July 8, 2025 • 54 mins
When Delaney Tarr survived the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, her life split in two. One part became instantly visible: the fiery, articulate youth activist who co-founded March for Our Lives and stood on national stages demanding change. The other part—quieter, more complicated—was still inside the girl who had to hide in a closet and text her parents goodbye while her classmates were being murdered.
In this raw and fiercely poetic episode of Alive Again, Delaney recounts her experience in two acts: a spellbinding live performance at Write Club Atlanta, followed by an intimate studio conversation. With striking metaphors—like the lifecycle of a fig or the stench of rotting flowers—Delaney reflects on trauma, identity, media scrutiny, and the strange burden of becoming a symbol before she had time to grieve.
And just weeks after recording this, Delaney’s younger sister survived a school shooting of her own, echoing the tragedy that upended Delaney’s life nearly seven years earlier. The cycle continues. But so does Delaney.
This is not just a story about surviving a mass shooting—it's about the rot that remains, the uncomfortable beauty in grief, and what it means to carry a cause through years of transformation.
Story producer: Nicholas Tecosky
Learn More:
Delaney is a freelance writer, reporter, and photographer based in Atlanta, GA. You can explore her work and advocacy at delaneytarr.wordpress.com
You can follow Delaney on Instagram and X: @delaneytarr
To find out more about March for Our Lives and to support the movement: marchforourlives.com
* If you have a transformative near-death experience to share, we’d love to hear your story. Please email us at aliveagainproject@gmail.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
My name is Delaney Tarr. I am a former student
activist who co founded a gun violence prevention organization called
March for Our Lives after the shooting at my high
school in Parkland, Florida, on February fourteenth, twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts
of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were
forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand
accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.
Our mission is simple, find and explore and share these
(00:54):
stories to remind us all of our shared human condition.
Please keep in mind these stories are true and maybe
triggering for some well listener, and discretion is advised everyone.
Before we begin today's episode, I wanted to tell you
about a very special segment that you're about to hear.
Nicholas Takoski, one of our story producers here at Live
(01:14):
Again and the longtime host of Write Club Atlanta, invited
today's guest, Delaney Tarr, to perform her story before a
live audience at one of their recent events. Right Club
is very special and the stories are always very intimate.
Delaney Tarr is a journalist, activist, and one of the
original founders of March for Our Lives. She's a survivor
of the twenty eighteen Parkland school shooting at Marjorie Stoneman
(01:37):
Douglas High School. She became one of the most visible
young voices fighting for gun violence prevention in America. Since then,
she's carried the weight of that experience into her activism
and storytelling. But recently something happened that reframed everything. Just
weeks ago, Delaney's younger sister survived a school shooting of
her own, this time it was Florida State University. In
(01:57):
a heartbreaking Instagram post, Delaney reflected on the two thousand,
six hundred and nineteen days that had passed between her
school shooting and her sisters quote, I keep rolling it
over in my head. The mirror image hiding out in
a closet in twenty eighteen, texting my parents, my sister
hiding out in a dorm room in twenty twenty five,
texting the family group chat. The anger, the pain, the fear.
(02:21):
It's also familiar. She's going through it All end quote.
So this episode is not only about survival, It's about grief.
It's about advocacy and the heartbreak of watching history repeat
itself in the life of someone you love. After this
live segment, will return to the studio for a deeper
conversation with Delaney, one that explores how activism shapes grief,
(02:43):
how her life has evolved since Parkland, and how she
continues to navigate the complexities of survival and advocacy. What
you're about to hear is Delaney's powerful, unfiltered reading on stage.
It's a rare and intimate moment that gives voice to
her experience.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Why do you know how a fig is formed?
Speaker 3 (03:10):
I'll tell you it's pretty nasty.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
See.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
The fruit is a stem that has flowers inside, little
tiny flowers. Those flowers amid a tantalizing smell, ready for
pollen that draws female wasps in Desperate to get to
the flowers. The wasp crawls through a teeny little hole,
loses her wings, her antenna, mutilates herself, lays her eggs,
pollinates the plant, and dies. As the dead mother wasp
(03:37):
rots inside that fig, her eggs hatch the male bugs
small no wings, find the females and mate with them.
It's incestrous because they're so little and flightless. The men
die inside their final resting place, right next to mother.
It's only the fertilized females who ever leave pollen, prepared
to find another fig and begin the process again. Because
(04:00):
of that fig is my favorite fruit. Every time I
bite into that soft flesh and taste those mealy, pink insides,
I think of the rotting wasp, a little decay, That
doomed partnership made something so divine. The story of the
fig doesn't resonate with everyone. On a mixed audience hike
(04:26):
through the rainforest of Costa Rica with my family and
some British tourists, a guide stopped at a massive tree
ready for a gotcha?
Speaker 3 (04:34):
Does anybody know how the fig is formed? With glee?
My hands shut up?
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Dead wasp, Dead wasp, I announced, always a teacher's pet.
My mother glanced at me with her through her sweat
trip brow.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
What's wrong with you?
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Ourn't? Your friends avoided me for the rest of the trip,
less charmed by my fun fact than I expected, But
perhaps they weren't prepared to confront the gruesome dirty truth
of the beautiful fruit. After all, it's a natural aphrodisiac,
not what many associate with dead bugs, but I love it.
When my high school got shot up in twenty eighteen,
(05:13):
a wound formed in our town. Literal people died, but
the community was changed. Everyone streamed in to fill that gap.
They wanted to help, or maybe they just wanted to.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Be a part of the hubbub.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Crowds parked right at the entrance of my now alma
mater to cry more and show their hurt at everything.
School was shut down, obviously, and there was no real
morning place, so right there in front of the bike
racks where we scheduled all of our fistfights, it became
a shrine. We had a gaping, painful hole where the
world used to be. To fix it, they laced public's
(05:48):
plastic wrapped flowers into the chain link fence. When that
got too full, they stacked up vases full of carnations,
roses and Valentine's Day discount bouquets anywhere they could fill
each new edition and helped a little bit more. I
took some pictures at the start. I studied what everyone left,
seeing if they splurged on the good roses, or if
they just used their leftovers. I didn't care much for
(06:11):
those flowers. I like to make my own bouquets. The
spray roses from my girlfriend's gift that year were still
drying on my dresser. But as the days passed, the
mountain of flowers only grew, transforming our eerily quiet campus
into some pastiche of tragedy. After a week, the Florida
sun had baked it all down into remains. Stems had
melted into mush, and the petals had crisped up. And
(06:33):
they really don't tell you how a flower smells once
it's done being pretty. The smell climbed into our noses
at one hundred yards and reminded you of exactly why
the bouquets were there. The blood was still inside the building.
Nothing felt more alive, but the pretty was supposed to
fix the rot. The pretty decayed until it permeated, and
that's when I started to like it. The rot was
(06:56):
the only thing that I could accept. It felt familiar,
and it matched what I was feeling gnawing deep inside me,
like I was also decomposing. Yeah, it's cliche, but we
all were, couldn't they see it. I developed a hobby.
I've had a long overactive imagination and an affinity for horror,
the Boogeyman lurking in the shadows, and knowledge was a comfort.
(07:16):
I grew up on an Internet where you had fifty
percent chance of seeing a video of someone's graphic death
anytime you logged on, and sometimes it felt like I
was extra prepared for our real life nightmare. So I
started watching sped up videos of animals decomposing.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
I cope.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
I've never been a religious person, so the question of
what happens when we die was a pretty practical one
for me, and I needed it answered.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
There's catharsis in decomposition.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
It's not evil that the flesh begins to sag and
slough away, that the ants and maggots feast with glee,
raising down the eyes and testin's muscle on a squirrel, bird, lizard,
whatever it might be, it doesn't look too different from
eating a bone in chicken wing when you think about it.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
In those videos, though.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Death is just a step, a part of the process
once living things break down into phosphorus, potassium, and carbon
for the soil that becomes life anew. Nobody's wrong not
the ant, the maggot, or the bacteria that break it down,
and nobody's hiding from it. Back in the real world,
everybody wanted to didn't want to take off that rotting
safety blanket. When the shrines would leave, school would reopen,
(08:26):
life would go on, and it would be just another
step in the process as we became something new.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
But it was unavoidable.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Eventually, some stranger cleared off the sidewalk, picked the mushy
stems out of the fence. Students built a garden, planted
flowers that wouldn't die, fertilized with soil rich in all
those carcass goodies. We spent so long hiding from the wound, though,
that it had festered. The stink of it came out,
and people got nasty, They got mean, community came crashing down,
(08:56):
and factions took its place.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
I had never felt more removed from it all. Now.
Rotten things are my solace.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
When someone tells me they're deep dark, that thing clawing
up their throat and scratching at their brain.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
I trust it. It's real.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
My friends and I we like to say that we
rot in bed, or that our look of the day
is rotted like a shuffling corpse.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
I study it.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
I leave my produce in the fridge way past an
ok point until I have to slam the door shut
just to trap a sent inside. I let my bouquets
sit on the table so I can gaze at them
while I eat, watching the whites turn brown and the
buds turn down to the ground. And when it's unbearable,
I scrub it all down. I fill the trash with
truly heinous sense. Rotto disparagus can clear a room, and
I make it clean. And just like that, I've done
(09:44):
my step. I save some things, the crispy petals, the
barely trimmed herbs. I make it new, and I make
it beautiful again.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
My name is Delane Uitar.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
I am a former student activist who co founded a
gun violence prevention organization called March for Our Lives after
the shooting at my high school in Parkland, Florida, on
February fourteenth, twenty eighteen.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
I was a.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Senior in high school at the time, and interestingly enough,
I was, you know, kind of at that crux in
your life where you're looking at colleges.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
Trying to figure out what the rest of your life
is going to look like.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
I had been toying with journalism and film as my
two main options.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
Throughout all of high school.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
I had been in TV production and newspaper, which were
these groups where I was, you know, producing student news
but also producing student films. So pretty care free on
that front.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
And I'm from South Florida.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
So it's a very beachy, a little bit idyllic lifestyle,
not perfect, but definitely pretty normal teenage life that I
was living. It didn't feel idyllic then now it does,
but that's what I remember. So the vibe at Marjorie
Stone and Douglas High School is massive and wealthy are
(11:08):
the two main ways that I would characterize the school.
But it was a really huge school that could swallow
you up. But yeah, very classically like open campus Florida style.
Everything is outdoors and there's very few indoor hallways. I
have a distinct memory of a couple of weeks before
the shooting talking to my mom about where I would
(11:29):
hide if there was a shooting. I had so that
I would hide in the trash cans outside. So it
was February fourteenth, it was Valentine's Day. I remember putting
on my cute little romper that my mom had bought
me from Target and some sandals. I had made bouquets
for all my friends in little Mason jars. You know,
I wanted to do something sweet. And I also really
loved Valentine's Day for the kitsch of it all.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
The actual day.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Itself, like leading up to that was a blur because
Valentine's Day was not a real day for classes. None
of us paid attention, none of us cared. So about
two ish pm, we were in Newspaper, which was my
last class of the day, and I was hanging out
with my friends. We were watching videos, sitting on the
beanback chairs in the classroom, hanging out, you know, not serious,
watching vines, I think, like fine compilations on YouTube. So
(12:14):
it was, you know, a pretty normal day as far
as that goes, just a.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Very unseerious day of school.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
And I had worked later that day, so it was
kind of like leading up to like, Okay, I got
to get off school, go to Tilly's, texting my mom
bout my shift at Tilly's.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
My damn, I have to work on a holiday. That's stupid.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
And we were supposed to have like a fancy Italian dinner.
