you respect as part of the Republican Party. But that didn’t happen because there were heroes to save the day — the Capitol Police were assigned to Congressman Scalise for protection, which ended up protecting everyone from certain death.”

His eyes opened wider and I could almost hear his impeccable logic at work, rolling it to the end of the tape in his mind.

And so it ended here — with the following discussion requiring his input.

I asked him, “As a Roman Catholic, who do you believe pulled off this apparent ‘lucky coincidence’?”

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He smiled because it’s a set-up question, and of course — he knew the drill.

He replied, “Come on, Mom. This was evil, and Our Lord made sure He wouldn’t let evil win. He knows what’s coming — always. He’s the boss.”

“Right,” I replied. “And now let’s pray the Holy Rosary.”

And so we, mother and son, did exactly that.

The author, a retired attorney, is a published poet, writer, and columnist based in Arizona.