By FRANCIS XAVIER SULLIVAN
It was Mother’s Day, 1979, when mother, asleep at home, next to my dad, received every mother’s nightmare phone call: “You need to come to New England Medical Center immediately. Your son, Francis, has been shot.”
I was 24 years old, strong, personable and gentlemanly, when four attackers, set out to kill me. One shot me twice in the head and once in the arm with a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun. I was left lying on the ground with blood and cerebral fluid oozing onto the sidewalk in Boston’s Chinatown neighborhood.
Doctors believed I might die, a priest heard what was supposed to be my final confession. God had a different plan. I lived and masked the stigmata of pain with humor: “What’s the worst thing about being shot in Chinatown? An hour later you want to get shot again.” Ha, ha. (My gallows humor aside, violent crime is not a laughing matters.)
My mother’s love and support helped me focus not on what I lost, but what remained.
After a court case that took nearly ten years, I was bitter and confused. The shooter was found not guilty. Two of his three accomplices were found guilty. Verdicts aside, there is never closure.
My mother urged me to focus on hope.
The bullets severely and permanently damaged my eyesight, but I relied on insight. I returned to college and obtained a degree in Journalism. I volunteered to tutor and mentor minority youngsters from throughout Boston’s toughest neighborhoods, traveling on foot or by bus because I could no longer drive due to my vision loss.
Why was I able to do handle the post-traumatic stress? How did I keep my head above the vicious, unforgiving vortex of resentment and revenge? Mom, that’s how.
Dad helped, too, as did my brothers and sisters. However, the unconditional love of my mother was, and remains, the elixir for emotional and physical pains.
What about victims who do not have a solid family foundation upon which to build a brighter future? What about victims who don’t have a relentlessly faithful mother who is so compassionate that she would advise me to pray for my attackers?
Watch a mother on Mother’s Day as she visits the grave of her child. Think about the mother’s whose nighttime companion is grief. Homicide statistics vary from city to city, but this number is finite: All mothers of victims of violence feel an indescribably unique pain.
This weekend, despite the many politically expedient promises to stop the mayhem, mothers endure. They rely on their womanhood, their instinct and their sweet souls. They teach us to see the light of a positive prism.
Perhaps, we should listen more to mothers. Theirs are the voices of love and reason during our most trying times. Crime’s nightmarish impact may appear to cripple their resolve, yet mothers remain steadfast in their mission to nurture, as is their beautiful nature.
Thanks, mom! Happy Mother’s Day!
Frank Sullivan, who has an honors degree in Journalism, lives with four blondes – his wife, two teen daughters and Maggie, a Golden Retriever. A known Toastmaster and Dale Carnegie student, Frank, is the recipient of several awards for his writing, his work on the Boston Fire Department and for his community activism. He has been everything from a dishwasher, to a prison guard, an advertising writer, a Boston Fire Department dispatcher and a sexual harrassment prevention and diversity awareness instructor.