My dad was making my favorite pasta for dinner, so it.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
Was going to be like a cute night.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
But yeah, at about two something PM, I don't remember
the exact time. I always have to ask my friends
this one because I forget it. But towards the end
of the school day, we heard an alarm go off.
And we had been told in the months prior that
there would be some school shooter drills that we're going
to be super realistic.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
So we heard the drill go off. Oh my god,
that's so stupid. We have to evacuate so.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Close to the end of the school day when we
had like twenty minutes left. So we walked down this
little stairwell to go down to the first floor. Halfway
down the stairwell, I start hearing screams, which is weird,
and everybody starts panicking because we're seeing like very authentic
screams coming from like down in the other direction. So
half of us kind of get pushed back up the
stairs and into that classroom.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
The other half of the class we don't know where
they go.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
They did not make it back upstairs because it was
just find the nearest classroom. So we get up to
the second floor. Our journalism teacher corrals us all into
the classroom and we sit up against the wall, crouched down.
I am confused. I think I still at that time,
was convinced that it was a shooter.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Jel.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
I was like, Wow, this is a really realistic shooter.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Dril.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
This is very strange what is going on?
Speaker 2 (13:51):
And the people around me are panicking, you know, So
I'm trying to calm everyone down, like, Okay, let's not cry,
let's be quiet just in case.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Like let's but we're sitting there.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Against the wall that is like on the hallway, so
like our backs are to the hallway. Essentially, our teacher
makes an executive decision to take us into the storage
closet where we keep all of the photography equipment.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
So I don't know how many.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Of us, probably like ten twelve of us really quickly
stand up, have to run across because the door has
a window, and there's windows on the other side of
the classroom, so we sprint across to make sure that
nobody can see us, just in case, and we get
in the closet and I don't know how long we
were in the closet for.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Probably at least an hour.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
But some of the things I remember most were I
was close to the door with my teacher, was crammed
in there. I was texting everyone. One of my friends
called me because he had been on campus earlier that day.
He called me a panicked and I was like, please
don't text me. I remember texting my boss going, hey,
I actually can't make it into my shift today. I'm
(14:56):
currently hiding because there's a shooting at my school. He said,
don't worry about it. And I think about that a lot,
because what was he supposed to say. My mom is
texting me updates because the news is reporting on it
at this point, and like, I'm on Twitter some but
I don't want to be on social media too much
because my phone is dying.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
We're all realizing.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
We're like, oh my god, who could it be? Because
we know it's real. At this point, we all turn
off our Snapchat locations. That's like the first thing, because
Snapchat has a map feature where it tells you where
someone is, and we don't know who this could be.
We had theories about, like, Okay, which kid.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
Do we think maybe he did a shooting?
Speaker 2 (15:31):
We're like, oh my god, does he have a snapchat,
and it was for some reason we assume to he,
you know, for many reasons.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
We assumed it was a he.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
So we were in there, like everybody's kind of realizing
things at the same moment, finding out news at the
same moment, and everybody's kind of shouting out like, oh
my god, there's this many people dead.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Oh my god, he's.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
Over here, Like we don't know what is and isn't
true at this point in time, because some people are
getting it from their friends texting from the other side
of school, some people are getting it from news helicopters,
some people are getting it from their parents, and it's
just like all this influx of information, and I can
tell that it's making people freak out more so one
(16:06):
of my friends is having like several panic attacks in
the back of the closet. Somebody else is like crying,
and this one girl keeps like a nounce and she's like,
oh my god, I think there's more people dead.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
And I think I feel bad because.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
I did dick out on my iro on her because
I was like, if you don't shut the fuck up,
I'm gonna slap you. You are not helping the situation.
Everybody was freaking out. So my way of handling it
was locked down, no feelings, keep my composure because everyone
else is having a meltdown. I want to be as
(16:35):
solid as possible. My phone is dying, which I'm very
acutely aware of the fact that I'm like, Okay, what's
gonna happen, So I like text my mom, I love
you if anything happens, and like text my dad and
my sister. I'm like, just in case, I want to
cover my bases. I don't want our last text to
be stupid. My mom joking about like, don't fart in there,
which she did because she was trying to add brevity
to the situation, which maybe wasn't the right move, but
also like, what is the right move when your daughter's
(16:57):
in a school shooter situation?
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Don't fart.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
So we were in there for quite a while, and
we really didn't have any true real updates. We didn't
know where on campus the shooter was. Mind you, it's
a huge campus, so we didn't hear gunshots because we
sprinted upstairs so quickly.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
Well, we don't know.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Apparently, I find out half the kids had run out
of the school completely. They had escaped to school so
we were still.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
There for a while.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Nobody knew where anybody was, nobody knew really what was
true and what wasn't. We were there for so so
long in that cramped little closet back up against the
shelving where all the cameras were sitting, and eventually we
heard a banging sound on the main classroom door. So
I think they said something about like swat team, open up.
(17:48):
And my first thought was I'm like, Oh, he's pretending
to be the swat team and we're all about to
die right now. And I think everybody kind of thought that,
because even my teacher bless Her, was like, like he
was going to have to be the one to open
the door. But this is also just a person who
is terrified of being murdered. I remembered the baited breath
(18:11):
that we all had, in the fear that we all
had because we knew we had to open our closet
door to like see who was at the door. And
that was the one moman where I was like, I'm
about to die right now. We opened up the door
and we could see like the military people standing outside
through that little tiny window in the front of the
classroom door. Yeah, we kind of ran out. I still
(18:40):
didn't feel safe. I still had convinced myself like, Okay,
maybe there's a second.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
Shooter, Maybe there's somebody. Maybe they didn't catch him.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
He might still be walking around and we have these
giant wall of windows here that he could just shoot through.
I don't really know the logistics of how a gun works.
I mean I do now, but like I didn't at
the time understand would the bullet be able to get me.
So they like open up the doroorm. We're like, we're
gonna evacuate this entire haul into your classroom. And I'm
looking at these windows. I'm like, I'm i gonna get
shot right now because everybody else is hiding, crouching down.
But I'm walking around because I decided I want to
(19:06):
be the helper. Teacher's bet uh but yeah, I like
wanted to help in any way possible. So I'm, you know,
stacking stuff, and then the classmates start filing in.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
My TV production.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
Teacher was in the same hallway and he had become
like a father figure to me. So I saw him
and that was the first moment that I kind of
I could feel the breakdown a little bitcause I was like,
oh my god, like I finally feel safe around him
because he's known me for so long. I say, he's like,
you're okay, You're safe, and they're like, you know, it's
got these teachers trying to do like head counts and stuff,
and these scary, scary military man standing there with their gun,
and it was just such a surreal situation that I
(19:40):
don't think I could really process it in the moment.
And then eventually they were like, Okay, we're going to
go to the end of the hall where the library is,
and we're going to take you out to the library
and you're going to wait there. So we just kept
getting shuffled around. At that point, we did not know
when we were going to get to leave the school
if ever, so we have to walk with our hands
up through the hall. I remember my friend filming it
(20:01):
after the student journalist. He was recording everything he could,
I was taking pictures. We were very much trying to
document the scenario. But yeah, us walking through the hallway
with our hands in the air, and we go When
we sit in the library, just waiting and waiting and waiting,
I think we ate some grapes. The immediate fear and
shock was wearing off, so a lot of us reverted
to a kind.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
Of childish stupidity because it was like, this is insane.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Let's pretend it's not happening, so, you know, we're joking
around being stupid.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
Once again. Don't know how much time had passed.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
It felt like another hour, maybe it was, And they
were like, okay, so we're gonna evacuate you, but all
the roads are shut down, so you're gonna have to
walk a mile to get to the library, like the
actual Parkland library. So they filed us out of the school,
hands up in the air, and we then had to
begin our trek through all these closed down roads where
you can see already news cruiser there. Some parents had
made it inside, so like some people split off pretty early,
(20:53):
not me, so I had to walk the mile. We
made a bunch of probably tasteless jokes about like having
to you know, make this journey in this.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Trek, and how stupid it is that they're making us
walk so far.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Right now, because once again don't want to confront the
reality of the situation.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
By the time we.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Made it to the library, my phone had died, so
I wasn't able to communicate with my family. I knew
my dad was coming to pick me up, but I
didn't know where he was or how far away he was.
And unfortunately, when my phone died, I later found out
that he panicked because he thought something else had happened.
So he was like running around the parking lot screaming
(21:29):
my name, like he had pulled over. He was like
trying desperately to find me because I think he thought
that I had been shot.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
In the time, since.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Before we even left the parking lot of the library,
my journalism teacher was getting phone calls from Anderson Cooper's
team to schedule interviews, so already was kind of beginning,
and I could feel the first and I was like,
oh my god, Anderson Cooper. So that was like the
first taste of something being insane. But yeah, my dad
(22:02):
picked me up. We tried to go home, and then
our neighborhood road was shut down.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
I'm like, that's weird.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
So then we parked a little bit further away, walked
again for so long, so much walking that day, and
the reason the road was shut down was because they
had caught the shooter outside of my neighborhood. He had
gone to Walmart with the rest of the kids, the
Walmart next to our school, and like blended in.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
He had made it far to get to my neighborhood.
Because I was like, oh my.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
God, this is so haunting and I don't really know
what to say about it, but yeah, we went home.
My dad had still made his fancy dinner was Cabernada.
He was like, I know, he left his pasta. I
barely picked at it. And it was just like a
really bizarre night because I was not crying. I think
everybody was waiting for me to cry, but I was
(22:54):
not crying. The few things that I did do I
scheduled an interview through Twitter DMS for the next day.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
I found my high school yearbook.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Once I learned the name of the shooter and I
found his face, realized I did in fact know him
because he worked register at a dollar store nearby, and
barely it's some pasta, collapsed into bed, woke up the
next day and then I had a different life than
I ever expected. I had gotten DMS because I had
(23:25):
tweeted something. I don't even remember what it was, but
I tweeted something about the shooting and it went semiviral,
so people started dming me and asking to do interviews.
I know that I'm good at talking. I know that
I'm comfortable in front of the camera. I've spent many
years in front of and behind the camera in a
journalistic capacity, so I kind of was like, why not
to do the interviews. I want people to talk to
(23:45):
the press. I want I want to share this my anger,
my vitriol. Because immediately I was like, oh my god,
this was so prevenable, So I yeah, I started doing interviews.
Literally immediately there was a vigil and that was where
a lot of us reunited, so like I saw a
lot of my classmates that I hadn't seen since before
the shooting, tons of news cameras, but yeah, so that
(24:06):
was like reunions was the first thing, like hugging each other,
people being like, oh my god, you're alive. Like we
all knew we were alive, but you kind of have
to see it to believe it. And I remember one
of the parents of the children who were killed got
up there and started talking about how he couldn't remember
if he had said I love you to his daughter,
and that was that was the moment that I think
(24:27):
I first started like really crying like it hit me,
and I think it hit a lot of people in
a severe way. First of all, the fact that his
daughter had just been killed and he was up here
talking to us about this was like haunting, so amazing
to see him say it and not like retreat but
be like, no, you have to confront what happened here,
(24:48):
because there were these cameras here and there were these
people watching across the country and the globe.
