For a while, it’s going to be scary. It’s going to be difficult. Life in Bend will be hard.

Whether you were inside the Safeway store during the shooting on Sunday, or heard about it, you will feel a sense of loss, a sense of sadness or fear. Seven days is not enough time to recover.

“The more we acknowledge the trauma and put energy into healing, the more we can reduce the impacts of the trauma,” said Shannon Lipscomb, an Oregon State University-Cascades associate professor of human development and family science. “We all need to give ourselves permission to recognize that it’s going to be hard.

“Our sense of safety has been shaken.”

For some just saying the word “Safeway” might trigger fear. Trauma comes from just knowing that at 7:04 p.m. Sunday, a 20-year-old Bend resident opened fire inside the east Bend grocery store, firing more than 100 rounds from a semiautomatic rifle. He killed Donald Ray Surrett Jr. and Glenn Edward Bennett before taking his own life.

Two others were injured at the shooting at The Forum Shopping Center. Since the shooting, the community has held a vigil, posted signs of loss and affection, and created a flower-draped memorial to the loss of life — positive ways the community can come together to heal, Lipscomb said.

“Talking, being in community, or doing other types of therapy, unlocks the emotional energy that the tragedy holds over us and allows us to regain control,” Lipscomb said.

Bend will not be alone. On the same Sunday, 14 people died in eight shootings across the country. They were in Wisconsin, New York, Texas, Colorado, Michigan, California and Arizona, according to the Gun Violence Archive, an online archive of gun violence in the United States.

But recovery is possible.

It’s important to remember that the entire community has been involved in an extremely traumatic event, said Molly Wells Darling, St. Charles Health System administrative behavioral health director.

“Healing starts with supporting our community and knowing if someone’s having a reaction to an event. It’s pretty normal, even if you didn’t work there or shop there,” Wells Darling said. “It was horrific and everyone will react differently.”

The stress of the event can develop hours, days or weeks later, and depends on the severity of the event and past trauma, she said.

“The community is a victim as well,” Wells Darling said. “Everyone will have their own reaction and that’s ok. The more we talk about it, the better.”

Newport Market expresses kinship

In the parking lot outside Newport Market, the street sign offers a simple tribute to grocery store workers across town: “Love to Safeway and our community.”

Inside the market, chief operating officer Joe Anzaldo sees grocery shoppers come and go each day, though the last few days have seemed a little quieter, a little more solemn than usual. Online shopping numbers picked up a bit, though. Sadness and grief have been the predominant emotions all week in the store, he said. He described the shooting rampage as senseless and he feels solidarity with Safeway workers.

One employee told Anzaldo that the shooting made her think about the “run-hide-fight” training she had received in the store. She’s made mental notes in case she needs to escape. Anzaldo thinks the training has been on the minds of others this week in his store.

“We just try to educate people around that, involve the state police and sheriff to keep it fresh in people’s mind of what you do (in an active shooter situation), and we hope to God we don’t get there,” he said. “But it’s getting pretty damn close.”

With emotions still raw, Anzaldo said it’s difficult to put into words how to discuss its aftermath and how the community will heal. Certainly, mental support and related resources are needed, he said, and the community also needs to have conversations around the mental toll that the incident has taken.

“As a society, we need to put it out there, get people talking,” said Anzaldo. “Just having that conversation, having that conversation and see what comes out of it.”

— Michael Kohn

Schools can be a forum for healing

For Bend-La Pine school board member and Central Oregon Community College success coach Marcus LeGrand, community healing will come through community conversation.

“It’s okay to spend time with one another,” LeGrand said. “In a way where we’re having these conversations about how we can not just protect one another, but be able to have conversations where if someone is hurting or having troubles, they know what resources are available for them.”

The pandemic, and the isolation that came with it, especially for students whose classes and extracurriculars were relegated to Zoom calls for months on end, means even more healing is necessary, LeGrand said.

“As much as we may not think about it, the pandemic plays a lot into what goes on. A lot of people have not been able to get out and do a lot of things,” LeGrand said. “We still need to take an opportunity to be able to do some healing in that regard.”

But schools can be a place to have that dialogue, he said.

