The Excruciating Echo of Grief in Uvalde

UVALDE, Texas — In a cemetery on the edge of Uvalde, a cluster of fresh graves had been carved from the parched, rocky earth. The dead were claiming new ground: No sod had been laid. No trees had taken root to shield against an unrelenting South Texas sun.

Uvalde had weathered loss, but never anything like this. The community had crossed into unfamiliar terrain, as the massacre at Robb Elementary School created a marathon of mourning that started with vigils in the hours after the May 24 attack and continued for weeks until the last victims were buried.

On June 3, Javier and Gloria Cazares buried their daughter Jacklyn in one of the graves. On June 8, they returned for the burial of their niece, Annabell Rodriguez. A few days later, on a Sunday evening, they were back again with Jacklyn’s older sister, Jazmin. They had just been to the visitation for another classmate who was killed. On their way home, they stopped to collect the balloons they had set out for the 10th birthday Jacklyn was supposed to celebrate on June 10.

“We lost a child,” Ms. Cazares said. “We lost all of her friends. Our friends lost children.”

“It’s so much.”

Part of the cruelty of what Uvalde endured lay in the repetition: One funeral after the next — days with one in the morning, another in the afternoon and then a visitation after that — into the summer. The pastor giving a variation of the same sermon, beseeching an anguished community not to let its anger ferment into malice. The collections of 21 crosses, one for each of the 19 students and two teachers who were killed, that sprouted all over town.

It was an excruciating echo.

It also reflected an enormous undertaking, as overwhelming emotionally as it was logistically, to memorialize the dead and care for those now living with debilitating loss.

Uvalde’s plight is as agonizing as it is familiar. The attack, now more than 10 weeks past, initiated the city into a crowded cohort of American communities forced by a gunman’s actions to navigate the long, brutal path that is the aftermath of mass violence.

Soon, just as in Newtown and Parkland and Sutherland Springs — other places indelibly associated with shootings — the path will splinter into countless trails, diverging as individuals wrestle with varying degrees of trauma and heartache, confront their own struggles and move at their own pace.

But for now, Uvalde is bound by its collective grief.

Uvalde is a small community of roughly 16,000 people, situated in the scrubby, wide open territory between San Antonio and the Mexican border.

The shooting has made it feel even smaller.

In some ways, that has been reassuring, a testament to the community’s cohesion.

But it has also been constricting. And in the immediate aftermath, a crush of outsiders swarmed into town: law enforcement officials, reporters and camera crews, politicians, evangelists, Meghan Markle, motorcycle gangs, people who came to help, and others who slowly drove through town, drawn by lurid curiosity — all creating a sense that Uvalde was stuffed well beyond capacity.

The crowds have largely retreated and the mountainous memorials have been consolidated. The void has been filled by a growing outrage, inflamed by revelations about apparently catastrophic miscalculations by law enforcement officials who responded to the shooting.

And for months now, the community has been grappling with how much has been lost.

“As we deal with what has happened, we have a lot of questions without answers,” the Rev. Emmanuel Pacheco, the pastor of Church Time of Life in nearby Brackettville, told mourners on June 7.

“It’s OK to have questions,” he said. “And it’s OK to ask God why. God does not get offended by our questions.”

He was speaking at a viewing before the funeral for Xavier Lopez, 10. The boy lay in an open blue coffin with a Tejana hat set on top and sunflowers placed around it. X.J., as his family and friends called him, loved dancing to Tejano music and playing baseball.

The children were at an age where their families could see the people they were becoming — their talents, their personalities taking shape. Maite Rodriguez wanted to turn her passion for dolphins into a life as a marine biologist. Jacklyn Cazares — Jackie, as her family called her — talked ceaselessly about someday visiting Paris; a model of the Eiffel Tower sat on her bedroom dresser.

But families also held onto simple moments. As she spoke at his funeral, X.J.’s grandmother Amelia Sandoval reminisced about how warmly he greeted her every time she came to visit.

“We will always love you,” said Ms. Sandoval, her words overpowered by her sobs.

“I love you, baby.”

Amid the tides of frustration, anger, confusion and exhaustion, all of it eddying with sorrow, the early weeks of mourning also brought moments of profound kindness.

Every day, dishes were dropped off at the Cazareses’ house — one day, chicken Alfredo; another, enchiladas — part of a meal train that was organized to feed victims’ families. “It helps,” Jazmin Cazares said. “It helps so much.”

And whatever Uvalde couldn’t handle on its own, outsiders took care of, like personalized coffins for each of the children. One man built and erected a 15-foot cross that stands on a main street. Mariachi musicians from around the region performed in the plaza at the heart of the city.

Huge sums of money were raised, though initially, the Cazareses decided against taking any.

“It didn’t feel right,” Gloria Cazares said. “What was it going to do? It’s not going to bring our baby back.”

Yet some in her extended family tried to persuade her to reconsider. Ms. Cazares works as a home health nurse, and Mr. Cazares has a glass installation business. The relatives asked when they expected to return to work. She didn’t have an answer.

“So, they said, OK, then you have to have a way to pay your bills,” Ms. Cazares said, recounting the conversation. “That’s what everybody wants to help with.”