Speaker 3 (24:53):
So he was like, I'm going.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
To make you deal with the fact that my daughter
is dead now and she should not be. And I
remember there were all these crosses set up for the
dead kids in the park on the ground, and I
can remember my mom actually told me about this because
I kind of forgot about it because I was like,
what was I like from your perspective in these days,
(25:17):
because I know what I was like from my perspective,
but you were, my mom, I don't know what you
were experiencing. And she told me that at the vigil
when we were about to leave, I had like gone
to the crosses and was like looking at the kids' names,
and I started when she was like we have to leave,
I started uncontrollably sobbing, which was my first time doing
that in front of her, maybe ever, but specifically in
this scenario, and I was like panicking at the thought
(25:39):
of having to leave, like she was like, I was like, please, no, like,
don't make me leave. Don't like crying, crying, crying, And
she was trying to kind of manage that, but she
even still she was like, I don't know why you
reacted like that in that moment, but that was the
moment that you.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
Really broke down in front of me. I know.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
I think that that was a moment of community and
safety and feeling held and that we were all together
mourning and grieving together. And having to go back to
my home, back to my room and go be a
person again was unfathomable to me because all I needed
was to just be around all of these people who
were feeling the same way as me, and it was
(26:21):
almost like this pocket outside of the real world that
we could live in where we were holding these candles
and like feeling the hot wax and petting the therapy
dogs and you know, just hugging and crying and grieving
in this mass morning moment. To have to like realize
that there is a life outside of this and that
(26:42):
we have to carry these feelings into our daily lives
and just keep going was unfathomable to me. I started
avoiding my friends too, because a lot of them we
would gather at our different houses and it would just
kind of be sitting there in our feelings together, and
for a lot of them that helped.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
For me, that was my worst nightmare.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
I stay there for about twenty minutes, and I was
so violently uncomfortable that I told them I had to go,
and I went and I did an interview because that
was my coping mechanism was like I can talk about this,
but I can talk about it in a way that
makes me feel guarded versus having to open up and
be vulnerable, because if I fall apart, I don't think
I'm gonna put myself back together again. And that was
(27:26):
not a luxury that I wanted to afford myself at
the time of like just letting it loose and letting
it go. But to pivot to like this was a
preventable tragedy. There's a reason that this happened. This happened
because of gun laws, This happened because of the NRA,
and this happened because of you, And like that that
was what I needed to say and that was what
(27:48):
I wanted to share out into the world. And I
was clearly not the only one because days later.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
We formed March for Our Lives.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
The journey of processing has been a process, which is
so silly to say, but there has not been one
moment where I've realized it. It is a lot of
hiindsight in understanding what I was doing and why I
was doing it. I mean, every month I have a
new revelation essentially where I'm like, oh my.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
God, everything I thought was wrong. So it's still very.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
Much a process for me of like understanding and feeling
and going through those feelings. But I did let myself
have emotions in very specific scenarios, so like protests are
always very cathartic, Like watching.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
Other speakers get up there, I would cry a lot, and.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
They wouldn't be like parking speakers and be like kids
from across the country. I would cry to other things,
like if I was watching a sad movie, I'd cry
a lot to that, or listening to music, I'd cry
a lot to that. So there were these moments of
like letting it out, but it had to be in
a way where I could put it all back in
and that was the truth for a very long time.
(28:56):
March for Our Lives, I want to say it happened organically.
My story of joining the March for Our Lives began
when my TV production teacher, who, like I said, was
a father figure to me. My TV production teacher texted
me and he said, Hey, I know that they're putting
on a rally at the courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Florida,
which was about thirty minutes away.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
Do you want to speak at it? I went to
the rally. There was a couple of us speaking.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
It was me, David Hogg, X Gonzalez, Cameron Cask I
believe David was in TV production with me. Xually I
had known since freshman year, and Cameron Caske I had
known through theater, which was like we worked a lot
and we had a lot of overlap with.
Speaker 3 (29:37):
The theater program. I gave a speech and I started
doing interviews.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
We get these people who come up to us and
they're like, hey, I think it was CBS. We want
to take the four of you and we want to
do a sit down interview in a hotel room tonight,
and we want to broadcast it. We wanted to be
like a big thing, so we did this sit down interview.
After the sit down interview, Cameron Caske walks up to
me and is like, Hey, come to my house tonight.
And I go what he said, Yeah, come to my
house tonight. I can't tell you, I'll tell you.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
There.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
I walk in, there's this huge dream of people. All
these people that I've known for a long time are
there and they're all like on the phone and they're
organizing and they're taking calls and they're messaging, and he
kind of like it calls the meeting to order. He's like, Hey, everyone,
we're going to do something. And I think we're going
to do the March for our Lives and we're going
to do a march on Washington And he's like, we're
going to announce it and then we're going to have
it organized by March twenty fourth. Then we realize it's
(30:26):
going to happen. We have a month to put it together,
and we are all on board and signed on for
this thing. So we are the March for our Lives.
We decided a march would.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
Be this moment to.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
Show that people weren't gonna take it anymore. That it
wasn't going to be thoughts and prayers anymore. We wanted
a mass mobilization. We understood the power of protest, and
that was like a thing that when you learn about
all these movements, particularly student and youth led movements, you're like, Okay,
well we're going to do this, and yeah, March on
Washington was ambitious, definitely ambitious.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
There was a little bit of fear, I think that
it wasn't going to come together in a month, but
it did.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
We're going to do this one thing that gives us
hope for the first time in what was days but
felt like an eternity. That was the first feeling of like,
thank God, we have this thing, this thing that we
can do to feel something other than pain and to
feel hope and to push towards a positive thing that
(31:28):
can only last so long. So pretty quickly things started
like you know, there's tensions, there's high school conflict, there's
distrust and dislike for each other. So it evolved over
a period of months and devolved over a period of
months into like needing to have sit downs with outside
(31:49):
mediators who were like, you guys do not like each
other right now, and you.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
Are at each other's throats and we need to figure
this out. Of course, we all dated each.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Other too, and that's a whole other thing of like,
once again, when you put a bunch of high schoolers
in our room together. We spent all of our waking
hours together, and we a little of it were like,
oh my god, we're changing the world. So there was
a lot of hormones, there was a lot of unresolved
trauma and grief, and there was a lot of responsibility
that we were feeling. So some friendships got really close
(32:19):
and then collapsed. I made some of my best friends
and then lost some of my best friends in that timeframe,
and they were the same people, and like, it was
just a constantly shifting landscape of who's okay with, who,
who can work with? Who, who likes each other, who
doesn't like each other. And that was one of those
things where I'm like, in hindsight, I almost feel like
we needed and it would have been impossible because were
(32:40):
still building an organization. I feel like we needed like
an HR manager or something, because we should not have
been in charge of all of that without somebody checking
in on us emotionally. And eventually we kind of established
that infrastructure, but we was so baked into us to
not feel our emotions and not share our emotions that
it would just come out in all these other ways.
So I became incredibly close with them, and I feel
(33:03):
like we all are forever linked. But I also know
that we had a lot of moments of drama, teenage
drama that was put on the national stage and also
involved millions of dollars and people counting on you, which.
Speaker 3 (33:19):
Is a really fun recipe.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
We were not giving ourselves space or time to feel anything.
Nobody else is giving us space or time to feel
anything like nobody's were these inspiring teenagers, And that is
one of those things that I've had to break down.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
Over the years of like, oh, you guys are so
strong and so inspiring.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
I'm like, yeah, but we were also so broken and
what we needed in that moment, yeah, it was to
do this.
Speaker 3 (33:44):
But I also sometimes.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Feel regret and anger at the fact that I'm like,
why did you guys let this happen? Nobody could have
stopped us, No one could have stopped me, clearly, but
I like, damn, I wish somebody had sat us down
and kind of been like, take a beat, you know, and.
Speaker 3 (34:03):
If we did.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
Problem is if we did take a beat, keep on
moving without us, So we couldn't take a beat, like
we all knew, if any of us stopped to feel
our feelings or took a break or like backed off
for personal reasons, the train would keep moving and we
wouldn't be able to get back on the way I
feel about my work with much of our lives changes
(34:26):
practically every day, particularly the more that I reflect on it.
And then also the question of did it change anything?
And I think that is a really tough thing to
grapple with for me, where I'm like, we did all that,
We threw our lives away for a while, we traumatize
ourselves and then add an entirely new level of trauma
(34:46):
on top of it for what And then I get
angry about that. But then somebody comes up to me,
particularly young kid, and is like, you change things for me,
You inspired me, You made me feel like I could
do something. The fact that it changed things for some
kids and that it at least gave them a voice
is kind of That's what I hold on too. I
(35:08):
used to hear it a lot more when I was
doing organizing actively because these kids were coming up to me.
But yeah, being able to hear it now sometimes it
checks me a little when I get a little bit
too dark and twisty about all of it, because I'm
very cynical now, so that cynicism kind of bleeds into
the hope that I have then, because I'm.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
Not seeing the change that I wanted to.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
Pre shooting, I wanted to go to the University of Georgia,
go dogs and go to journalism school. I had applied
to a bunch of schools, but that was the one
I toured, and I was like, this campus is gorgeous.
I think I can do this. Grady is a great school.
I'm out of state, like it was the dream for me.
Post shooting, A bunch of adults got in my ear
and this was not malicious. They got in my ear
(35:56):
and they went, you're going to go to a state
school in Georgia. I studied journalism, you need to go
into politics.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
So I negotiated.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
I was like, Okay, I apply to American University in
DC and I'll study public policy. Because I was like,
this is what I should be doing, and this is
what people keep telling me I should be doing, is
going into politics and making a difference that way. I
had a lot of really negative experiences with reporters and
a lot of really negative experiences with the media where
I felt I felt taken advantage of. I felt like
(36:27):
boundaries were crossed, and seeing firsthand the way the media
industry worked, the way the machine worked to us, I
was like, Oh, my god, do I want to be
a part of this?
Speaker 3 (36:37):
Do I even want to be a journalist?
Speaker 2 (36:38):
So I really started questioning that, and I'm getting all
this feedback of out like no, do politics, do politics?
Speaker 3 (36:43):
Or you could be really good at it.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
So I applied to American, I got in. I applied
to UGA, I got in. I remember getting really excited
when I found out I was accepted to UGA because
it was something that I had done completely independent of
the shooting. When I got into American, I didn't feel
as excited because I also would have only been able
to afford one semester of tuition and then from there
I would have had to figure it out.
Speaker 3 (37:04):
And the moment that I.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
I backtracked on all of that, it was a college
decision day in high school where you wear the shirt
from the college that you're going to, and I remember
being like I had some UGA merch because I wanted
to go to UGA. I was like, I don't have
any American University merch and I was like, they don't
even have like a college culture. I would just be
going there and being in the city. And my friend
(37:28):
who was going to go to UGA later backed out,
was wearing her UGA shirt and I was wearing a
stupid like maybe blue T shirt. And I was like,
uh oh, I don't feel excited about this. I don't
feel happy about this. And I panicked. That was the
day that, like you had to It was the day
after deposits were due. So I emailed UGA and like
a panic, I was like, can I please come? Can
(37:49):
I please come here instead? I know I did not
commit here. I know I missed the deadline, but I
really want to go here more than anything, And can
I come and can I defer a semester?
Speaker 3 (37:57):
And they said yes. So I lost six.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
Hundred dollar on the American University deposit. I put down
the deposit for UGA, and I made what was the
first decision for me in a long time, because I
knew that would mean going out of state, going away
from the whole nonprofit organization, going away from the political
machine and being a college student. So I decided to
(38:20):
be a college student, and I decided to give journalism
a chance and hope that I could change it. There's
been a lot of changes and I think phases that
I've gone through. I have never been religious. I know,
I was not raised with religion, so I did not
find religion. Sometimes I think maybe that would have been
(38:43):
a comfort. But I'm fine without it. I'm managed without it.
I found other ways, and a lot of that involved
being introspective and looking at my own feelings.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
But I did kind of transform a couple of times.
