by Nomad
On Saturday, 8 January 2011, at ten minutes past ten in the morning, U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen others were shot in the parking of a supermarket in Tucson.
Six innocent people were murdered. The list of victims included including federal District Court Chief Judge John Roll, a nine-year-old girl, Christina-Taylor Green and three people all past the age of 75.
Another person who died that day was 30-year-old Gabe Zimmerman, the director of Community Outreach for Giffords. As his obituary noted:
He was outgoing, interested in other people and had a knack for connecting with folks, according to his friends and colleagues. He died doing his job.Over seven years have passed since his senseless murder and yet the impact he had on the people who knew him, who worked with him and who loved him endures to this day.
This story reminds me of the words of the great American author, Herman Melville.
“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”Being a part of this chain of cause and effect is perhaps the only glimpse of immortality the universe grants us.