Nikyra was 18, a recent high school graduate who was starting nursing college this month.
Reggie was a 37-year-old warehouse worker and father of two sons.
Tiger was a 27-year-old Wall Street trader and former Princeton football player who was kept on life support until his family arrived to say goodbye, after which he died.
Nicole was a 28-year-old deli worker, recently promoted to manager, and mother of a four-year-old son.
Matthew, a 25-year-old Superdome worker, had dinner with his mother and the next time she saw him was at the morgue.
Before we move on to the next news cycle, which already happened the same day with news of the Musk cybertruck exploding at Trump Tower in Las Vegas, let’s remember some of the 15 victims of the New Orleans terrorist massacre.
Like many, when I woke up New Year’s Day, news of this horrific event was the first thing I saw on my phone. My daughter and her friends had spent New Year’s Eve celebrating on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, and there are no words for the horror I felt seeing no messages or social media posts from my daughter from the night before. It’s unlike Faith not to text me photos or a quick message about a fun night in a new city. She’d been wanting to visit for many years, my grandfather was born and raised in Louisiana and my mother had sent her with recommendations for local dishes—she couldn’t wait to try the jambalaya I’d grown up enjoying.
Heart-gripping panic set in immediately as I texted her, it was just before eight a.m. and I thought of not wanting to wake her, but my husband called her. Overwhelming relief came in hearing her groggy voice. She’d come in from the Bourbon Street midnight revelry at one, missing the tragic events by two hours; in fact hadn’t yet heard the news. She wanted to call her friends at the other hotel, who’d stayed out later, to check on them. We later learned they’d been much closer, and even luckier not to have been affected more directly, though the psychological impact from what they saw will never leave them.
As the day unfolded and details of the incident were revealed, I was disgusted at the immediate politicization, however unsurprising, by Trump and Fox News as they made rash racist assumptions about the terrorist mass murderer. It only served to remind me what the next four years will be like as we once again have a president who focuses not on the immeasurable grief of a situation where families lives are being irreversibly changed forever, but on some imagined political gain. This is a President who says school shooting victims will have to “get over” losing their loved ones and with gun reform now off the table, we have four more years of terrible reactions to national tragedies to endure.
I’ve never been a fan of New Year’s resolutions; expectations forever lead to disappointment. I follow a few self-care and mental health experts and see posts about choosing a “word of the year”: so I batted around a few: authenticity, creativity, perhaps serenity. I liked serenity best, but waking up on the first day of 2025, it didn’t seem like that one was going to work out; it took me half the day just to stop physically shaking. My overwhelming sense became gratitude that my daughter is okay, mixed with sadness for the mothers and families who didn’t wake up to the same news.
I hate that there’s so much tragedy that the essential task of honoring victims becomes almost impossible when there are new ones almost every day. While it seemed like serenity was a bad choice for word of the year, perhaps the importance of finding peace in small moments this year will become crucial to our mental health.