So for me, there's like chunks.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
The chunk of me going to college it was almost
I was trying so hard to be young again, so
I got really into, you know, nonsensical stuff like I
didn't want it to be serious unless I decided it
was serious. So I took a lot of you know, comfort.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
In watching like stupid cartoons and bad.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
Movies and like listening to what I liked, whether or
not that was considered cool enough. Because once I got
to college, it was a lot of these kids who
were like I read Hagel and I only watch esoteric
films and like a lot of people who are trying
very hard to seem like they're mature, And there were
some moments where I think people kind of I don't
(39:42):
think they thought it was immature, but I think I
seemed like maybe I didn't.
Speaker 3 (39:46):
Know as much.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
But it was largely because I realized I had already
lived way more lifetimes than these people, and a lot
of them were trying to substitute for a lack of living,
whereas I had experienced all of this hell on earth
and I didn't really need to be substituting it by
living vicariously through something else. So I was very adamant
about the fact that I wanted to preserve that nonsense
(40:08):
and preserve that frivolity and silliness.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
So I worked very hard to get that back, and
then COVID hit that way through college.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
I was very fresh when I went to college, it
was and that was one of things when I was
looking at hindsight, I was like, oh, I was not
far enough removed from anything to be healed, but I
had convinced myself I was healed. And then understanding that
it's been like a long process that started happening post COVID,
where I was like, Okay, I need to really understand
(40:42):
like how I've been dealing with these things and what
it means for me to deal with my emotions the
way I have, and understand why I'm so closed off,
understand why my impulse is to write about these things
because it's safe to write about it where I can
have control over the narrative and I can perform it
and deliver it in the way that I want versus
really feeling it. Does that mean that I, you know,
(41:07):
changed the behavior. No, it means that I just I
got it a little bit more and like learning how
to open up to people and just kind of figure
out who I would be as DeLine guitar not Delane
guitar youth activist, because my entire identity had been built
around that for so long and it was one of
those things that even though it was, you know, in
(41:29):
the long run, not a crazy amount of time to
be super involved, it was an identity that followed me.
So I, you know, I didn't distance myself from it,
but I did try and like incorporate into myself but
not let it dominate myself. And that became part of
it too, where I was like, this is one part
of my identity, but I've lived enough since then that
it's not the only part of my identity. And I've
(41:51):
made enough friendships and had enough experiences since then that
I can be more than that thing. Whereas post shooting
like that was the thing, everything else felt are the
way side. I'm still understanding things, but I've been specifically
writing about it a lot lately, and that has forced
(42:11):
me to confront a lot of things that I forgot about,
a lot of things that I maybe didn't put the
pieces together on. So I feel like I'm at a
new point of understanding of myself and at a new
point of like grappling with myself. I feel like a person,
and I don't think I felt like a person after
the fact, but I'm a different person, you know, And
I think everybody that I know now really understands that
about me and is conscious of it in a way
(42:34):
that I think is really beautiful and loving.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
Welcome back to Alive again, joining me for a conversation
about today's story. Are my other Alive against story producers
Nicholas Dakowski and print Day, and I'm your host, Dan Bush.
Speaker 4 (43:10):
You know what drew me to Delaney's story is the
fact that we are surrounded by this decades long epidemic
of gun violence in this country. And you know, one
thing that we don't get to hear a lot is
(43:31):
sort of how what the long term effects are on
the people who go through this. We hear the stories
of what happened in the moment, you know, and we
go and this is a sickness in our society. I
think that, like true crime is a symptom of like
true crime shows and podcasts for the fascination with that
(43:51):
symptom of this sickness. We want to like it's like
we want to know everything about the evil, you know,
the quote unquote what causes it was, what was in
his brain that made him this way, But we never
fucking focus on like the long term effects has the
people who are victims of this stuff, Like they're interesting
(44:14):
in that they can tell us what happens, They can
give us all the gruesome details, but like nobody seems
to give a shit what happens once the cameras are
turned off and they have to like go home and
these seventeen year olds have to like sleep at night
and eat food.
Speaker 5 (44:32):
What struck me about her telling of this was how
lighthearted and humorous she was able to make her presentation.
I mean, she'd gone through this traumatic thing, and she
still carried this joy, this natural personality.
Speaker 4 (44:50):
And I hopefully she wouldn't be insulted by this. But
she also has like theater kid energy, you know, this
like intellectual curiosity and excitement, you know. I think think
that's just her personality. She tells the story well because
she's it's not just because she's an excellent storyteller at heart,
but because she's practiced in telling it. One of these
(45:10):
one of the aspects of this story. And I think
the thing that was the most interesting to me was
that not only she survived this experience of being right
there at death's door, and it was super important and
something that happens constantly in this country, but she also
went through the experience of becoming famous for having this
(45:35):
trauma before her and went out on a speaking tour
before she'd had a moment to process this, before she'd
had before a week had passed, she'd already done a
half dozen interviews, and they were already planning March for
our lives, like days after days after people they knew
(45:57):
were killed were murdered. So you know, she she became
very practiced to telling a story before she'd even processed it.
And she was seventeen when it happened, So she has
all of these different things going on in her skull
before she before she even has this traumatic event and
(46:18):
is thrust into the limelight. So all of these horrifically
traumatic Like that in itself was deeply traumatic, is that
she was basically put in front of cameras, you know,
vilified by a large percentage of the right, or just
outright dismissed as being stupid kids who are just out
(46:39):
there speaking about their experience and going like, hey, maybe
if this guy didn't have a gun, that could have
murdered a lot of people quickly, a lot of people
would not be dead. And maybe that is the case
in many places. And you know, these kids are villified
for this. So the fact that Delaney, six gant years later,
(47:01):
is able to have a sense of humor about this stuff,
is able to be vulnerable even a little bit, is
amazing and it speaks very well to her character and
to the character of a lot of the kids who
went on to do March for Our Lives.
Speaker 5 (47:19):
Yeah, she seemed to question the effectiveness of what they
had done, and I think, you know, you're a teenager,
you're growing emotionally personally through this period. What a difficult
thing to be thrust in the limelight the way they were.
But to me, it was an incredibly inspiring thing. The
(47:40):
way they pulled together, the smartness of how they use
social media, how they turned a lot of these NRA
arguments on their head. And the fact that NRA is
tumbling because of their own financial problems, not because of
anything that this society has done to rise up and
stop these things from happening, is so discouraging. But I
don't think she or any of the kids who are
(48:01):
involved in March for Our Lives should ever question what
they did. I mean, it was to me a heroic
act and as a very core of what makes this
country great is when people see it wrong and they
get together and they address it. I thought they were
so smart and how Yeah, she should be perpetually proud
of what.
Speaker 4 (48:20):
I agree with you. I think that like so often,
we get so bogged down in arguments about the guns
themselves that we we literally overlook the humanity of the
people who are who are in front of the guns
getting shot at, and I think that, you know, I
think that, like Delaney has been asked a million times
(48:43):
what she felt like that day, She's been asked a
million times about like the work that she does for
March for our lives. Because of the nature of what
we're doing in this show, we're less focused on the
event themselves than how the event affects you as a
human being. So our show necessarily is asking what happened later.
Speaker 1 (49:05):
It's almost it's almost like her transformation had to do
more with navigating for six years the waters of the
student movement and of being in the line in the
spotlight as a teenager. I expected to hear like, oh, this,
this shooting happened and it made me, you know, our
typical sort of what we always hear about about these
(49:27):
experiences being immediately transformative. I think what was fascinating about
her story was the events after after the actual incident,
that that train that spoke to her transformation.
Speaker 5 (49:38):
I love that she's planning in the hour before the shooting.
She's texting with her dad. He's going to make his
dinner for them. You know, she's planning her evening. The
shooting happens and she goes home and they eat the
dinner that was planned in the night, presites as planned.
I I love those little details. I love that her
mom texts her, don't fart in there while the shooting
(49:59):
is going on. That the these moments where they're under
extreme darrest, but there's still this relationship with her parents.
There's still a time for brevity, for humor, there's still
right She's still a high school kid. You know, we
see a day. She presents the day as a normal
(50:19):
day for.
Speaker 1 (50:20):
Any high school kid.
Speaker 5 (50:21):
It was Valentine's Day. They weren't paying attention to their classes,
they were excited about Valentine's Day. They're playing these things
and then it's almost like seventh period. The shooter comes
and up ends our lives, and then we are expected
to go back into our normal routines. What she does,
but then, you know how quickly they seize that moment
to say, you know, fuck no, man, this has happened enough.
(50:44):
I mean the fact that she's hiding in her closet, going,
my god, I was just talking to my mom about
what I would do in this situation.
Speaker 1 (50:51):
I love how she and and the other students that
were part of the movement with or refused to acknowledge
the shooter's name. That's what the shooter wants, that's all
they want. But in our case, there is a direct
result from the Parkland shooting that shows its face in
(51:11):
the next story, Aileen Murray's because that shooter on that
bridge for Aileen Murray's story, guess what he was. He
was inspired by the manifesto of the Parkland shooters.
Speaker 5 (51:22):
Yeah, and he almost killed a good friend of mine.
Speaker 4 (51:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
So it is you know, to talk about the perfasiveness
of this, and and and and then both stories, it's
sort of, you know, it's we could be so easy
to be again. This comes up again and a lot
of our stories of like the idea of victimhood and
who's the victim and kind of like in Manuel Beo's
story of he was the victim, but his captors and
(51:48):
his uh, the cartel that abducted him, and the kids
who were forced to torture him, they were also victims.
And it's hard to deep dig down, but these I
wonder if these stories point us towards that, how do
you have compassion for this person who's lost their humanity,
this person who's in you know, and we talk about
(52:08):
Eileen Murray's story. She also says, I don't feel bad.
You know, I don't have hatred for the shooter. I
have hatred for the politicians. I have hatred for the
legal system. I have hatred for the insurance companies. It's
so easy for us to and we're so trained to go.
You know, the monster is this individual or their parents
that you know, at what point do we all start
(52:31):
to take responsibility. Next time I'm Alive again, we meet
Aaron Ralston, who's solo Canyon expedition turned into a harrowing
fight for survival. Trapped for days with no escape, Aaron
made the unthinkable decision to amputate his own arm in
order to save his life. I step out of my
grave and into my life. And that is when I
(52:55):
almost passed out, but not from the pain, but from
the infinite possibility of having.
Speaker 3 (53:00):
A life again.
Speaker 1 (53:02):
His incredible story, immortalized in the film one hundred and
twenty seven Hours, is a testament to the boundless strength
of the human will in the drive to survive even
when all hope seems lost. Our story producers are Dan Bush,
Kate Sweeney, Brent Die Nicholas Dakoski and Lauren Vogelbaum. Music
(53:24):
by Ben Lovett, Additional music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive
producers are Matthew Frederick and Trevor Young. Special thanks to
Alexander Williams for additional production support. Our studio engineers are
Rima El Kali and Nomes Griffin. Today's episode was edited
by Mike w Anderson, mixing by Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez.
(53:44):
I'm your host, Dan Bush. Special thanks to Delaney Tarr
for sharing her story. For more about Delaney and her work,
visit her website Delaney Tar dot WordPress dot com. To
learn more about March for Our Lives and how you
can get involved, go to Mark for OurLives dot org.
Alive Again as a production of I R Radio and
Psychopia Pictures. If you have a transformative near death experience
(54:08):
to share, we'd love to hear your story. Please email
us at Alive Again project at gmail dot com. That's
a l I v E A g A I N
P R O j E C T at gmail dot com.
