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On Monday evening, the husband and I were watching television as I was winding down from the holiday weekend. We were watching Trauma, a new show on NBC about EMTs and the emergencies from the patients/victims’ point of view as well. My husband, being a volunteer with our local EMT crew, had seen the show, and was going on to me about the characters and plot lines. I listened in and out as I grew drowsy towards bedtime.

Then one of the scenes opens in an office building, with typical cubicles and receptionists and phones ringing. A man enters, asks to see the boss, then pulls out a gun and begins firing. In an instant, I was no longer drowsy. I was in the midst of a full-blown panic attack. I froze, felt my pupils dilate, couldn’t breathe. Soon I began to hyperventilate and sob. It took my husband a few minutes to figure out what was happening, and then a minute more to figure out why. It was just six months ago that just this kind of thing happened right across the street from me.

The headlines have long since faded, even here. The news vans which overtook our small city for that horrible week in April have all gone on to some other tragedy or sensational story. We’re not the front page of any national coverage anymore, which is just fine by me. But what the headlines miss, what no one seems to talk about, is what’s left behind. Here it is, six months gone, and I still can’t watch indiscriminate violence on television or a movie without feeling some level of panic. I still have to look out that same classroom window from which I could see the SWAT and FBI vans and ambulances pull up, and on cool, rainy days, I have to fight to keep the flashbacks at bay. More significantly, this past Eid-ul-Fitr, one of the most joyful days on the Islamic calendar, I hugged Parveen Ali’s mother as she made a futile attempt to smile on the first Eid day without her daughter. And as I hugged her, I cried myself, because I can still hear her wailing at her daughter’s funeral. Today, I presented my annual Day of the Dead project to my students, and I was all too aware of the discomfort of my usually light-hearted student who lost his grandmother that awful day.

This is what remains. Our community suffered the loss of fourteen lives, but countless other lives have been shaken, and some shattered. The headlines have moved on to the latest sensation, our shows and movies continue to get their plot lines from these same headlines, and millions are enthralled and entertained. I’m just as guilty as anyone on this. But in the meantime, those of us who are left behind are left to try to pick up the pieces.