“I think this gives us an opportunity to have a great needs assessment for, ‘Hey, what do we need?’” LeGrand said. “That’s sad that we are in a place where no one feels like they have an outlet, and that’s what we want to provide for families.”

Building connections across all lines in the community is central to the path forward, LeGrand said.

“How you build a better future with this is, don’t stop talking about mental health, don’t stop talking about things that affect us, don’t stop talking and having conversations,” LeGrand said. “We can get so buried in our day-to-day, we forget to have conversations.”

— Zack Demars

Tower restores trust by reviewing emergency plans

On Monday, Tower Theatre staff reviewed the theater’s 25-page emergency operations plan, said Ray Solley, executive director of the Tower Theatre Foundation, the nonprofit that operates the historic downtown theater, which seats 450.

“We have the police coming to do an active shooter training, which we’ve done several times before,” he said. “Yes, it’s for the comfort level of the patrons, but it’s also our comfort level, so we know we have a checklist, we know what to do, and we have enough experience and rehearsal so that doing it becomes something that we can do automatically and not panic if something happens.”

How does Bend recover? Is that possible?

“I’m not sure that you ever recover from a traumatic experience,” Solley said. “I don’t know that recovery in the traditional sense of the word is what happens. You adapt, you learn, you realign… You can’t just go and pretend like it didn’t happen, or go back to some normal — or assume it’s going to happen again next Sunday. You can’t live that way, either.

“I do think we’re all going to be affected, and act slightly differently. It’s part of adapting and changing and being resilient and trying to overcome these things, not succumb to these things.”

Solley brought up a post he’d seen earlier last week from The Rev. Steven Koski of First Presbyterian Church of Bend, which read, “May we be the reason someone believes there is still good in the world.”

That’s within the power of a performing arts institution such as the Tower.

“We have to be reasons why somebody believes there is still good in the world,” Solley said.

— David Jasper

Encourage passion in young people

As the city of Bend grapples with what happened at Safeway a week ago and what drives people to such violence, Molly Cogswell-Kelley, the Bend-based Mt. Bachelor Sports Education Foundation events director, is reminded that everybody needs a passion in their life.

“The things that I do with our organization and what we do as a club, we promote a healthy lifestyle by doing the things that we love, which are competitive sports and being in the outdoors,” Cogswell-Kelley said. “We’ve just got to continue to push that mission of how important it is to have something in your life that you just love so much.”

It’s important to ensure those activities are accessible to everyone, Cogswell-Kelley said.

“We have to pay attention and we have to listen,” said Cogswell-Kelley. “We have to listen, because there’s a lot of people out there that are struggling and there’s little, teeny signs that they give people, that if you’re not listening then you’re not going to know.”

Listening and being kind to one another can go a long way as Bend continues to recover, Cogswell-Kelley said. She wants to tell her friends and neighbors to not give up hope, and to not live in fear.

“People are kind, and when things like this do happen, you always see the best of people,” Cogswell-Kelley said. “I tend to always believe that people are pretty wonderful. I want to make sure that we don’t lose sight of that.

“Unfortunately, these things happen and they’re becoming more frequent, but if we can always be nice to each other, and if we do see someone struggling, that you don’t ignore it, but you reach out. I know it’s uncomfortable, but it’s really important to reach out to people. Because sometimes that’s all they need.”

— Mark Morical

City of Bend needs to act to end gun violence

Bend Mayor Gena Goodman-Campbell had been out of cellphone range camping with her family when she learned upon her return that her city had dramatically changed.

“The trauma of this shooting will be with our community now and forever,” Goodman-Campbell said. “It’s a part of our story.It’s not just something you can heal and move on from.”

Goodman-Campbell said she had an experience with gun violence earlier in her life that made the Safeway shooting twice as difficult to cope with.

“I think it’s important for us as leaders to not just have this be a moment that we’re responding to. We’ve expressed our commitment as the whole city council to doing everything in our power to advocate for the policies that we need to end gun violence in this country,” Goodman-Campbell said.

Goodman-Campbell said she has kept in mind the good that people are capable of in the face of great tragedy. She said it’s up to everyone in the community, including those in positions of power, to remember Sunday’s events, to offer each other support and to foster more good in the world in spite of the bad.

