My phone rang at 6 a.m., the day of our annual family reunion. It was so much more ominous than I ever dreamed. The voicemail left by my daughter-in-law shattered my world: “We can’t make it to the lake. My son, your grandson, Isaiah, was shot and killed last night.” In disbelief, I tried unsuccessfully to call her back to confirm what was unthinkable a few moments before. Finally, my son called. It was true.
Isaiah graduated from his local high school a month before he was killed. The night of his murder, a 19-year-old with a brand-new handgun, himself a graduate, came to the local hangout with a pledge “to get a body under his belt and get street cred.” Isaiah’s last words were “I’ve been shot; it hurts.”
As we stared at the stiff, beautiful young man in the casket with his long, newly combed hair and kind expression, the lump in our throat progressed to tears for all of us: his parents, his four siblings, his 17 cousins, the 300 fellow students and teachers, and me. We tried, unsuccessfully, to quell the overwhelming emotion of the moment.
This time, senseless gun violence devastated our own community.