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
My name is Delaney Tarr. I am a former student
activist who co founded a gun violence prevention organization called
March for Our Lives after the shooting at my high
school in Parkland, Florida, on February fourteenth, twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous accounts
of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were
forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand
accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.
Our mission is simple, find and explore and share these
(00:54):
stories to remind us all of our shared human condition.
Please keep in mind these stories are true and maybe
triggering for some well listener, and discretion is advised everyone.
Before we begin today's episode, I wanted to tell you
about a very special segment that you're about to hear.
Nicholas Takoski, one of our story producers here at Live
(01:14):
Again and the longtime host of Write Club Atlanta, invited
today's guest, Delaney Tarr, to perform her story before a
live audience at one of their recent events. Right Club
is very special and the stories are always very intimate.
Delaney Tarr is a journalist, activist, and one of the
original founders of March for Our Lives. She's a survivor
of the twenty eighteen Parkland school shooting at Marjorie Stoneman
(01:37):
Douglas High School. She became one of the most visible
young voices fighting for gun violence prevention in America. Since then,
she's carried the weight of that experience into her activism
and storytelling. But recently something happened that reframed everything. Just
weeks ago, Delaney's younger sister survived a school shooting of
her own, this time it was Florida State University. In
(01:57):
a heartbreaking Instagram post, Delaney reflected on the two thousand,
six hundred and nineteen days that had passed between her
school shooting and her sisters quote, I keep rolling it
over in my head. The mirror image hiding out in
a closet in twenty eighteen, texting my parents, my sister
hiding out in a dorm room in twenty twenty five,
texting the family group chat. The anger, the pain, the fear.
(02:21):
It's also familiar. She's going through it All end quote.
So this episode is not only about survival, It's about grief.
It's about advocacy and the heartbreak of watching history repeat
itself in the life of someone you love. After this
live segment, will return to the studio for a deeper
conversation with Delaney, one that explores how activism shapes grief,
(02:43):
how her life has evolved since Parkland, and how she
continues to navigate the complexities of survival and advocacy. What
you're about to hear is Delaney's powerful, unfiltered reading on stage.
It's a rare and intimate moment that gives voice to
her experience.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Why do you know how a fig is formed?
Speaker 3 (03:10):
I'll tell you it's pretty nasty.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
See.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
The fruit is a stem that has flowers inside, little
tiny flowers. Those flowers amid a tantalizing smell, ready for
pollen that draws female wasps in Desperate to get to
the flowers. The wasp crawls through a teeny little hole,
loses her wings, her antenna, mutilates herself, lays her eggs,
pollinates the plant, and dies. As the dead mother wasp
(03:37):
rots inside that fig, her eggs hatch the male bugs
small no wings, find the females and mate with them.
It's incestrous because they're so little and flightless. The men
die inside their final resting place, right next to mother.
It's only the fertilized females who ever leave pollen, prepared
to find another fig and begin the process again. Because
(04:00):
of that fig is my favorite fruit. Every time I
bite into that soft flesh and taste those mealy, pink insides,
I think of the rotting wasp, a little decay, That
doomed partnership made something so divine. The story of the
fig doesn't resonate with everyone. On a mixed audience hike
(04:26):
through the rainforest of Costa Rica with my family and
some British tourists, a guide stopped at a massive tree
ready for a gotcha?
Speaker 3 (04:34):
Does anybody know how the fig is formed? With glee?
My hands shut up?
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Dead wasp, Dead wasp, I announced, always a teacher's pet.
My mother glanced at me with her through her sweat
trip brow.
Speaker 3 (04:50):
What's wrong with you?
Speaker 2 (04:53):
Ourn't? Your friends avoided me for the rest of the trip,
less charmed by my fun fact than I expected, But
perhaps they weren't prepared to confront the gruesome dirty truth
of the beautiful fruit. After all, it's a natural aphrodisiac,
not what many associate with dead bugs, but I love it.
When my high school got shot up in twenty eighteen,
(05:13):
a wound formed in our town. Literal people died, but
the community was changed. Everyone streamed in to fill that gap.
They wanted to help, or maybe they just wanted to.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
Be a part of the hubbub.
Speaker 2 (05:25):
Crowds parked right at the entrance of my now alma
mater to cry more and show their hurt at everything.
School was shut down, obviously, and there was no real
morning place, so right there in front of the bike
racks where we scheduled all of our fistfights, it became
a shrine. We had a gaping, painful hole where the
world used to be. To fix it, they laced public's
(05:48):
plastic wrapped flowers into the chain link fence. When that
got too full, they stacked up vases full of carnations,
roses and Valentine's Day discount bouquets anywhere they could fill
each new edition and helped a little bit more. I
took some pictures at the start. I studied what everyone left,
seeing if they splurged on the good roses, or if
they just used their leftovers. I didn't care much for
(06:11):
those flowers. I like to make my own bouquets. The
spray roses from my girlfriend's gift that year were still
drying on my dresser. But as the days passed, the
mountain of flowers only grew, transforming our eerily quiet campus
into some pastiche of tragedy. After a week, the Florida
sun had baked it all down into remains. Stems had
melted into mush, and the petals had crisped up. And
(06:33):
they really don't tell you how a flower smells once
it's done being pretty. The smell climbed into our noses
at one hundred yards and reminded you of exactly why
the bouquets were there. The blood was still inside the building.
Nothing felt more alive, but the pretty was supposed to
fix the rot. The pretty decayed until it permeated, and
that's when I started to like it. The rot was
(06:56):
the only thing that I could accept. It felt familiar,
and it matched what I was feeling gnawing deep inside me,
like I was also decomposing. Yeah, it's cliche, but we
all were, couldn't they see it. I developed a hobby.
I've had a long overactive imagination and an affinity for horror,
the Boogeyman lurking in the shadows, and knowledge was a comfort.
(07:16):
I grew up on an Internet where you had fifty
percent chance of seeing a video of someone's graphic death
anytime you logged on, and sometimes it felt like I
was extra prepared for our real life nightmare. So I
started watching sped up videos of animals decomposing.
Speaker 3 (07:31):
I cope.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
I've never been a religious person, so the question of
what happens when we die was a pretty practical one
for me, and I needed it answered.
Speaker 3 (07:43):
There's catharsis in decomposition.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
It's not evil that the flesh begins to sag and
slough away, that the ants and maggots feast with glee,
raising down the eyes and testin's muscle on a squirrel, bird, lizard,
whatever it might be, it doesn't look too different from
eating a bone in chicken wing when you think about it.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
In those videos, though.
Speaker 2 (08:03):
Death is just a step, a part of the process
once living things break down into phosphorus, potassium, and carbon
for the soil that becomes life anew. Nobody's wrong not
the ant, the maggot, or the bacteria that break it down,
and nobody's hiding from it. Back in the real world,
everybody wanted to didn't want to take off that rotting
safety blanket. When the shrines would leave, school would reopen,
(08:26):
life would go on, and it would be just another
step in the process as we became something new.
Speaker 3 (08:31):
But it was unavoidable.
Speaker 2 (08:33):
Eventually, some stranger cleared off the sidewalk, picked the mushy
stems out of the fence. Students built a garden, planted
flowers that wouldn't die, fertilized with soil rich in all
those carcass goodies. We spent so long hiding from the wound, though,
that it had festered. The stink of it came out,
and people got nasty, They got mean, community came crashing down,
(08:56):
and factions took its place.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
I had never felt more removed from it all. Now.
Rotten things are my solace.
Speaker 2 (09:04):
When someone tells me they're deep dark, that thing clawing
up their throat and scratching at their brain.
Speaker 3 (09:10):
I trust it. It's real.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
My friends and I we like to say that we
rot in bed, or that our look of the day
is rotted like a shuffling corpse.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
I study it.
Speaker 2 (09:21):
I leave my produce in the fridge way past an
ok point until I have to slam the door shut
just to trap a sent inside. I let my bouquets
sit on the table so I can gaze at them
while I eat, watching the whites turn brown and the
buds turn down to the ground. And when it's unbearable,
I scrub it all down. I fill the trash with
truly heinous sense. Rotto disparagus can clear a room, and
I make it clean. And just like that, I've done
(09:44):
my step. I save some things, the crispy petals, the
barely trimmed herbs. I make it new, and I make
it beautiful again.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
My name is Delane Uitar.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
I am a former student activist who co founded a
gun violence prevention organization called March for Our Lives after
the shooting at my high school in Parkland, Florida, on
February fourteenth, twenty eighteen.
Speaker 3 (10:15):
I was a.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
Senior in high school at the time, and interestingly enough,
I was, you know, kind of at that crux in
your life where you're looking at colleges.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
Trying to figure out what the rest of your life
is going to look like.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
I had been toying with journalism and film as my
two main options.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
Throughout all of high school.
Speaker 2 (10:33):
I had been in TV production and newspaper, which were
these groups where I was, you know, producing student news
but also producing student films. So pretty care free on
that front.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
And I'm from South Florida.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
So it's a very beachy, a little bit idyllic lifestyle,
not perfect, but definitely pretty normal teenage life that I
was living. It didn't feel idyllic then now it does,
but that's what I remember. So the vibe at Marjorie
Stone and Douglas High School is massive and wealthy are
(11:08):
the two main ways that I would characterize the school.
But it was a really huge school that could swallow
you up. But yeah, very classically like open campus Florida style.
Everything is outdoors and there's very few indoor hallways. I
have a distinct memory of a couple of weeks before
the shooting talking to my mom about where I would
(11:29):
hide if there was a shooting. I had so that
I would hide in the trash cans outside. So it
was February fourteenth, it was Valentine's Day. I remember putting
on my cute little romper that my mom had bought
me from Target and some sandals. I had made bouquets
for all my friends in little Mason jars. You know,
I wanted to do something sweet. And I also really
loved Valentine's Day for the kitsch of it all.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
The actual day.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Itself, like leading up to that was a blur because
Valentine's Day was not a real day for classes. None
of us paid attention, none of us cared. So about
two ish pm, we were in Newspaper, which was my
last class of the day, and I was hanging out
with my friends. We were watching videos, sitting on the
beanback chairs in the classroom, hanging out, you know, not serious,
watching vines, I think, like fine compilations on YouTube. So
(12:14):
it was, you know, a pretty normal day as far
as that goes, just a.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Very unseerious day of school.
Speaker 2 (12:19):
And I had worked later that day, so it was
kind of like leading up to like, Okay, I got
to get off school, go to Tilly's, texting my mom
bout my shift at Tilly's.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
My damn, I have to work on a holiday. That's stupid.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
And we were supposed to have like a fancy Italian dinner.
My dad was making my favorite pasta for dinner, so it.
Speaker 3 (12:35):
Was going to be like a cute night.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
But yeah, at about two something PM, I don't remember
the exact time. I always have to ask my friends
this one because I forget it. But towards the end
of the school day, we heard an alarm go off.
And we had been told in the months prior that
there would be some school shooter drills that we're going
to be super realistic.
Speaker 3 (12:58):
So we heard the drill go off. Oh my god,
that's so stupid. We have to evacuate so.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
Close to the end of the school day when we
had like twenty minutes left. So we walked down this
little stairwell to go down to the first floor. Halfway
down the stairwell, I start hearing screams, which is weird,
and everybody starts panicking because we're seeing like very authentic
screams coming from like down in the other direction. So
half of us kind of get pushed back up the
stairs and into that classroom.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
The other half of the class we don't know where
they go.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
They did not make it back upstairs because it was
just find the nearest classroom. So we get up to
the second floor. Our journalism teacher corrals us all into
the classroom and we sit up against the wall, crouched down.
