Chapter 15
The international trips I took were planned well in advance, with every detail accounted for, but many of my domestic trips as First Lady were rapidly arranged visits in response to national tragedies.
Whenever something horrific happened, I felt called there as a representative of the country, to show people they were not alone.
Steeled for scenes of pain and misery, I would arrive to find wreckage still smoking, floodwaters still receding, grief still raw.
From Nashville, Tennessee, to mourn the victims of a school shooting, I would head to Mississippi to spend time with tornado survivors.
In every place, I met people whose lives were forever changed.
So much of the job of First Lady is to sit with people having the worst day of their life—wounded warriors, survivors of hurricanes, parents who’ve lost children to gun violence—to just be with them, to hold their hand and look in their eyes and tell them that they don’t need to go through it alone.
To me, that task was a great honor, and it required all my strength and composure.
I had to be fully present. I had to keep any distractions, any of my own anxieties or sorrows, at bay so I could absorb theirs.
When tragedy strikes, it’s amazing to see how people and organizations come together to help those in need.
FEMA, headed by Deanne Criswell, was always one of the first response teams to arrive, followed by the Red Cross, National Guard, United Way, and International Association of Fire Fighters, to name just a few.
José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen appears wherever they’re needed.
Not to mention mental health care and animal rescue workers.
We are so blessed to live in a country where the federal and state governments offer so much support.
People helping people—the strength of who we are as Americans.
The question of whether to go in person to the site of a tragedy was always an easy one for me: You show up, the same way you mail a condolence card when someone you know dies and get a baby gift when someone has a shower. Politics, though, complicated even these basic human gestures.
In November 2021, an SUV plowed into a holiday parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and killed members of a longtime dance troupe called the Milwaukee Dancing Grannies. I said I was going to visit. Some of Joe’s advisors said, “That’s a red area. Don’t go.”
I couldn’t bear not to go somewhere that had experienced that kind of tragedy just because few there had voted for Joe.
We were president and First Lady for all Americans.
I laid a wreath at the memorial and then went to city hall to meet with the victims’ families.
Out front, there were protesters, and the mood inside was tense.
I went up to people and introduced myself.
“Call me Jill,” I said, over and over. Gradually, everyone relaxed.
By the end, women were coming up to hug me and ask, “Can you take a picture with my daughter?”
In Lewiston, Maine, in November 2023 there had been a shooting at a bowling alley and a bar.
We were there to honor the dead and to do what we could to comfort the survivors.
Outside, protesters were screaming, cursing, holding up violent signs.
Even though there was no credible evidence that Joe hadn’t won the election, he was still being accused of stealing it.
The country was already fractured by COVID and then the January 6 insurrection, and the surrounding conspiracy theories about the election made it much, much worse.
On another trip to Hawaii, which was a mostly blue state, I’d visited a school and was leaving to go back to the car when a protest descended.
In the security field, they tend to especially worry about moving crowds, because those can get unruly.
I was concerned they were going to trap us between buildings.
But my aide and I moved swiftly. By the time we got back to the car, we were trembling.
I understood why I was often advised not to go to MAGA strongholds.
But to me, finding ways to grieve together outweighed every other consideration.
It’s what makes us human. So I went to places where they hadn’t voted for Joe because we’d promised to serve everyone, not just blue states.
I offered my hand to whomever was in front of me, whether they shook it or not.
The philosopher Albert Camus wrote, “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” Going around the country in the wake of tragedy, I tried to bring some message of hope into the dark places.
It never got easier visiting the sites of mass shootings.
On January 8, 2011, nineteen people were shot in a Tucson parking lot as Congresswoman Gabby Giffords spoke to her constituents.
After being shot in the head, Gabby persevered through a difficult recovery and became a strong advocate against gun violence.
In the years that followed, I came to be in awe of Gabby.
She’d seen the darkest parts of the human heart, and she’d responded by becoming a light to so many others.
In June 2023, I spoke at the Giffords Law Center’s thirtieth-anniversary celebration in San Francisco about the experience of bearing witness to so many gun deaths.
When I learned about thirteen-year-old shooting survivor Ava Olsen, from Townville, South Carolina, I thought, Her friend Jacob will never grow up.
Ava would try out different clothing trends and learn to drive.
She’d have crushes and graduate from high school.
But Jacob, the boy she imagined marrying, now forever dressed in his favorite Batman costume, would always be six.
After years of debilitating PTSD, unable to leave her home for fear of loud noises that would force her to relive those moments on the playground when she ran for her life, Ava returned to her studies. But the heaviness of Jacob’s small coffin would always weigh on her heart.
When I contemplated the state of gun laws in our country, I thought of those children who never got to grow up.
Daniel Barden of Newtown would always be seven.
Jaime Guttenberg of Parkland would always be fourteen.
Hallie Scruggs of Nashville would always be nine.
The number of children we’ve lost to mass shootings is unfathomable. The number of parents and siblings, teachers, journalists, police—innocent bystanders of every age. Those who died next to Gabby. Every massacre that turns our city names into synonyms for death.
The lives lost don’t tell the whole story.
They don’t tell us of the loved ones who must live with a black hole of grief inside them, forever trapped in that gravity.
They don’t tell us of the classmates and coworkers who saw the blood, who heard the shots ring out, who wake each night in a sweat from nightmares where they’re running and running.
Of the students who learn to live with fear, who know how to hide before they can spell.
The parents who must steel themselves as they put their children on the bus each morning.
The congregants who watch the door instead of the pulpit.
The communities of color who wonder when hate will shadow their doorstep with an AR-15 in hand.
The places where gun violence is too common to make the nightly news.
As a teacher, I imagined the scene in my own classroom more times than I could count.
At the start of each semester, I had to explain to my students what they should do if, God forbid, there was an active shooter.
We all feel the ripple effects. We’ve all lost a piece of ourselves—our security, our hope, our trust in one another.
If we supported the work of people like Gabby, we could build a future where we hear loud noises without ducking for cover.
Where we shop for groceries and go to movies without fear.
Where children like Daniel, Jaime, and Hallie would have been able to grow up.
When Joe and I visited the Uvalde memorial—just twelve days after we mourned with people who’d lost friends and relatives in a Buffalo, New York, grocery store shooting—we stood in front of twenty-one crosses.
I touched the pictures of the bright, beautiful faces of children who would never again laugh or open birthday presents or tell their parents that they loved them.
Teachers fell into my arms crying. We went to Mass at Sacred Heart with families broken by grief.
As we were leaving the sanctuary, someone in the crowd, articulating the desperation so many of us felt, yelled, “Do something!”
Joe worked with Congress to pass the first major gun safety law in almost thirty years.
Because of him, there was a mechanism in place to stop domestic abusers from buying guns.
We strengthened background checks for young people.
We increased funding for mental health programs and school security.
Joe took dozens of executive actions to keep firearms out of the hands of dangerous people and save lives.
Gabby Giffords came out in the wake of the 2024 election with words of comfort once again: “After being shot in the head and nearly killed, it would have been easy to lose hope—but I never did. Despite all the pain, I held on to my hopes for this country every bit as tightly as I did the hope that I would one day take a walk or talk with my family. I learned that trying times bring out the power of the human spirit.”
When Joe and I moved into the White House in January 2021, it felt as though we had the wind at our back. There was hope and promise. We could all breathe a bit more easily. Then, within months, the wind shifted.