Today marked 10 years since my perspective on life began to shift and “life is short; live it” began running through the back corners of my mind. Over the course of seven seconds in a California courtroom on March 4, 2009, I watched as a judge narrowly avoided being stabbed in the jugular and her attempted killer was shot to death. By then, I’d already seen plenty of dead bodies and gruesome crime scenes and grieving families, and now I’m in a career where I deal with a lot of traumatized people. It doesn’t bother me and I sleep just fine, but that day in the courtroom had such a different impact on me.
It took me a long time to figure out why that courtroom attack hit me so strongly. In the days after that incident, I kept a running daily tally of every single Chrysler 300 I saw on the road — and those cars were at the peak of popularity in 2009, so I saw a lot of them. Every single minute, I knew exactly how many black Chrysler 300’s I’d seen that day, and how many non-black ones I’d seen. I spotted them across a divided freeway, in the distance rounding a corner, and in dim evening light. Every morning, my tortured mental tally restarted, and every day I vehemently hoped it wouldn’t resume. Four weeks later, my brain finally stopped differentiating between black and other colored Chrysler 300’s. After six weeks, the daily counting finally stopped, and I was so very relieved. I suspect it was post traumatic stress reaction — not disorder (the D in PTSD), though I refused my employer’s counseling offer so I never did find out. However, I do still get silently enraged when people joke about PTSD, because I know how much my version bothered me, and how hard I tried and failed to make it stop until it had run its course.
I still hate Chrysler 300’s with an embarrassingly absurd passion. This morning, a black one got very close to me while making a turn, and I felt that familiar rage, especially with today’s anniversary. Why that car? That’s the question I’ve asked myself for a decade. The guy who nearly killed the judge was on trial for murder, a crime that happened when he admittedly stabbed his girlfriend in the jugular inside a black Chrysler 300. His attorney, coincidentally, drove a nearly identical black Chrysler 300, and I had even been in it before the crime. (His lawyer later got a different car, and told me that case was the reason he got rid of it.)
I’ve mostly accepted the fact that I’ll never know why my brain fixated on black Chrysler 300’s. But along the way, I’ve finally figured out some of the reasons why that courtroom attack had such a profound impact on me. Sure, the attack itself was out of the ordinary and justifiably made headline news across the country. But by then, I’d already seen and done a lot of crazy things, and none of them gave me a mantra that has run through my head for 10 straight years.
First, in the moments immediately after the stabbing and shooting, I knew that the attacker had been shot and stopped by a detective I would have trusted with my life (that’s saying something for me). But suddenly a sergeant came running from behind me, hollering, “Everybody get down!” I experienced a moment of sheer horror, suddenly thinking that it wasn’t over and that the attacker must have gotten hold of a gun. I found myself crouching on the floor in front of my seat, few yards away from the attacker. I was later teased both publicly and privately for my reaction of ducking to the floor, which still fills me with indignation, since I was defenseless and had just heard a very urgent order to get down. I think that combination of brief terror and later ridicule contributed to my Chrysler 300 reaction, because my brain just couldn’t deal with all of it.
Second, people close to me had very different reactions. One, who had flirted with me for a while and we had briefly dated (and years later tried again), knew I was in that courtroom and was instantly texting me, then calling. Over the next days and weeks, he checked in with me regularly to ask how I was, and praised my reporting and writing. Meanwhile, the guy I was actually dating had the opposite reaction: He thought I was lucky I’d been there to get the story, and said it was mild compared to many other things. We barely talked, because he could not understand why I kept thinking about it. He thought my car counting was absurd and that I needed to just get over it.
But, third, the biggest take-away was that line: “Life is short; live it.” Three months after the courtroom attack, I was on a freeway when a truck accelerated, went up a hill, then went airborne and sailed over an overpass with a vehicle on it. Both occupants of that truck died, the driver who’d had a heart attack that caused the wreck, and his wife who awoke from a coma just long enough to learn that her husband hadn’t survived.
It took a little more than a year for me to finally listen to that line running through my head. I left the job environment that was making me unhappy, I finally broke up with that “just get over it” guy for the last time, and I decided to move to either Portland or the Bay Area. A door opened in the Bay Area, and I walked through it, never once regretting the change that meant leaving behind a 10-year career I had truly loved.
Six years later, my paternal grandfather died and my grandmother couldn’t live alone. And then my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic cancer. As I went every direction at once (thanks to the most compassionate boss), “life is short; live it” kept running through my head. My mom beat the odds, and that’s when I knew it was time to move to Portland. I finally found a way to make it happen, and though today is the courtroom attack anniversary, later this month I’ll mark two years of living in Portland. They’ve been two years of the hardest job training I’ve ever experienced, but once again, I’ve had no regrets.
A decade later, I’m still scowling at black Chrysler 300’s, and I’m still remembering 2:10 p.m. on March 4, 2009. But I’m really trying to live life. I just returned from a romp through Italy and Spain, where I ran marathon #20; I’m watching more international flights; I’m gradually making my way through each of the 50 United States; I’m mapping out road trips to Yellowstone and ocean camping; I’m begging people (and my bank account) to go to Antarctica; I’m still dreaming of qualifying for the Boston marathon despite my injury-prone self that was never supposed to run in the first place.
And I’ve also gradually been learning that I don’t need the people who ridicule me or brush me off. Yes, we usually get what we give and we shouldn’t expect anything in return, but some people can just be acquaintances while others can be true friends.
(I’ve written about this previously. Here’s the 2016 post, where I reprinted the first-hand account I wrote the night of the courtroom attack.)
