Dodger Thoughts

APChristina-Taylor Green

On the morning of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords’ emotional resignation from the House, I checked in on the website in memory of Christina-Taylor Green, Dodger scout John Green’s 9-year-old daughter who died in the mass shooting that severely wounded Giffords.

Here’s what the memorial foundation has been up to:

At the time The Christina-Taylor Green Memorial Foundation (C-TGMF) was being formed, The Community Foundation for Southern Arizona (CFSA) held funds in Christina-Taylor’s name. CFSA provided a way to capture the outpouring of love that we felt from our community, many other parts of the nation, and the world.

As CFSA handled the financial oversight of the donations, they provided time for the new foundation to define its mission and initial goals. Before the Christina-Taylor Green Memorial Foundation’s 501c3 status was finalized, CFSA funded several projects, including upgrading the technology at Mesa Verde Elementary and Cross Middle schools with SMART Boards, Physical Education equipment, computers and arts programs.

In conjunction with The Allstate Foundation, The Christina-Taylor Green Little Hands Playground was built at Mesa Verde Elementary School, an outdoor space open to students and to neighborhood residents.

Several other contributors participated in the completion of the playground. Community volunteers provided help with construction. Donations were provided by The Little Tikes Corporation, The Sundt Foundation and The JohnJay and Rich Care For Kids Foundation. The Injury Free Coalition for Kids at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health also partnered on building the project by, among other things, getting design ideas for the nearly 2,000-square-foot play area from Christina-Taylor’s classmates. For details about the playground and its dedication, read more at AZStarnet.

Before school started in August, our foundation partnered with Tierra Antigua Real Estate to collect school supplies and backpacks. Hollaway Elementary and Drexel Elementary schools were the recipients of these items.

“Stuff the Hummers”, our last project of 2011, was a huge success. C-TGMF partnered with Team up for Tucson to benefit The Salvation Army in their annual toy collection for Tucson area children in need. Not only did we surpass all goals for toys donated,  we also collected 125 bikes, setting a new record of 10,000 toys/bikes.  Our foundation and its volunteers look forward to a long term partnership with Team up for Tucson in hopes of breaking records every year so we can continue to help our local Salvation Army provide toys for needy children in the Tucson Area.

The C-TGMF will be issuing a call for Grant Proposals in the spring of 2012, and we hope to fund multiple small projects. The goal is to give out approximately $50,000 in grant money for projects that will help carry out the mission of the foundation:

The mission of the Christina-Taylor Green Memorial Foundation is to honor the life and memory of Christina-Taylor through charitable and educational projects that reflect and embody her interests, values and dreams.

Earlier this month, on the anniversary of the shooting, Karina Bland of the Arizona Republic wrote movingly about Christina’s survivors, including mother Roxanna and friend Suzi Hileman, who had taken Christina to meet Giffords.

… “Suzi is a dear friend and neighbor,” Green says. “I want Suzi to heal. I don’t want to bring any more sadness to her.”

Each woman has a strong network of friends, but they circle back to one another. A glass of wine. Coffee. Lunch. They live blocks apart.

At times when Green wants to cry, or shout, or rant without someone hushing her, or trying to fix what is upsetting her, she turns to Hileman: “If I need to whine, I go to her house.” Hileman does the same.

There is no comforting them: Christina-Taylor is dead, and nothing anyone can do can change that.

“We both get it because we both went through it,” Green says.

A year later, Green still cries most days. Time hasn’t changed that. …

Here are some pictures of Christina.

Just after 7 a.m. Tuesday, I got in my car for a three-minute drive to our neighborhood bagel store. As I moved into the left-turn lane, a many-wheeled truck was lolling the opposite direction past the driveway of the mini-mall parking lot. And then, just as I began to make my left turn, the truck driver suddenly put his truck into reverse, blocking the driveway before I could get through.

I was on the wrong side of the street, perpendicular to traffic, with nowhere to go and a car coming at me at regular speed from about 75 yards away.

I threw my car into reverse in the middle of the boulevard to get out of the oncoming car’s way, and lived to breathe for another day.

* * *

Today in Tucson, the Dodgers and Diamondbacks will gather to play a baseball game in memory of those killed in the January 8 mass shooting in Tucson and to raise money for the Tucson Together Fund, sanctioned to assist victims, families and witnesses of tragedy.

Spirits will be heightened, but I imagine they will also be high. They’ve wrapped this day around a game, after all. It’s going to be a day where life is celebrated, even in death’s immense shadow.

The best antidote to sadness is the argument that things will get better, and short of that, to find happiness in the moments that follow, and short of that, to just find meaning. But there’s no throwing tragedy into reverse. The players and the fans will go home, will go on with their lives. The survivors will go forward into their suffering. They walk a different path.

* * *

My first depression of note came when I was in college, though it was mild by any serious standard. It was over a girl, a girl I never really had but just seemed so perfect. No, not so perfect, but so right. And in order to make sense of why she didn’t want me, I started weighing the conclusion that there might be no reason anyone would want me.

Over the next couple of years, the stakes seemed to increase. I dated, but there would be times a girl would reject me and it would just devastate me, and I truly, truly feared that I was going to spend my life alone. My biggest breakup of all, in my mid-20s, pulverized me.  I walked through life with a constant weight in my head for a couple of years. I bought books on depression. I sought therapy. It felt like the end of the world, and yet this was with the full knowledge that no one had died. It seemed so likely to me that things would be worse before they would get better.

People told me that I was being too negative. “You’re a good person. You’ll be fine.” I just had to rebuild my self-esteem, they said. I had to like myself again before anyone else could like me. But they didn’t know. They didn’t know like I did.

Each miserable day seemed eternal, and yet within five years, I did rebuild, and I met the woman I would marry.

You’d think that have taught me a lesson but good, but I can still struggle with a positive outlook, to this day. Despite my best efforts, my household outlives its means, and I cannot seem to find a solution. It weighs on me repeatedly. It doesn’t mean I don’t have happy days in between, but I do worry. My self-esteem rises and falls like the Dow.

Still, people can tell me things will get better, and they might be right.

What are those who lost loved ones in the Tucson tragedy told? What do they tell themselves?

As the Dodgers play baseball in his daughter’s memory, what is Dodger scout John Green to think?

Do they say to live each day in honor of your lost love? Do they say to just live?

This is not a self-esteem issue. The man lost his little girl. There is no going back from that.

And this happens every day, every hour, every minute. I know it has happened to readers of Dodger Thoughts.

It takes a special person to be able to survive this kind of loss. I don’t feel that I’m special in that way. But somehow people are?

I thought about this post as I kissed my daughter goodnight on her forehead last night. I wish I were going to be at today’s game.

* * *

Dodgers at Diamondbacks, 1:05 p.m.