The family was still reluctant, but the point had gotten through.

Jazmin Cazares recently sent her sister, Jackie, a text message.

“Don’t forget to wake up early. We have summer academy tomorrow.”

Her brain had slipped into an alternate universe where, the next morning, they would be starting the fine arts program that stages a play each summer. Last year, it was “The Wizard of Oz.” (Jackie played a munchkin and a flying monkey; Jazmin did tech.) This year, it was supposed to be “Beauty and the Beast.”

Reality came crashing back.

“It was like it just hit me all over again,” Jazmin said.

A rising high school senior, Jazmin was seven years older than Jackie, but they were close. They had their sisterly squabbles, sure. “It upset me so much how she would copy me,” Jazmin said. Jazmin wanted to be a veterinarian, so Jackie wanted to be a veterinarian. Jazmin sang and acted, so Jackie started singing and acting. “I went into her closet the other day, and I saw three shirts of mine that I don’t remember giving her,” she said.

That did not mean Jackie wasn’t her own person. Her mother said she thought her nickname should be spelled Jacky, but Jackie decided otherwise. When she encountered panhandlers, she nudged her parents to give them money or buy them food.

In the days after Jackie’s funeral, the Cazareses’ home bustled during the day. Cousins came and went. Ringo, Lily, Chiquita and Roxy, the family’s dogs, demanded attention.

But at night, Jackie’s absence was inescapable.

“Everybody’s gone,” Ms. Cazares said, “and it’s just us.”

Jackie’s parents had spent their lives in the Uvalde area. Their roots were here, and they could be enveloped in the care of their sprawling families.

But the Cazareses did not dissuade their children’s curiosity about possibilities outside of Uvalde, imagining lives in places they had never visited. Jackie’s older brother enlisted in the Marines. For a while, Jackie wanted to be a Marine, too, until her brother told her about having to wake up at 5 a.m. Then, she had Paris. Jazmin dreamed of going to a university in Britain.

Uvalde High School’s prom was held 10 days before the shooting. “I went to take pictures at my girlfriend’s house,” Jazmin said, “and Jackie was crying the entire time.”

“Why are you crying?” she asked her. “There’s no reason to cry.”

“And I remember her saying that you go to prom, that means you’re going to leave me soon.”

In one of the photographs from that night, Jackie’s face was stained with tears. She was wearing a shirt she had taken from Jazmin.

In the days and weeks after the massacre, the story of what actually happened kept shifting. The temperature kept rising.

The initial official narrative of a swift and heroic response by law enforcement quickly disintegrated. Within 48 hours, the community learned that officers had delayed — some 78 minutes — confronting the gunman.

Mass shootings have produced many activists, as families and survivors are spurred to leap into the fray over gun safety. The same was happening in Uvalde. But the police response added another dimension to the community’s anger — a fury stoked by each new fact that emerged: The police chief arriving on the scene without his radio; officers spending precious time searching for a key to open a classroom door without checking to see if it was unlocked; the police, captured on video, milling around in a hallway.

“We know he was to blame 100 percent,” Ms. Cazares said of the gunman, “but we don’t know how many kids could have been saved.”

Javier Cazares believes his daughter could have been one of them. “If she got out in time,” he said.

Public meetings grew increasingly heated as the community demanded accountability. The Cazareses participated in a rally in Austin in June calling for tighter gun laws, carrying signs and telling the crowd about Jackie.

Mr. Cazares said that he was nervous and was not sure what to say, but he felt compelled to go and speak up. “It was powerful,” he said. “I’m willing to go out there and do as much as I can.”

If the circumstances were different — if Jackie were rehearsing for her part in “Beauty and the Beast” right now — he almost certainly would not be marching for more gun restrictions.

Mr. Cazares owns an AR-15, the devastatingly powerful rifle favored by gunmen in mass shootings. Since the attack, he has resolved to have his handgun with him more. He was upset with himself for leaving it behind the day of the shooting. Maybe, just maybe, an opportunity could have presented itself, he tells himself, and he could have taken out the gunman.

But he and his wife now argue that an 18-year-old, such as the Robb Elementary gunman, should not be allowed to buy that kind of weapon.

“We’re gun owners,” Ms. Cazares said. “We don’t want to take away guns — and especially in Texas, it’s Texas. But something has to change.”

On July 10, a crowd assembled in front of Robb Elementary. Ms. Cazares was trying to get the protesters — the families of victims and survivors, residents, activists who had come from out of town — ready for a march. Jazmin was handing out water and taking her spot in the front.

The funerals were over. The memorial of flowers, crosses and posters that had consumed the town square had been dismantled, the plaza now conspicuously empty.

But the protest reflected the depth and intensity of the anger that remained.

One demonstrator carried a large poster with 21 coffins and the message, “This is a reminder of what you didn’t do.” Others had signs calling officers “cowards.”

“Not one more child!” the protesters chanted.

Uvalde was now pushing into a new frontier of grief, its expressions of loss now tinged with indignation and imbued with a new sense of purpose.

“This is for justice,” Jazmin told the crowd. “This is for accountability. But above everything, this is for our freaking kids.”