Anyone passing the “Narrows Room” at our Gig Harbor, Washington hotel would have seen the sign outside:
A National Gathering for Those Impacted by Homicide.
Had they paused outside the doors, however, they might have heard something unexpected coming from behind the double doors: a roomful of homicide survivors laughing loudly.
We were doing an exercise called “Put It in the B.S. Box.” Participants were invited to write down some of the offensive, untrue or thoroughly worn-out remarks people had made to us following the murder of someone we loved. Each one was then read aloud.
Someone had submitted a remark many of us had heard before in one form or another:
“I get it. My dog died. I know just how you feel.”
The room erupted in unified laughter.
Of course, it was not laughter at the death of a beloved animal. Hardly. Many of us have loved and grieved animals deeply. Instead it was the laughter of instant recognition—the release that comes when nobody needs an explanation of why a comparison is so spectacularly inadequate.
Liberty, my very competent conference co-leader, looked toward the hallway and said, “Imagine someone walking by, seeing our sign out in the hallway and hearing us all in here laughing.”
That made us laugh even harder.
Those moments of laughter were as much a part of the Aftermath Conference as the tears.
People gathered from North Carolina, Oregon, Colorado and California, as well as communities across Washington State. They arrived at very different points in the aftermath of homicide. Some were preparing to go to court. Others were facing parole proceedings for the person convicted of killing their loved one. Some were still confronting legal systems, unanswered questions and the bewildering early landscape of traumatic grief.
And some of us were more than forty years beyond the murder.
I have lived much longer without my first husband than I ever lived with him. His murder occurred sometime around July 13, 1985. Time has changed the shape of my grief, but it has not erased the event or its consequences. A homicide does not end when the crime scene is cleared, the trial concludes or public attention moves elsewhere. Its effects continue through families and across decades. It lasts a lifetime.
That long aftermath was precisely why we gathered.
The conference included survivors, advocates, authors and professionals, but those categories often overlapped. People did not enter the room simply as recipients of information. They brought hard-earned wisdom of their own. They asked questions, exchanged books, told stories and recognized parts of themselves in one another.
The times set aside for questions were never met with silence. Quite the opposite.
People were moved to tears more than once, yet no ever felt the need to leave the room to regain control. That does not mean the subjects were easy or the emotions restrained. It means the room was able to hold them.
We sometimes misunderstand emotional safety as the absence of strong emotion. But a safe gathering is not one in which nobody cries. It is one in which people can cry without becoming a problem to be managed. It is a place where sorrow does not embarrass others, where silence need not be hurried away, and where laughter does not have to be defended.
In ordinary life, homicide survivors frequently find themselves monitoring other people’s comfort. We learn that certain details are considered too disturbing, that our grief has lasted too long or that our anger makes others uneasy. We edit what we say. Well-intentioned people may offer clichés because they feel compelled to say something—anything—that will close the distance between our experience and theirs.
Inside the Narrows Room, we did not have to translate ourselves.
No one had to explain why an approaching court date could feel terrifying. No one had to justify the dread of a parole hearing or explain why the possibility of release can reopen wounds after decades. No one had to defend remembering a loved one forty years later. No one had to apologize for experiencing the rawness of an anniversary reaction.
We were not all in the same place. That mattered. It provided a way for the “veterans” to pay it forward.
Someone facing the courtroom for the first time could sit beside someone who had survived the trial, sentencing, appeals and years of living afterward. Those further along could not promise that everything would become easy. We could offer something more honest: evidence that a life can continue, that joy can return without betraying the dead, and that grief can change without requiring us to relinquish love.
Those nearer the beginning of the homicide ordeal reminded the rest of us of our own early bewilderment. It was real. It was exhausting. It was inevitable.
Time can create distance, but it should never create amnesia about what the beginning demanded of us.
Over the course of the conference, books, survival tips and contact information passed from hand to hand. Conversations continued over meals and in hallways. People who had arrived as strangers began building connections that I hope will endure well beyond one weekend.
Not everything placed on paper that weekend went into the B.S. Box.
In another exercise, participants wrote letters to their future selves. They could write about something important they had learned, a goal, an insight or simply a wish. They sealed their letters and allowed them to be collected. In March 2027, they will be mailed back to the people who wrote them.
There was something quietly hopeful in that act. Homicide forces us to divide life into before and after. Writing those letters asked us to imagine another point on the timeline—not merely the aftermath we had survived, but a future self who would still be here to open an envelope.
They were like messages in a bottle. Historically sailors used this method as a way to send messages to loved ones, to document their survival hopes, as a memorial of a moment in time, or to take away hurt they no longer wanted. Messages in a bottle conveys the idea that there is something out there which may change our present circumstances for the better. It was a way of saying “There’s more of my story ahead.” It invites hope.
It is my hope that opening those future letters will perpetuate the best qualities of the conference: the feeling of being accepted, a heightened sense of clarity, an awarness of not being alone in this nightmare.
We cannot know what the intervening months will bring. Court proceedings might conclude or continue. Another holiday season will pass for better or for worse. Parole decisions might be made. Grief might shift again. A goal might be reached, revised or abandoned. But each sealed envelope also carried an assumption worth making: There is more of my story ahead.
At a beautiful restaurant dinner, I had quietly prepared myself to cover the bill. Before I could, someone else did. That gesture seemed to capture the spirit of the gathering: someone saw what needed carrying and chose to carry it.
By the conference’s end, I was exhausted but happy. I was ready to go home, sleep under my own roof and allow the experience to settle. Conferences can be measured by attendance figures, schedules, presentations and evaluations. Those things matter, but they cannot fully measure what occurred in that room or in the minds and hearts of the participants.
How do we quantify the moment someone realizes, perhaps for the first time, that they are not grieving incorrectly? That it takes as long as it takes.
How do we record the relief of meeting another person who understands the approach of a parole hearing?
How do we count the questions finally asked, the books exchanged, the private conversations or the laughter that escaped into a hotel hallway?
For two days, people at vastly different points in the aftermath of homicide entered the same room. We brought different histories, different losses and different burdens. Nothing that happened there could undo a murder or restore the person whose absence brought each of us through those doors.
But inside the Narrows Room, the aftermath became something we could speak about honestly.
We cried because it was safe to do so.
We laughed because, for once, everyone understood we were one faced with the absurdity of a culture who does not know how to support us.
And although none of our burdens disappeared, for a little while, none of us had to carry them alone.