I am confused. I think I still at that time,
was convinced that it was a shooter.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Jel.
Speaker 3 (13:46):
I was like, Wow, this is a really realistic shooter.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Dril.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
This is very strange what is going on?
Speaker 2 (13:51):
And the people around me are panicking, you know, So
I'm trying to calm everyone down, like, Okay, let's not cry,
let's be quiet just in case.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Like let's but we're sitting there.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
Against the wall that is like on the hallway, so
like our backs are to the hallway. Essentially, our teacher
makes an executive decision to take us into the storage
closet where we keep all of the photography equipment.
Speaker 3 (14:15):
So I don't know how many.
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Of us, probably like ten twelve of us really quickly
stand up, have to run across because the door has
a window, and there's windows on the other side of
the classroom, so we sprint across to make sure that
nobody can see us, just in case, and we get
in the closet and I don't know how long we
were in the closet for.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Probably at least an hour.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
But some of the things I remember most were I
was close to the door with my teacher, was crammed
in there. I was texting everyone. One of my friends
called me because he had been on campus earlier that day.
He called me a panicked and I was like, please
don't text me. I remember texting my boss going, hey,
I actually can't make it into my shift today. I'm
(14:56):
currently hiding because there's a shooting at my school. He said,
don't worry about it. And I think about that a lot,
because what was he supposed to say. My mom is
texting me updates because the news is reporting on it
at this point, and like, I'm on Twitter some but
I don't want to be on social media too much
because my phone is dying.
Speaker 3 (15:14):
We're all realizing.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
We're like, oh my god, who could it be? Because
we know it's real. At this point, we all turn
off our Snapchat locations. That's like the first thing, because
Snapchat has a map feature where it tells you where
someone is, and we don't know who this could be.
We had theories about, like, Okay, which kid.
Speaker 3 (15:29):
Do we think maybe he did a shooting?
Speaker 2 (15:31):
We're like, oh my god, does he have a snapchat,
and it was for some reason we assume to he,
you know, for many reasons.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
We assumed it was a he.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
So we were in there, like everybody's kind of realizing
things at the same moment, finding out news at the
same moment, and everybody's kind of shouting out like, oh
my god, there's this many people dead.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Oh my god, he's.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
Over here, Like we don't know what is and isn't
true at this point in time, because some people are
getting it from their friends texting from the other side
of school, some people are getting it from news helicopters,
some people are getting it from their parents, and it's
just like all this influx of information, and I can
tell that it's making people freak out more so one
(16:06):
of my friends is having like several panic attacks in
the back of the closet. Somebody else is like crying,
and this one girl keeps like a nounce and she's like,
oh my god, I think there's more people dead.
Speaker 3 (16:13):
And I think I feel bad because.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
I did dick out on my iro on her because
I was like, if you don't shut the fuck up,
I'm gonna slap you. You are not helping the situation.
Everybody was freaking out. So my way of handling it
was locked down, no feelings, keep my composure because everyone
else is having a meltdown. I want to be as
(16:35):
solid as possible. My phone is dying, which I'm very
acutely aware of the fact that I'm like, Okay, what's
gonna happen, So I like text my mom, I love
you if anything happens, and like text my dad and
my sister. I'm like, just in case, I want to
cover my bases. I don't want our last text to
be stupid. My mom joking about like, don't fart in there,
which she did because she was trying to add brevity
to the situation, which maybe wasn't the right move, but
also like, what is the right move when your daughter's
(16:57):
in a school shooter situation?
Speaker 3 (17:00):
Don't fart.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
So we were in there for quite a while, and
we really didn't have any true real updates. We didn't
know where on campus the shooter was. Mind you, it's
a huge campus, so we didn't hear gunshots because we
sprinted upstairs so quickly.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
Well, we don't know.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Apparently, I find out half the kids had run out
of the school completely. They had escaped to school so
we were still.
Speaker 3 (17:25):
There for a while.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Nobody knew where anybody was, nobody knew really what was
true and what wasn't. We were there for so so
long in that cramped little closet back up against the
shelving where all the cameras were sitting, and eventually we
heard a banging sound on the main classroom door. So
I think they said something about like swat team, open up.
(17:48):
And my first thought was I'm like, Oh, he's pretending
to be the swat team and we're all about to
die right now. And I think everybody kind of thought that,
because even my teacher bless Her, was like, like he
was going to have to be the one to open
the door. But this is also just a person who
is terrified of being murdered. I remembered the baited breath
(18:11):
that we all had, in the fear that we all
had because we knew we had to open our closet
door to like see who was at the door. And
that was the one moman where I was like, I'm
about to die right now. We opened up the door
and we could see like the military people standing outside
through that little tiny window in the front of the
classroom door. Yeah, we kind of ran out. I still
(18:40):
didn't feel safe. I still had convinced myself like, Okay,
maybe there's a second.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
Shooter, Maybe there's somebody. Maybe they didn't catch him.
Speaker 2 (18:45):
He might still be walking around and we have these
giant wall of windows here that he could just shoot through.
I don't really know the logistics of how a gun works.
I mean I do now, but like I didn't at
the time understand would the bullet be able to get me.
So they like open up the doroorm. We're like, we're
gonna evacuate this entire haul into your classroom. And I'm
looking at these windows. I'm like, I'm i gonna get
shot right now because everybody else is hiding, crouching down.
But I'm walking around because I decided I want to
(19:06):
be the helper. Teacher's bet uh but yeah, I like
wanted to help in any way possible. So I'm, you know,
stacking stuff, and then the classmates start filing in.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
My TV production.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
Teacher was in the same hallway and he had become
like a father figure to me. So I saw him
and that was the first moment that I kind of
I could feel the breakdown a little bitcause I was like,
oh my god, like I finally feel safe around him
because he's known me for so long. I say, he's like,
you're okay, You're safe, and they're like, you know, it's
got these teachers trying to do like head counts and stuff,
and these scary, scary military man standing there with their gun,
and it was just such a surreal situation that I
(19:40):
don't think I could really process it in the moment.
And then eventually they were like, Okay, we're going to
go to the end of the hall where the library is,
and we're going to take you out to the library
and you're going to wait there. So we just kept
getting shuffled around. At that point, we did not know
when we were going to get to leave the school
if ever, so we have to walk with our hands
up through the hall. I remember my friend filming it
(20:01):
after the student journalist. He was recording everything he could,
I was taking pictures. We were very much trying to
document the scenario. But yeah, us walking through the hallway
with our hands in the air, and we go When
we sit in the library, just waiting and waiting and waiting,
I think we ate some grapes. The immediate fear and
shock was wearing off, so a lot of us reverted
to a kind.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
Of childish stupidity because it was like, this is insane.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
Let's pretend it's not happening, so, you know, we're joking
around being stupid.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
Once again. Don't know how much time had passed.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
It felt like another hour, maybe it was, And they
were like, okay, so we're gonna evacuate you, but all
the roads are shut down, so you're gonna have to
walk a mile to get to the library, like the
actual Parkland library. So they filed us out of the school,
hands up in the air, and we then had to
begin our trek through all these closed down roads where
you can see already news cruiser there. Some parents had
made it inside, so like some people split off pretty early,
(20:53):
not me, so I had to walk the mile. We
made a bunch of probably tasteless jokes about like having
to you know, make this journey in this.
Speaker 3 (21:00):
Trek, and how stupid it is that they're making us
walk so far.
Speaker 2 (21:02):
Right now, because once again don't want to confront the
reality of the situation.
Speaker 3 (21:09):
By the time we.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Made it to the library, my phone had died, so
I wasn't able to communicate with my family. I knew
my dad was coming to pick me up, but I
didn't know where he was or how far away he was.
And unfortunately, when my phone died, I later found out
that he panicked because he thought something else had happened.
So he was like running around the parking lot screaming
(21:29):
my name, like he had pulled over. He was like
trying desperately to find me because I think he thought
that I had been shot.
Speaker 3 (21:34):
In the time, since.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
Before we even left the parking lot of the library,
my journalism teacher was getting phone calls from Anderson Cooper's
team to schedule interviews, so already was kind of beginning,
and I could feel the first and I was like,
oh my god, Anderson Cooper. So that was like the
first taste of something being insane. But yeah, my dad
(22:02):
picked me up. We tried to go home, and then
our neighborhood road was shut down.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
I'm like, that's weird.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
So then we parked a little bit further away, walked
again for so long, so much walking that day, and
the reason the road was shut down was because they
had caught the shooter outside of my neighborhood. He had
gone to Walmart with the rest of the kids, the
Walmart next to our school, and like blended in.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
He had made it far to get to my neighborhood.
Because I was like, oh my.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
God, this is so haunting and I don't really know
what to say about it, but yeah, we went home.
My dad had still made his fancy dinner was Cabernada.
He was like, I know, he left his pasta. I
barely picked at it. And it was just like a
really bizarre night because I was not crying. I think
everybody was waiting for me to cry, but I was
(22:54):
not crying. The few things that I did do I
scheduled an interview through Twitter DMS for the next day.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
I found my high school yearbook.
Speaker 2 (23:01):
Once I learned the name of the shooter and I
found his face, realized I did in fact know him
because he worked register at a dollar store nearby, and
barely it's some pasta, collapsed into bed, woke up the
next day and then I had a different life than
I ever expected. I had gotten DMS because I had
(23:25):
tweeted something. I don't even remember what it was, but
I tweeted something about the shooting and it went semiviral,
so people started dming me and asking to do interviews.
I know that I'm good at talking. I know that
I'm comfortable in front of the camera. I've spent many
years in front of and behind the camera in a
journalistic capacity, so I kind of was like, why not
to do the interviews. I want people to talk to
(23:45):
the press. I want I want to share this my anger,
my vitriol. Because immediately I was like, oh my god,
this was so prevenable, So I yeah, I started doing interviews.
Literally immediately there was a vigil and that was where
a lot of us reunited, so like I saw a
lot of my classmates that I hadn't seen since before
the shooting, tons of news cameras, but yeah, so that
(24:06):
was like reunions was the first thing, like hugging each other,
people being like, oh my god, you're alive. Like we
all knew we were alive, but you kind of have
to see it to believe it. And I remember one
of the parents of the children who were killed got
up there and started talking about how he couldn't remember
if he had said I love you to his daughter,
and that was that was the moment that I think
(24:27):
I first started like really crying like it hit me,
and I think it hit a lot of people in
a severe way. First of all, the fact that his
daughter had just been killed and he was up here
talking to us about this was like haunting, so amazing
to see him say it and not like retreat but
be like, no, you have to confront what happened here,
(24:48):
because there were these cameras here and there were these
people watching across the country and the globe.
Speaker 3 (24:53):
So he was like, I'm going.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
To make you deal with the fact that my daughter
is dead now and she should not be. And I
remember there were all these crosses set up for the
dead kids in the park on the ground, and I
can remember my mom actually told me about this because
I kind of forgot about it because I was like,
what was I like from your perspective in these days,
(25:17):
because I know what I was like from my perspective,
but you were, my mom, I don't know what you
were experiencing. And she told me that at the vigil
when we were about to leave, I had like gone
to the crosses and was like looking at the kids' names,
and I started when she was like we have to leave,
I started uncontrollably sobbing, which was my first time doing
that in front of her, maybe ever, but specifically in
this scenario, and I was like panicking at the thought
(25:39):
of having to leave, like she was like, I was like, please, no, like,
don't make me leave. Don't like crying, crying, crying, And
she was trying to kind of manage that, but she
even still she was like, I don't know why you
reacted like that in that moment, but that was the
moment that you.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
Really broke down in front of me. I know.
