Had lunch last week with my old boss at Youth Alive (YA), Lauren Greenberg. Lauren is Director of Development and Communications there, and lately has been thinking about the best ways to express the true meaning of the healing programs at YA -- particularly counseling and homicide response -- but also to explain their roles in increasing community safety.
This is a thing I think about a lot as I write about the founder of YA’s healing program The Khadafy Washington Project (KWP), Marilyn Washington Harris. Staff in KWP step in to the immediate aftermath of homicides in Oakland to provide emotional and practical support to shocked, traumatized, dazed survivors of the killed. Marilyn began doing this work mere months after her only son, Khadafy Washington, was killed in Oakland, at age 18, back in the year 2000.
I am writing a book about Marilyn and her brilliant idea to help otherwise neglected – no -- otherwise deserted families in their darkest times. She began in obscurity, reaching out to families to offer help, working with a small group of volunteers. Today she is an icon of healing and justice in Oakland and still works with families as a staffer in KWP.
As I research and write the book, I think a lot about what is the essence of her project, her work, her calling, her mission. At its core is Faith. Faith is what sustains her and guides her every step in life. Faith and prayer are what brought her to the work in the very beginning. But what is the essence of what she and KWP deliver? And what, in the eyes of survivors, characterizes the work of Marilyn and the other crisis responders in KWP.
A perfect blending of compassion and competence
They bring an element of surprise. One thing I have learned from Marilyn and the others is that survivors are often surprised when anyone at all shows up to offer them help, but especially when the person who shows up demonstrates a perfect mixture of compassion and competence. That’s KWP. Its crisis responders would simply be unable to do the painful work they do if they were not individuals who are filled with compassion for their fellow humans experiencing the deepest distress.
They bring into homes infused with a thick, mixed cloud of trauma, fear and anger a perfect combination of compassion and competence. When they appear, they have come to do business, to help you move forward with dignity in the often-dehumanizing process of being a survivor of a homicide victim, forced suddenly to deal with police, media, mortuaries, government bureaucracies, not to mention the whispers and the stares. Imagine the best kind of human tech support, where your questions are understood, where some are answered before even they are asked, where you are not only shown what to do, but given tools to help yourself moving forward. In this case, those tools can be as simple as a notepad and pen to write everything down, as your brain will not be at full capacity, or bottled water to keep you hydrated, as so many survivors forget to care for themselves, or forgo caring for themselves.
An exchange, love for hate
Before Marilyn and the other KWP crisis responders step into the room, into the home, hate often dominates within. There is, for survivors, in the roiling hours after the rumor of a loved-one’s gunning down becomes fact, a feeling of hate descending, of being hated, a sense that the hate that the killer felt for your son extends to you. After all, you are the victim as much as, if not more so, than the deceased. They are dead, done, at peace, maybe even in heaven. You will live with this. There is also, often, in the hearts of the survivors, a kind-of outward-flowing hatred for the killer and for the world that took away their loved one. That is, hate will have its echo. It musters its own seemingly unstoppable momentum after violence. In the violence prevention community it is often said that unhealed trauma is a virus that leads to further violence, that hurt people hurt people. I would not disagree. I would simply add that hate kills.
A moment of love can change the word
But a moment of unexpected love can change the world; the mere presence of love in the surreal cloud of homicide grief, amidst the darkness and the glare, where it really stands out, interrupts the momentum of hate. Like a quaking thunderclap in the night (but it's gentler than that of course), the surprise of love shocks a mourner to distraction. It’s bracing. A moment of love lowers temperatures long enough for a person to consider the ramifications of retaliation, long enough to reconsider. Perhaps it even gives them a reason to reconsider. KWP crisis responders are interrupters of hate. They are not only savers of the lives of the living; they prevent retaliation. They deliver love.
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