Two days after the shooting, Irvin awoke from surgery. Hospital workers wheeled him back to his hospital room, where Sister Act 2 played on TV. In it, Whoopi Goldberg leads a raw but gifted group of kids through choir practice, her fellow nuns looking on.
“Relax,” she tells them. “Take a deep breath.”
With all he’d been through, Irvin felt grateful. To the officer who helped him. To the God he prayed to. To the doctors who worked to repair his body. To the family who supported him.
In the movie, the boy with the solo finds his voice. And in his hospital room, Irvin too began to sing.
“Oh, happy day.
"Oh, happy day."
There were some really hard moments when writing this article where I felt like, Why am I doing this? Why am I making people relive horrors? Nothing will change, another mass shooting is inevitable. Does this type of work even matter?
But Kelley and the rest of us talked a lot about how it's a disservice to move on without giving people a chance to tell their story, to know that what happened to them belongs on the record. Even if these shootings keep happening, we can't allow people to shrug them off without confronting what they do to so many shattered communities.
After publication, I heard from numerous readers who thanked us for putting together such a vivid account. One email really stuck with me, because it proved that capturing the tiny, human details really does make a story resonant:
"I got to the end of the third sentence of your article before crying — breaking out crayons is something my wife and I do for our girls."
