Grief and Resiliency: Considerations after the Lewiston Maine Mass Shooting

ASL Translation by two Deaf Mainers and two Deaf representatives of Maine Sign Language Interpreter Community.

ASL Video: https://youtu.be/2xNdkIU8eik?si=HRrFieCLo_RBbpOl

We don’t hold our bodily grief the same way, moment by moment or person by person.

At times it lays dormant, resting below the rising and setting sun.

At times grief is a twitching muscle, the impermanence of laughter, the memory of a sweet moment.

At times the grief is biting and gripping the skin. It chews the inside of our mouths and the corners of our fingernails. It corrodes the throat.

Sometimes, it is not just the Maine winter that hurts our faces. It is just everything that hurts.

Grief is every exit sign on 95, the reminder of what an empty highway looked like in lockdown, how the steering wheel felt tight in your hands when you were afraid.

It is the grains of salt in sand dollars and on cheeks. It is every siren and every silence.

Grief is daily remembrance and the untouchable question “why”?

It is the desire to be still, and the desire to scream. It is always the way love feels in the tips of our fingers. It is always the way the shock still holds our spirit captive.

Our community now writes to your community as we live this grief.

Because our grief is also our movement, in the sharp gaze of the public eye.

As humans first and foremost, we feel with the collective grief of the community. We hold our hands open towards one other, wordless.

At other times we interpreters find a solitary place,

the driver’s seat of the car, a stall of the bathroom, the Maine shoreline in the morning - to wrap our own arms around our own selves. To rock, to cry, to be.

On October 25th 2023, violence was inflicted on the Maine Deaf community. This violence took the lives of four Deaf individuals, permanently tearing a Deaf interpreter from the community, and left survivors and families with horrific memories of that night.

We grieve in our body minds, this ineffable loss. We contain grief alongside resilience within our collective ecosystem.

Foremost it is love that sustains the spirit through its worst days.

It is love that breathes enough hope into our humanity that we rise and lean forward.

Our resilience is in our community get-togethers, our Telegrams, Marco Polos, text messages and Facetime calls, our time in-person holding one another physically and spiritually.

Our Resilience is in our whole and open Deaf-hearing teams.

Our Resilience is in building trauma-informed practice and communities of care.

Our Resilience is engaging in safety practices and Deaf-hearing coalitions.

Our Resilience is built through embodied practice: knowing when to labor and when to rest.

Our Resilience is building personal, communal, and professional solidarity.

We write to you, the audience of our grief and resilience, for a reason.

We are writing to you because you may be next.

This kind of violence may appear in your community and it is important for you to start seeking and building your resources NOW.

Seek resources, because resources will not seek you.

1. In your interpreting communities build the following plans:

a. Crisis Plans

b. Safety Plans

c. After action reporting plans (feedback, barriers, what can be accomplished and how to make the changes within our realm)

d. Aftercare and support plans

2. Establish connections with local and state EMS services to define emergency response communication policies and procedures. In lockdown, interpreters need to be included in the EMS teams. Have credentialing and insignia plans established well beforehand to allow for communication access in restricted areas.

3. Collaborate with state and local EMS to recognize Deaf-hearing interpreter teams as a part of the professional crisis and emergency team. Center Deaf interpreters and leaders in this process with their lived expertise. This collaboration is about acknowledging the linguistic humanity of Deaf people, and building a prepared team well before a future dispatch is needed.

4. Make sure news channels reporting police and public official announcements know how to request interpreters, consistently provide interpreters, and always show the interpreters in the frame.

5. Prepare with state licensure and credentialing policies to utilize out-of-state interpreters in the wake of a local crisis.

6. Build relationships with out-of-state interpreting agencies to support local teams in the wake of a tragedy.

In Maine, we are grateful to Partners Interpreting and Sorenson Communications, as well as other out-of-state interpreters outside of those networks who came to Maine to support the work of our own MJ Grant Interpreting and Pine Tree Society interpreting teams.

We are grateful for the work of local interpreters and interpreter schedulers who have worked over the last five months to fill requests from media, commissions, and families alongside the day-today requests that continue to come in.

We are grateful for those who have checked in and held us through this time.

Most specifically we honor the precious lives of Billy Brackett, Steve Vozella, Bryan MacFarlane, and, Joshua Seal.

You are so loved, and you are so deeply missed.