Mayor Pro-Tem Anthony Broadman was 12 years old when someone fired a gun at his father, missing him by only a few inches. “You never fully heal from the trauma of gun violence,” he said.

He was on the scene near Safeway Sunday night, along with Councilor Melanie Kebler and Councilor Stephen Sehgal. “I hope that everybody in the community continues to give each other a lot of grace,” Broadman said.

He said his goal is to have people feel safe going to school, going to worship and going to the grocery store.

“I know people are very scared right now,” Broadman said. “I think that’s normal.”

What has worked for him and his family is “embracing order in the face of disorder,” Broadman said.

Broadman said he feels gratitude for those who acted heroically on Sunday, yet is grappling with how best to have tough conversations with community members — young children in particular — who have been affected by this. Broadman said he wants to look toward discussions of “common sense firearm safety.”

“It’s okay to look for solutions even in the darkest moments while we mourn, while we struggle, while we grieve,” Broadman said.

— Anna Kaminski

Bend store owner tries to instill joy and love

Two days after the Safeway shooting, Katy Clabough, owner of Nancy P’s Bakery and Café, shared a video on Instagram of her and her friend, Amy Castano, driving around Bend in an old, red Volkswagen Beetle.

The caption read, “as much as we feel pain we also have the right to feel joy and love and happiness and the simple bliss of a ride in (a) VW Bug.”

The post serves as a reminder to the Bend community to extend a little extra kindness and grace.

When Clabough thinks of the gunman, she thinks of her children, including a daughter who graduated from high school the same year as the gunman.

“Whatever it was that brought him to that,there’s probably so many different things in his life that none of us could understand,” Clabough said.

Clabough watched as her children returned to school after two years of grappling with the pandemic and saw the toll it took on them.

“There’s no support for what those kids went through with COVID-19,” she said, pointing out that children attending sixth grade at the beginning of the pandemic missed out on the remainder of middle school and the social dynamics involved.

She strongly believes that addressing mental illness should be part of the school curriculum.

“I think about that boy,” said Clabough. “I don’t know his story, or anything.”

But she wonders: Did anyone check on him or offer help or a way forward?

— Janay Wright

Give back to the community as a way to heal

The Bend community can come back from the tragedy and the grief it feels by doing acts of service, said Rabbi Yitzchok Feldman of the The Family Shul at Chabad of Central Oregon.

“It’s natural to feel discouraged and even helpless after such a senseless, evil act,” Feldman said.

One way to work through grief is to give back as much as possible, not only by comforting those in mourning, but by increasing in mitzvahs (good deeds) “to add more light during dark times,” Feldman said.

“Every human being can and must participate in healing society and ensuring that such hatred and horror does not strike again,” Feldman said.

The community can come together to scrub itself of hatred by performing a few simple actions, he said.

Give, even a little bit, to charities that help the community, Feldman said. By giving a little every day, it trains individuals to reach out to others who are less fortunate and to think of others.

“To become a giver ensures that caring for others becomes central to our lives,” Feldman said.

“When someone becomes a giver at a young age, it’s hard to hate others so blindly. Kindness is contagious. One positive action can have a ripple effect and change the entire world for good.”

— Joe Siess

Coach tells players ‘Don’t let evil win’

In preparation of the first game of the 2022 boy soccer season, coach Donnie Emerson had a message for his Mountain View players:

“We aren’t going to let this evil win,” Emerson told the team.

The gunman, who graduated from Mountain View in 2020, has been linked to online posts that specifically targeted the high school.

“You hear about school shootings all the time in the news, but you never think that it is going to happen in Bend,” said Mountain View senior Cole Hersey, who had an auto class with the gunman. “Especially someone you know shooting up your school.”

The fear may never disappear, Emerson said. But when left with a couple of options in the immediate aftermath of Sunday’s shooting, the decision to get back together and practice was viewed as the best one for the team of Mountain View students.

“We have to get through this together,” Emerson said.

Sports are often framed as a way to teach life lessons through competing, overcoming challenges and working together. Emerson tapped into that ethos when addressing his team of Mountain View students.

“The things that sports teach you is the importance of team and family,” he said. “When hard things happen like this you need to lean on each other. If there are people on the team struggling, we are going to help them.”

— Brian Rathbone