Opinion | An open letter to the Annunciation School families and community from a former Minneapolitan

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My wife and I recently moved from southwest Minneapolis to Chicago. From afar, it’s been hard to watch what’s happened at Annunciation School because Minneapolis still feels like home and probably always will. We feel like we should be there, sharing the grief, anger and even numbness with you, our friends, neighbors and community.

Over the past weeks, I’ve been scanning published photos and footage on CNN, the New York Times, the Minnesota Star Tribune and other local, national and worldwide news sources. What I see are ordinary neighborhood folks like you and me.

At first, it was the all-too-familiar, desperate, deflated expressions on your faces, the ones we’re all familiar with, the ones that speak volumes in one sentence:

“How could this have happened here?”

I know your neighborhood well. “Here” is an easy bike ride from the Fulton neighborhood, where my wife and I lived, to Annunciation School and your idyllic Windom neighborhood. I know that neighborhood well. So do folks where I now make my home and those living in greater Minnesota. That’s because chances are good they’re living in one just like it. Their version of “here.”

“Here” is near their favorite second home, the local throwback Dairy Queen.

“Here” is the corner coffee shop across the street from Annunciation School, where retirees and parents toting strollers meet each morning.

“Here” is the nursing home down the block. I know that Annunciation kids visit with and perform for its residents, especially at Christmastime.

“Here” is the welcoming public library almost kitty-corner from Annunciation; next to it flows Minnehaha Creek. In summertime, the creek lazily floats kids in inner tubes all the way to Minnehaha Falls Park.

“Here” is in the late afternoon, when you’re sitting at a study table next to one of the bay windows that face Annunciation, and you’ll witness its students, kindergartners through eighth-graders, wearing their once morning-tidy but now unkempt school uniforms. They’re riding bikes, skateboarding or walking in twos, threes, fours and fives, some of the older ones with tiny brothers and sisters in tow. The little ones’ backpacks look heavier than the bodies schlepping them.

“Here,” only a few blocks east of Annunciation, stands the highly regarded, old but stately Washburn High School. This past August, Washburn celebrated its hundredth anniversary and storied history. Next to it is a junior high, recently renamed “Justice Page Community Middle School” honoring Alan Page, retired Minnesota Supreme Court judge (and, of course, Minnesota Vikings Hall of Fame defensive end).

“Here” is where folks would love to live, believe me.

And, now, “here” are all of you wonderful folks, committed to doing all you can to ease the pain still in so many hearts and minds.

From what we’ve seen in the reportage, the Annunciation family feels heartfelt gratitude for that, of course. But one member of the family has said even that at nighttime and alone, it’s still especially hard. Her greatest fear is that it wouldn’t be long before people “from the outside” would put this tragedy in the back pages of their minds.

“It’ll be just another shooting that happened,” she said.

At the same time, needing to “talk” to anyone, even a stranger, I tell one gentleman how I’ve recently relocated from Minneapolis and not far from the shootings at Annunciation. He replies, simply, “I’m so sorry for your loss.” He means it.

That’s fine. But now, as time passes — and please believe me when I tell you this — others with whom I’ve shared your stories not only remain saddened by “your loss” but now know much about, and express admiration for, your well-documented communal and individual courageousness, your inner strength and your fierce determination to hold the powers-that-be accountable to change Minnesota’s and America’s inept gun laws.

Our thoughts from far away remain with you.