Righteous Indignation

It Doesn't Need to be this Way

Earlier this week, like so many parents across the country, I forced my kids to pose for the requisite first day of school photographs on the front stoop of our Minneapolis home. The resulting photograph shows my boys looking less than excited to be starting the school year after their summer vacation went by all too fast. This annual tradition usually fills me with the range of typical emotions — amazement at how fast they’re growing up, excitement at what the world has in store for them and, of course, just plain elation that the first day of school is finally upon us! But looking through my pictures this year, I find myself thinking something much, much darker.

Less than a week before I coaxed my kids to pose for me, a mere five miles from our home, two young school children were killed in the Annunciation school shooting — Fletcher Merkel, 8, and Harper Moyski, 10, while attending mass with their schoolmates. Twenty-one were injured, including 18 other children. Two remain in the hospital, more than a week later. School shootings in our country have become all too common, almost to the point of feeling like another back-to-school ritual right up there with buying school supplies. I have tried to not become numb to these incidents, but admit to being desensitized to the point of examining the death tolls after each shooting and measuring my concern by the numbers.

But it hits differently when it happens in your community, in your backyard. I know this shouldn’t be the case, but it is, at least for me. And when you have kids around the same age as the victims, it’s a real gut punch. My son William will be 10-years-old in a week and his older brother Oskar just turned 15. I was glued to my computer last week following news of the shootings. My Facebook feed was filled with posts from friends who lived near the school and had direct connections. One friend heard the gunshots from her home and witnessed the resulting emergency response. One friend’s grown children attended the school and she still knew people who work there. Another friend was set to be one of the victim’s flag football coaches when practice started this week. And now, Fletcher doesn’t get the chance to meet his team. I couldn’t help thinking about this fact as I brought William to his soccer practice tonight. It hits differently when it’s in your community.

Despite my better judgement, I got sucked into a gun debate on Facebook after someone posted an insensitive meme two days following the shooting. It read — “If guns kill people, pencils misspell words, cars drive drunk, and spoons make people fat.” I just wasn’t having it. I made a comment calling out the poster, a former co-worker from some 20-years-ago, describing this viewpoint as being “shortsighted, ignorant and offensive,” and basically said his post was an insensitive “dick move.”

My comment elicited a response from a man I’ve never met who wanted to strictly blame mental health for these tragedies and claim that guns have nothing to do with it and limiting access to guns wouldn’t help with the problem. He replied so eloquently with — “take your self-righteous bullshit elsewhere . . . it’s not needed here.”

What he considers self-righteous bullshit, I consider righteous fucking indignation. After some back and forth, I came to my senses and removed myself from the conversation, a conversation with someone who most likely is living in a completely different reality than my own. I did not have the time or energy to waste and felt no good would come of it. The only common ground we seemed to find was the simple fact we both want these horrific events to come to an end, and I guess that’s something.

While it is ridiculous to think there is a single cause to the uniquely American problem of mass shootings, I like to point out mental health and easy access to assault rifles are not mutually exclusive. They are both major factors. But what sets America apart from other countries who do not have this problem? Of course, it’s the guns, our bloody love affair with guns. Making a real effort to ban assault rifles — guns designed to kill the maximum number of people in the shortest amount of time — would make these events a lot less deadly. Would they stop them entirely? Of course not. But why do we make it so damn easy for these shooters to kill so many? It doesn’t have to be this way.

Did you know firearms are the number one cause of death in children in the U.S. ages 1 to 17? That’s more than any other cause, including car crashes and cancer. Let that sink in. Have you ever wondered why it is so easy to access assault rifles in this country, yet so difficult to access mental health care? Did you know the CDC is prohibited from funding gun violence research? Research. Priorities, right? It doesn’t have to be this way.

Driving Wiliam to soccer practice tonight, past the blue and green ribbons tied around trees and light posts in honor of the Annunciation shooting victims, I think about Fletcher and how he should be at his first flag football practice. And I think about 12-year-old shooting victim Sophia Forchas, still in the hospital in critical condition, and the sweet first day of school photograph of her with her little brother Anthony, a fourth grader just like William. Instead of this photograph being a snap shot of a milestone event in their lives, it is now featured in countless news stories about the shooting. It is featured on a Go-Fund Me page for Sophia. It is etched in the minds of worried parents across the country who just want to be able to send their kids to school without worrying about their safety, without worrying the first day of school pictures they just took of their children have a similar fate.

It doesn’t need to be this way.

Dad

Grandpa Bob points out a bald eagle as it flies along the shoreline of Lake Superior.

It’s been just over a year since my dad passed away from complications of dementia. Today, June 12, 2025 would have been his 86th birthday. This Sunday is Father’s Day, the second Father’s Day without him. These are all hard truths which have, of course, been on my mind, when I’m not worrying about everything from the minutiae of daily tasks to the existential crisis of democracy in our country. Somewhere, inbetween, when I find a calm moment or two and allow my mind to go there, I’m thinking about the one and only Bob Jokinen and what it means to live on the planet in his absence.

Everyone who loses a parent deals with it in their own, personal way. There are countless variations, from the manner of the death itself to the nature of the relationship with said parent. Whatever the variation, it universally sucks, to put it bluntly. In the case of losing my dad, dementia was a slow and heartbreaking process witnessed over the course of a couple years. By the time he passed, he was not living in a manner anyone would consider quality. At the end, he was a shell of his former witty and gregarious self, progressing to the point of needing 24-hour care and being non-verbal. Even with this knowledge, and knowing he would not have wanted to be a burden on his family, it’s still very difficult to say good-bye to someone you love, someone who shaped who you are in so many ways, both profound and subtle.

