On February 14, 2018, Annika and Mitch Dworet were waiting to pick up their two sons at their high school in Parkland, Florida, when they got a call from Alex, 15: He told his mother he was in the back of an ambulance—he had been shot.
Annika took off for the hospital where Alex was taken, with the immediate hope that since he had been able to call her, he wasn’t in dire straits; it turned out that a bullet had grazed his head. But as a crowd of parents quickly gathered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, with word spreading that a number of students had been killed, Mitch, still at the high school, repeatedly called his older son: Nick wasn’t answering his cell. Where was he?
The Dworets wouldn’t get the news until 3 a.m., the last family taken into a private office by the FBI: Nick, captain of the swim team, with an athletic scholarship secured to the University of Indianapolis, who was so in love with his girlfriend he had exchanged homemade hearts with her on this Valentine’s Day—he was dead. Sixteen other students had also been murdered by a 19-year-old former Stoneman student in one of the worst mass shootings ever at a school in the United States.
In the days after Nick’s murder, the Dworets’ house was full of family, friends, and neighbors bringing them food. “Without that, I probably wouldn’t have gotten out of bed or taken a shower,” Mitch, 62, says.
Mitch was a longtime restaurant manager and a realtor; Annika, 52, a pediatric ER nurse. They had shared with both sons a passion for sports— running and biking—and Nick found a calling in swimming; he dreamed of representing Sweden, his mother’s native country, in the Olympics one day. It had been a close, active family, fractured in a way that was not only sudden but incomprehensible. And the trauma of their loss threatened to swallow them.
The Dworets needed to be alone, too, though being alone was possibly worse.
The family’s pain sometimes isolated them from each other. Mitch remembers, especially right after Nick’s death, “thinking about something and I’d just cry. And Annika’s not in the same place at that moment or vice versa. And it took us about three months to realize, wow, we have our son Alex in the other room who is in just as much trauma as we are.” Or more—Alex had been wounded, had lost his brother, and witnessed terrible violence happening to others.
The family soon got into therapy, which helped some, but for the better part of two years they had no real way of coping, and the level of trauma they were feeling was a dangerous place to be. Annika, describing the state of exhaustion, depression, and anxiety she was in, cuts to the chase: “To stay in that would be destructive, and I had to find something to get out of that, or I could stay in it forever. And that would be really bad.”
“You go down the rabbit hole of grief, and it’s very lonely,” says Mitch, who had gone into a vortex of his own scattered thinking after Nick’s murder: “It’s a feeling of desperation—I’m desperate to see my son again. I’m desperate to get back to moments of happiness that I used to have, but I can’t get it back because I can’t get Nick back. And then it goes in different avenues: Oh my God, what happened to Nick? The violence—the violence of what he went through. And I miss him and I…I won’t be able to ever hear his voice or see him again, and I won’t be able to experience a future. And I start thinking about what would have been, or what he would look like. He was just going to be 18.”
Mitch unraveled, again and again, into a place of deep despair. There seemed to be no way out.
The Journey Through Pain
In Chicago, Brenda Mitchell had been traveling a similar path of unremittent pain for more than a decade.
Brenda, 66, can speak calmly now about losing her son Kenneth, who was gunned down outside a bar in suburban Chicago in 2005. He was 31. “Never in a million years would I imagine Kenneth would be the one to die from an act of gun violence,” she wrote in an online piece for Moms Demand Action, which describes itself as “a grassroots movement of Americans fighting for public safety measures that can protect people from gun violence.”
Kenneth was the first grandchild in a close African-American family, a role model for his cousins and siblings. Kenneth had two young sons and a third on the way, and he was the family member, Brenda says, who would organize a barbecue if they had not gathered for some time. Kenneth was manager of a golf center in University Park, a Chicago suburb, and the weekend he was killed he was about to host a Super Bowl party. Kenneth had gone out the night before to a sports bar to play darts with friends.
As he was leaving the bar, an argument broke out between two men; he tried to intervene as a peacemaker, Brenda says. But a friend of one of the men went to his van, got a gun, and opened fire, killing Kenneth.
“A week earlier he had taken his brother to the airport for his third tour of duty in a conflict in the Middle East,” Brenda says. “And this tour was his last tour in Afghanistan, only to lose Kenneth a week later in a free country.”
The trauma of gun violence disproportionately impacts people of color, especially African-Americans, in the United States; homicide is the leading cause of death for Black males up to 44 years old. According to a CDC analysis, Black men and boys ages 15 to 34 accounted for 37% of gun homicides in 2019 in the United States, though that age group comprises just 2% of the country’s population.
For a long time after Kenneth’s murder, Brenda tried to carry on, denying her pain. Last spring, she spoke at a Zoom conference on how mindfulness can help people who have lost a loved one to gun violence. “I was in a doctor’s office and she was recommending that I don’t go back to work,” Brenda said, remembering how she felt a full decade after her son’s killing, “and I actually had on a new outfit to go to a new job. I had to realize that I was broken and I was fragile. And I stopped in that moment to realize that I no longer saw myself—I couldn’t see me anymore. Everybody talked about a new norm, but I didn’t know how to get there.”
I no longer saw myself—those are chilling words; Brenda had lost not just her son but something even more basic: who she was. She had raised her two young grandsons and was working a demanding job in human resources in health care while also serving as a pastor of her church. Her own health was at dire risk; Brenda’s blood pressure soared to 250 over 110. She took her doctor’s advice, going on disability instead of starting the new job.
But Brenda was still a long way from reclaiming her life—or herself.
Where Do You Store Your Trauma?
Trauma is a psychological, emotional response to a deeply disturbing or distressing experience or event. People who experience trauma may feel unsafe, with a reduced capacity for regulating their emotions and navigating relationships. Trauma can shake our sense of self and cause lasting harm to our ability to live a full life.
The good news is, healing from trauma is possible.
Fadel Zeidan is an associate professor of anesthesiology at the University of California San Diego. He wanted to better understand the efficacy of trauma-informed mindfulness—specifically, how mindfulness might relate to the trauma of losing a loved one to gun violence. In early 2021 he had an opportunity to conduct a study of gun violence victims as they went through an intensive eight-week course in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) training. Those taking part in the study would also become trainers themselves and the new trainers could then teach others to become trainers too. The research was ambitious and far-reaching.
Zeidan has been studying mindfulness for more than two decades; he wrote his undergraduate honors thesis at UNC Charlotte on how one 20