Speaker 2 (26:00):
I think that that was a moment of community and
safety and feeling held and that we were all together
mourning and grieving together. And having to go back to
my home, back to my room and go be a
person again was unfathomable to me because all I needed
was to just be around all of these people who
were feeling the same way as me, and it was
(26:21):
almost like this pocket outside of the real world that
we could live in where we were holding these candles
and like feeling the hot wax and petting the therapy
dogs and you know, just hugging and crying and grieving
in this mass morning moment. To have to like realize
that there is a life outside of this and that
(26:42):
we have to carry these feelings into our daily lives
and just keep going was unfathomable to me. I started
avoiding my friends too, because a lot of them we
would gather at our different houses and it would just
kind of be sitting there in our feelings together, and
for a lot of them that helped.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
For me, that was my worst nightmare.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
I stay there for about twenty minutes, and I was
so violently uncomfortable that I told them I had to go,
and I went and I did an interview because that
was my coping mechanism was like I can talk about this,
but I can talk about it in a way that
makes me feel guarded versus having to open up and
be vulnerable, because if I fall apart, I don't think
I'm gonna put myself back together again. And that was
(27:26):
not a luxury that I wanted to afford myself at
the time of like just letting it loose and letting
it go. But to pivot to like this was a
preventable tragedy. There's a reason that this happened. This happened
because of gun laws, This happened because of the NRA,
and this happened because of you, And like that that
was what I needed to say and that was what
(27:48):
I wanted to share out into the world. And I
was clearly not the only one because days later.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
We formed March for Our Lives.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
The journey of processing has been a process, which is
so silly to say, but there has not been one
moment where I've realized it. It is a lot of
hiindsight in understanding what I was doing and why I
was doing it. I mean, every month I have a
new revelation essentially where I'm like, oh my.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
God, everything I thought was wrong. So it's still very.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
Much a process for me of like understanding and feeling
and going through those feelings. But I did let myself
have emotions in very specific scenarios, so like protests are
always very cathartic, Like watching.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
Other speakers get up there, I would cry a lot, and.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
They wouldn't be like parking speakers and be like kids
from across the country. I would cry to other things,
like if I was watching a sad movie, I'd cry
a lot to that, or listening to music, I'd cry
a lot to that. So there were these moments of
like letting it out, but it had to be in
a way where I could put it all back in
and that was the truth for a very long time.
(28:56):
March for Our Lives, I want to say it happened organically.
My story of joining the March for Our Lives began
when my TV production teacher, who, like I said, was
a father figure to me. My TV production teacher texted
me and he said, Hey, I know that they're putting
on a rally at the courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Florida,
which was about thirty minutes away.
Speaker 3 (29:15):
Do you want to speak at it? I went to
the rally. There was a couple of us speaking.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
It was me, David Hogg, X Gonzalez, Cameron Cask I
believe David was in TV production with me. Xually I
had known since freshman year, and Cameron Caske I had
known through theater, which was like we worked a lot
and we had a lot of overlap with.
Speaker 3 (29:37):
The theater program. I gave a speech and I started
doing interviews.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
We get these people who come up to us and
they're like, hey, I think it was CBS. We want
to take the four of you and we want to
do a sit down interview in a hotel room tonight,
and we want to broadcast it. We wanted to be
like a big thing, so we did this sit down interview.
After the sit down interview, Cameron Caske walks up to
me and is like, Hey, come to my house tonight.
And I go what he said, Yeah, come to my
house tonight. I can't tell you, I'll tell you.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
There.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
I walk in, there's this huge dream of people. All
these people that I've known for a long time are
there and they're all like on the phone and they're
organizing and they're taking calls and they're messaging, and he
kind of like it calls the meeting to order. He's like, Hey, everyone,
we're going to do something. And I think we're going
to do the March for our Lives and we're going
to do a march on Washington And he's like, we're
going to announce it and then we're going to have
it organized by March twenty fourth. Then we realize it's
(30:26):
going to happen. We have a month to put it together,
and we are all on board and signed on for
this thing. So we are the March for our Lives.
We decided a march would.
Speaker 3 (30:38):
Be this moment to.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
Show that people weren't gonna take it anymore. That it
wasn't going to be thoughts and prayers anymore. We wanted
a mass mobilization. We understood the power of protest, and
that was like a thing that when you learn about
all these movements, particularly student and youth led movements, you're like, Okay,
well we're going to do this, and yeah, March on
Washington was ambitious, definitely ambitious.
Speaker 3 (31:00):
There was a little bit of fear, I think that
it wasn't going to come together in a month, but
it did.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
We're going to do this one thing that gives us
hope for the first time in what was days but
felt like an eternity. That was the first feeling of like,
thank God, we have this thing, this thing that we
can do to feel something other than pain and to
feel hope and to push towards a positive thing that
(31:28):
can only last so long. So pretty quickly things started
like you know, there's tensions, there's high school conflict, there's
distrust and dislike for each other. So it evolved over
a period of months and devolved over a period of
months into like needing to have sit downs with outside
(31:49):
mediators who were like, you guys do not like each
other right now, and you.
Speaker 3 (31:52):
Are at each other's throats and we need to figure
this out. Of course, we all dated each.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Other too, and that's a whole other thing of like,
once again, when you put a bunch of high schoolers
in our room together. We spent all of our waking
hours together, and we a little of it were like,
oh my god, we're changing the world. So there was
a lot of hormones, there was a lot of unresolved
trauma and grief, and there was a lot of responsibility
that we were feeling. So some friendships got really close
(32:19):
and then collapsed. I made some of my best friends
and then lost some of my best friends in that timeframe,
and they were the same people, and like, it was
just a constantly shifting landscape of who's okay with, who,
who can work with? Who, who likes each other, who
doesn't like each other. And that was one of those
things where I'm like, in hindsight, I almost feel like
we needed and it would have been impossible because were
(32:40):
still building an organization. I feel like we needed like
an HR manager or something, because we should not have
been in charge of all of that without somebody checking
in on us emotionally. And eventually we kind of established
that infrastructure, but we was so baked into us to
not feel our emotions and not share our emotions that
it would just come out in all these other ways.
So I became incredibly close with them, and I feel
(33:03):
like we all are forever linked. But I also know
that we had a lot of moments of drama, teenage
drama that was put on the national stage and also
involved millions of dollars and people counting on you, which.
Speaker 3 (33:19):
Is a really fun recipe.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
We were not giving ourselves space or time to feel anything.
Nobody else is giving us space or time to feel
anything like nobody's were these inspiring teenagers, And that is
one of those things that I've had to break down.
Speaker 3 (33:35):
Over the years of like, oh, you guys are so
strong and so inspiring.
Speaker 2 (33:38):
I'm like, yeah, but we were also so broken and
what we needed in that moment, yeah, it was to
do this.
Speaker 3 (33:44):
But I also sometimes.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Feel regret and anger at the fact that I'm like,
why did you guys let this happen? Nobody could have
stopped us, No one could have stopped me, clearly, but
I like, damn, I wish somebody had sat us down
and kind of been like, take a beat, you know, and.
Speaker 3 (34:03):
If we did.
Speaker 2 (34:03):
Problem is if we did take a beat, keep on
moving without us, So we couldn't take a beat, like
we all knew, if any of us stopped to feel
our feelings or took a break or like backed off
for personal reasons, the train would keep moving and we
wouldn't be able to get back on the way I
feel about my work with much of our lives changes
(34:26):
practically every day, particularly the more that I reflect on it.
And then also the question of did it change anything?
And I think that is a really tough thing to
grapple with for me, where I'm like, we did all that,
We threw our lives away for a while, we traumatize
ourselves and then add an entirely new level of trauma
(34:46):
on top of it for what And then I get
angry about that. But then somebody comes up to me,
particularly young kid, and is like, you change things for me,
You inspired me, You made me feel like I could
do something. The fact that it changed things for some
kids and that it at least gave them a voice
is kind of That's what I hold on too. I
(35:08):
used to hear it a lot more when I was
doing organizing actively because these kids were coming up to me.
But yeah, being able to hear it now sometimes it
checks me a little when I get a little bit
too dark and twisty about all of it, because I'm
very cynical now, so that cynicism kind of bleeds into
the hope that I have then, because I'm.
Speaker 3 (35:27):
Not seeing the change that I wanted to.
Speaker 2 (35:36):
Pre shooting, I wanted to go to the University of Georgia,
go dogs and go to journalism school. I had applied
to a bunch of schools, but that was the one
I toured, and I was like, this campus is gorgeous.
I think I can do this. Grady is a great school.
I'm out of state, like it was the dream for me.
Post shooting, A bunch of adults got in my ear
and this was not malicious. They got in my ear
(35:56):
and they went, you're going to go to a state
school in Georgia. I studied journalism, you need to go
into politics.
Speaker 3 (36:05):
So I negotiated.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
I was like, Okay, I apply to American University in
DC and I'll study public policy. Because I was like,
this is what I should be doing, and this is
what people keep telling me I should be doing, is
going into politics and making a difference that way. I
had a lot of really negative experiences with reporters and
a lot of really negative experiences with the media where
I felt I felt taken advantage of. I felt like
(36:27):
boundaries were crossed, and seeing firsthand the way the media
industry worked, the way the machine worked to us, I
was like, Oh, my god, do I want to be
a part of this?
Speaker 3 (36:37):
Do I even want to be a journalist?
Speaker 2 (36:38):
So I really started questioning that, and I'm getting all
this feedback of out like no, do politics, do politics?
Speaker 3 (36:43):
Or you could be really good at it.
Speaker 2 (36:45):
So I applied to American, I got in. I applied
to UGA, I got in. I remember getting really excited
when I found out I was accepted to UGA because
it was something that I had done completely independent of
the shooting. When I got into American, I didn't feel
as excited because I also would have only been able
to afford one semester of tuition and then from there
I would have had to figure it out.
Speaker 3 (37:04):
And the moment that I.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
I backtracked on all of that, it was a college
decision day in high school where you wear the shirt
from the college that you're going to, and I remember
being like I had some UGA merch because I wanted
to go to UGA. I was like, I don't have
any American University merch and I was like, they don't
even have like a college culture. I would just be
going there and being in the city. And my friend
(37:28):
who was going to go to UGA later backed out,
was wearing her UGA shirt and I was wearing a
stupid like maybe blue T shirt. And I was like,
uh oh, I don't feel excited about this. I don't
feel happy about this. And I panicked. That was the
day that, like you had to It was the day
after deposits were due. So I emailed UGA and like
a panic, I was like, can I please come? Can
(37:49):
I please come here instead? I know I did not
commit here. I know I missed the deadline, but I
really want to go here more than anything, And can
I come and can I defer a semester?
Speaker 3 (37:57):
And they said yes. So I lost six.
Speaker 2 (37:59):
Hundred dollar on the American University deposit. I put down
the deposit for UGA, and I made what was the
first decision for me in a long time, because I
knew that would mean going out of state, going away
from the whole nonprofit organization, going away from the political
machine and being a college student. So I decided to
(38:20):
be a college student, and I decided to give journalism
a chance and hope that I could change it. There's
been a lot of changes and I think phases that
I've gone through. I have never been religious. I know,
I was not raised with religion, so I did not
find religion. Sometimes I think maybe that would have been
(38:43):
a comfort. But I'm fine without it. I'm managed without it.
I found other ways, and a lot of that involved
being introspective and looking at my own feelings.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
But I did kind of transform a couple of times.