Living a long distance from your loved ones and not seeing them very often, it’s easy to not do a great job of being on top of things when it comes to their health. I knew my dad was declining, but my mom was pretty good at shielding us from much of the hardship she was going through taking care of him at home. I will always feel like I was not there enough for my mom as his condition worsened and he could not be left alone. When a spot suddenly opened up in a memory care unit, I had just started a new job. I’m grateful I was still able to make a quick weekend trip home to be there and offer a little support, even if it was just my physical presence. His placement at Canal View was a great relief in so many ways, despite it feeling so wrong to take him away from his beloved home on Lake Superior with the underlying knowledge he would never be coming back home.

I returned for another short visit a couple of months before he died and it was one of the toughest experiences I have known. I went to Canal View alone, leaving Oskar and William with Grandma Betty, and I’ll always be grateful for that decision. I am also grateful for this one last visit, as hard as it was to see him in his diminished state. In many ways, the experience made it easier to say good-bye and let go after he died.

My dad was 35-years-old when I was born and died just short of his 85th birthday. We had nearly fifty years together. Maybe I’m terribly selfish as I could have really used another 50 years. I wrote about that final visit shortly after it happened and held the following piece of writing close to my heart over the past year. But, I want to share it here now, as it serves as a good reminder to hold your loved ones close and appreciate the time you have together. It all goes by way too damn fast.

April 2, 2024

I was struck this morning by the difference between watching my 84-year-old father sleeping in his memory care unit room and watching my 8-year-old son sleeping on a twin mattress on the floor of my mother’s sewing room. It’s far greater than the 76 year difference in age.

My father is slowly dying from dementia and upon visiting this past weekend, I’m stunned by how diminished he has become. His body is skeletal, his cheeks hollow. When I first arrive he is awake and trying to take off one sock, his arms shaking as he struggles to do this simple task. He does not know who I am, does not acknowledge my presence and is overall unaware I’m there. The one-on-one nurse is at his side trying to convince him to keep his socks on. Apparently before I arrived he had been trying to take his pants off, for no apparent reason.

The nurse takes my arrival as a chance for her to go on break. It’s my first visit in three months, since I visited at Christmas, and I’m not all that keen on her leaving, as I don’t know what my dad is capable of and not capable of doing. It’s obvious he’s interested in getting up, but he doesn’t know who I am and cannot communicate verbally. He’s shaking and trying to get upright and I am alone with him, not quite knowing what to do. I’m still stunned by how he looks and am forcing back tears.

It’s Easter Sunday and an aide stops by his room. She’s dressed up for the holiday to entertain residents, wearing a pink top hat with bunny ears. She’s cheerful, and senses my discomfort, but says she’s just an aide and doesn’t quite know what to do about my dad’s insistence on standing. She tries to get some kind of support belt around him and I try to convince him to stay put on the bed, until someone more qualified to help comes back. At this point, he thankfully seems to give up on the idea of getting up and lays back down in his bed. The aide helps make him more comfortable, adjusts his blanket, and he turns away from me, laying on his side toward the wall.

Through it all, he looks miserable. I’m still struck by his face, the hollowed out cheeks, his mouth agape in a contorted manner that reminds me a bit too much of the Edvard Munch painting The Scream. He does not look like my father, the gregarious guy who always had so many stories to share and loved to talk. The man who should be sitting down in his Lazy Boy recliner with a bowl of his favorite ice cream covered with Hersey’s syrup, ready to watch the evening news on television. The man who loves Lake Superior and living at his lakeshore home. That man has been gone for quite awhile now and I miss him dearly. His body is left here hanging on, but my dad, he’s no longer with us.

For the next 40 minutes or so I sit by his side reading a novel and waiting to see if he wakes up. The television that’s bolted to the wall overhead behind me is playing the movie, “Pretty Woman,” on cable, complete with commercials. The subtitles are on. I wonder if the nurse had been watching it before I arrived. I know the movie well and between my reading, and watching my father sleep, I take in a scene or two from the movie. Julia Roberts’ character Vivian walks into the fancy boutique that wouldn’t serve her when she was dressed in her hooker outfit, and lets the bitchy sales woman know she made a big mistake - huge! A bit later she’s in the bathtub with Richard Gere’s Edward, offering up some therapy via her long legs. My familiarity with the movie serves as a good distraction from the sad and heartbreaking reality of seeing my father in his current state.

My Grandma Norma always referred to my dad as her little boy. I think about how sad Grandma Norma would be to see her little boy this way. He was a good son to her, always talking to her on the phone and cutting her grass in the summer, shoveling her snow in the winter. I’m not religious, but I still take comfort in the idea of her watching over him and welcoming him to the otherside when the time comes.

The next morning I’m up early and can’t fall back asleep. Instead I watch my little boy, my William, peacefully sleeping as the dawn’s early light filters into the room. I listen to his soft, even breathing and I think back to my poor father in his bed, so twisted. My father, my son - and here I am in the middle. Seventy-six years separate them — a whole lifetime. I think about all the ways my dad has influenced me throughout my life and I think about all the ways I have and will influence William's life. I hold out hope that I can do half as well as my dad did, because if I can, I consider that a big win.