So for me, there's like chunks.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
The chunk of me going to college it was almost
I was trying so hard to be young again, so
I got really into, you know, nonsensical stuff like I
didn't want it to be serious unless I decided it
was serious. So I took a lot of you know, comfort.
Speaker 3 (39:17):
In watching like stupid cartoons and bad.
Speaker 2 (39:20):
Movies and like listening to what I liked, whether or
not that was considered cool enough. Because once I got
to college, it was a lot of these kids who
were like I read Hagel and I only watch esoteric
films and like a lot of people who are trying
very hard to seem like they're mature, And there were
some moments where I think people kind of I don't
(39:42):
think they thought it was immature, but I think I
seemed like maybe I didn't.
Speaker 3 (39:46):
Know as much.
Speaker 2 (39:47):
But it was largely because I realized I had already
lived way more lifetimes than these people, and a lot
of them were trying to substitute for a lack of living,
whereas I had experienced all of this hell on earth
and I didn't really need to be substituting it by
living vicariously through something else. So I was very adamant
about the fact that I wanted to preserve that nonsense
(40:08):
and preserve that frivolity and silliness.
Speaker 3 (40:11):
So I worked very hard to get that back, and
then COVID hit that way through college.
Speaker 2 (40:20):
I was very fresh when I went to college, it
was and that was one of things when I was
looking at hindsight, I was like, oh, I was not
far enough removed from anything to be healed, but I
had convinced myself I was healed. And then understanding that
it's been like a long process that started happening post COVID,
where I was like, Okay, I need to really understand
(40:42):
like how I've been dealing with these things and what
it means for me to deal with my emotions the
way I have, and understand why I'm so closed off,
understand why my impulse is to write about these things
because it's safe to write about it where I can
have control over the narrative and I can perform it
and deliver it in the way that I want versus
really feeling it. Does that mean that I, you know,
(41:07):
changed the behavior. No, it means that I just I
got it a little bit more and like learning how
to open up to people and just kind of figure
out who I would be as DeLine guitar not Delane
guitar youth activist, because my entire identity had been built
around that for so long and it was one of
those things that even though it was, you know, in
(41:29):
the long run, not a crazy amount of time to
be super involved, it was an identity that followed me.
So I, you know, I didn't distance myself from it,
but I did try and like incorporate into myself but
not let it dominate myself. And that became part of
it too, where I was like, this is one part
of my identity, but I've lived enough since then that
it's not the only part of my identity. And I've
(41:51):
made enough friendships and had enough experiences since then that
I can be more than that thing. Whereas post shooting
like that was the thing, everything else felt are the
way side. I'm still understanding things, but I've been specifically
writing about it a lot lately, and that has forced
(42:11):
me to confront a lot of things that I forgot about,
a lot of things that I maybe didn't put the
pieces together on. So I feel like I'm at a
new point of understanding of myself and at a new
point of like grappling with myself. I feel like a person,
and I don't think I felt like a person after
the fact, but I'm a different person, you know, And
I think everybody that I know now really understands that
about me and is conscious of it in a way
(42:34):
that I think is really beautiful and loving.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
Welcome back to Alive again, joining me for a conversation
about today's story. Are my other Alive against story producers
Nicholas Dakowski and print Day, and I'm your host, Dan Bush.
Speaker 4 (43:10):
You know what drew me to Delaney's story is the
fact that we are surrounded by this decades long epidemic
of gun violence in this country. And you know, one
thing that we don't get to hear a lot is
(43:31):
sort of how what the long term effects are on
the people who go through this. We hear the stories
of what happened in the moment, you know, and we
go and this is a sickness in our society. I
think that, like true crime is a symptom of like
true crime shows and podcasts for the fascination with that
(43:51):
symptom of this sickness. We want to like it's like
we want to know everything about the evil, you know,
the quote unquote what causes it was, what was in
his brain that made him this way, But we never
fucking focus on like the long term effects has the
people who are victims of this stuff, Like they're interesting
(44:14):
in that they can tell us what happens, They can
give us all the gruesome details, but like nobody seems
to give a shit what happens once the cameras are
turned off and they have to like go home and
these seventeen year olds have to like sleep at night
and eat food.
Speaker 5 (44:32):
What struck me about her telling of this was how
lighthearted and humorous she was able to make her presentation.
I mean, she'd gone through this traumatic thing, and she
still carried this joy, this natural personality.
Speaker 4 (44:50):
And I hopefully she wouldn't be insulted by this. But
she also has like theater kid energy, you know, this
like intellectual curiosity and excitement, you know. I think think
that's just her personality. She tells the story well because
she's it's not just because she's an excellent storyteller at heart,
but because she's practiced in telling it. One of these
(45:10):
one of the aspects of this story. And I think
the thing that was the most interesting to me was
that not only she survived this experience of being right
there at death's door, and it was super important and
something that happens constantly in this country, but she also
went through the experience of becoming famous for having this
(45:35):
trauma before her and went out on a speaking tour
before she'd had a moment to process this, before she'd
had before a week had passed, she'd already done a
half dozen interviews, and they were already planning March for
our lives, like days after days after people they knew
(45:57):
were killed were murdered. So you know, she she became
very practiced to telling a story before she'd even processed it.
And she was seventeen when it happened, So she has
all of these different things going on in her skull
before she before she even has this traumatic event and
(46:18):
is thrust into the limelight. So all of these horrifically
traumatic Like that in itself was deeply traumatic, is that
she was basically put in front of cameras, you know,
vilified by a large percentage of the right, or just
outright dismissed as being stupid kids who are just out
(46:39):
there speaking about their experience and going like, hey, maybe
if this guy didn't have a gun, that could have
murdered a lot of people quickly, a lot of people
would not be dead. And maybe that is the case
in many places. And you know, these kids are villified
for this. So the fact that Delaney, six gant years later,
(47:01):
is able to have a sense of humor about this stuff,
is able to be vulnerable even a little bit, is
amazing and it speaks very well to her character and
to the character of a lot of the kids who
went on to do March for Our Lives.
Speaker 5 (47:19):
Yeah, she seemed to question the effectiveness of what they
had done, and I think, you know, you're a teenager,
you're growing emotionally personally through this period. What a difficult
thing to be thrust in the limelight the way they were.
But to me, it was an incredibly inspiring thing. The
(47:40):
way they pulled together, the smartness of how they use
social media, how they turned a lot of these NRA
arguments on their head. And the fact that NRA is
tumbling because of their own financial problems, not because of
anything that this society has done to rise up and
stop these things from happening, is so discouraging. But I
don't think she or any of the kids who are
(48:01):
involved in March for Our Lives should ever question what
they did. I mean, it was to me a heroic
act and as a very core of what makes this
country great is when people see it wrong and they
get together and they address it. I thought they were
so smart and how Yeah, she should be perpetually proud
of what.
Speaker 4 (48:20):
I agree with you. I think that like so often,
we get so bogged down in arguments about the guns
themselves that we we literally overlook the humanity of the
people who are who are in front of the guns
getting shot at, and I think that, you know, I
think that, like Delaney has been asked a million times
(48:43):
what she felt like that day, She's been asked a
million times about like the work that she does for
March for our lives. Because of the nature of what
we're doing in this show, we're less focused on the
event themselves than how the event affects you as a
human being. So our show necessarily is asking what happened later.
Speaker 1 (49:05):
It's almost it's almost like her transformation had to do
more with navigating for six years the waters of the
student movement and of being in the line in the
spotlight as a teenager. I expected to hear like, oh, this,
this shooting happened and it made me, you know, our
typical sort of what we always hear about about these
(49:27):
experiences being immediately transformative. I think what was fascinating about
her story was the events after after the actual incident,
that that train that spoke to her transformation.
Speaker 5 (49:38):
I love that she's planning in the hour before the shooting.
She's texting with her dad. He's going to make his
dinner for them. You know, she's planning her evening. The
shooting happens and she goes home and they eat the
dinner that was planned in the night, presites as planned.
I I love those little details. I love that her
mom texts her, don't fart in there while the shooting
(49:59):
is going on. That the these moments where they're under
extreme darrest, but there's still this relationship with her parents.
There's still a time for brevity, for humor, there's still
right She's still a high school kid. You know, we
see a day. She presents the day as a normal
(50:19):
day for.
Speaker 1 (50:20):
Any high school kid.
Speaker 5 (50:21):
It was Valentine's Day. They weren't paying attention to their classes,
they were excited about Valentine's Day. They're playing these things
and then it's almost like seventh period. The shooter comes
and up ends our lives, and then we are expected
to go back into our normal routines. What she does,
but then, you know how quickly they seize that moment
to say, you know, fuck no, man, this has happened enough.
(50:44):
I mean the fact that she's hiding in her closet, going,
my god, I was just talking to my mom about
what I would do in this situation.
Speaker 1 (50:51):
I love how she and and the other students that
were part of the movement with or refused to acknowledge
the shooter's name. That's what the shooter wants, that's all
they want. But in our case, there is a direct
result from the Parkland shooting that shows its face in
(51:11):
the next story, Aileen Murray's because that shooter on that
bridge for Aileen Murray's story, guess what he was. He
was inspired by the manifesto of the Parkland shooters.
Speaker 5 (51:22):
Yeah, and he almost killed a good friend of mine.
Speaker 4 (51:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
So it is you know, to talk about the perfasiveness
of this, and and and and then both stories, it's
sort of, you know, it's we could be so easy
to be again. This comes up again and a lot
of our stories of like the idea of victimhood and
who's the victim and kind of like in Manuel Beo's
story of he was the victim, but his captors and
(51:48):
his uh, the cartel that abducted him, and the kids
who were forced to torture him, they were also victims.
And it's hard to deep dig down, but these I
wonder if these stories point us towards that, how do
you have compassion for this person who's lost their humanity,
this person who's in you know, and we talk about
(52:08):
Eileen Murray's story. She also says, I don't feel bad.
You know, I don't have hatred for the shooter. I
have hatred for the politicians. I have hatred for the
legal system. I have hatred for the insurance companies. It's
so easy for us to and we're so trained to go.
You know, the monster is this individual or their parents
that you know, at what point do we all start
(52:31):
to take responsibility. Next time I'm Alive again, we meet
Aaron Ralston, who's solo Canyon expedition turned into a harrowing
fight for survival. Trapped for days with no escape, Aaron
made the unthinkable decision to amputate his own arm in
order to save his life. I step out of my
grave and into my life. And that is when I
(52:55):
almost passed out, but not from the pain, but from
the infinite possibility of having.
Speaker 3 (53:00):
A life again.
Speaker 1 (53:02):
His incredible story, immortalized in the film one hundred and
twenty seven Hours, is a testament to the boundless strength
of the human will in the drive to survive even
when all hope seems lost. Our story producers are Dan Bush,
Kate Sweeney, Brent Die Nicholas Dakoski and Lauren Vogelbaum. Music
(53:24):
by Ben Lovett, Additional music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive
producers are Matthew Frederick and Trevor Young. Special thanks to
Alexander Williams for additional production support. Our studio engineers are
Rima El Kali and Nomes Griffin. Today's episode was edited
by Mike w Anderson, mixing by Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez.
(53:44):
I'm your host, Dan Bush. Special thanks to Delaney Tarr
for sharing her story. For more about Delaney and her work,
visit her website Delaney Tar dot WordPress dot com. To
learn more about March for Our Lives and how you
can get involved, go to Mark for OurLives dot org.
Alive Again as a production of I R Radio and
Psychopia Pictures. If you have a transformative near death experience
(54:08):
to share, we'd love to hear your story. Please email
us at Alive Again project at gmail dot com. That's
a l I v E A g A I N
P R O j E C T at gmail dot com.
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