Grief is complicated. It brings layers of guilt — for surviving. For seeing a place you love upended by a shocking act of violence. In losing the sense of security you’d always held close.
It is physical. Manifesting in shock, in anger and in destroyed furniture on the back lawn.
It is not linear and requires time, patience. It can be overwhelming at unexpected times.
It has been a year since Lewiston’s grief began. The shooting — the most deadly in Maine's history — came on a night when people were gathered for fun. They were playing pool and cornhole, bowling, eating dinner with friends.
For the people who were at Just-In-Time Recreation and Schemengees Bar & Grille last Oct. 25, it’s been difficult to return to those moments of joy. They have been left to grieve their loved ones, cope with trauma and question how something like this could happen in their community. Some of the 13 people who were shot and survived are still fighting to overcome devastating injuries.
Some found solace in the Maine Resiliency Center, in spending time with other survivors and victims in a place where they feel safe and understood. Others felt compelled to testify before the commission investigating the shooting or are considering how to use their experiences to advocate for change. For some, their grieving has been done in private as they focus on moving forward.
Six people who survived that night or lost a loved one reflected on what this past year has been like and how they have navigated their grief.
Brenda Hathaway
How do you explain death to a 1-year-old?
For weeks after her husband was murdered while playing pool, Brenda Hathaway would take her young daughter on a tour of the house every night.
She and Lilian would look at Maxx Hathaway's empty desk chair, the bed where he wasn't sleeping, the car he'd never drive again. "You have to do that over and over again," Hathaway, 39, said. "She's so young and she doesn't understand a lot of things."
Still in shock and eight months pregnant, Hathaway spent the first weeks without her husband trying to figure out how to make sure Lilian and her stepdaughter, Zoey, 12, were going to be OK. She scrambled to make child care arrangements now that Maxx, a stay-at-home father, wasn't there to help.
Lilian eventually saw a counselor for play therapy. They’d talk about Maxx, about death and about Lilian’s feelings. She struggled to sleep and hated being away from her mother. She'd stand between the shower curtains when Hathaway showered because she wouldn't let her mother out of her sight.
Six weeks after Maxx died, Hathaway gave birth to Anna Mei. Maxx had helped choose her name, a playful nod to his love of anime. She tucked photos of Maxx on the baby's bassinet.
Hathaway thinks often about how much Maxx would have loved to see his daughters together. Anna looks like her father and she wakes up every day "smiling like a sunbeam," Hathaway said.
In February, Hathaway found herself overwhelmed by anger. She dragged furniture into the backyard and beat it with a baseball bat while she screamed. Then she let herself cry.
She started grief counseling, a process that has helped her accept her anger and to find strategies to cope as she learns to live without the man she felt lucky to marry.
She occasionally goes to the resiliency center but sometimes feels like an outsider in groups of victims and survivors. Her most significant experience there came when the lost-and-found box from Schemengees was brought in and she found a hat that Maxx had lost months before he died.
Framed photos of Maxx and his girls cover Hathaway’s walls. Also there is a list Zoey helped make of "Traditions for Dad" that they should carry on: Thanksgiving nachos, 20-second hugs, family game nights, birthday cakes smashed into their faces. The list is pinned to a corkboard near a sign Zoey and Lilian made with their upside-down handprints that reads, "World's best dad, hands down."
Earlier this year, Hathaway got two tattoos to honor her husband. On one forearm is a heart circling a pool cue joint protector, a reference to one of her last memories of Lilian and Maxx together. As they ate dinner at Schemengees, Lilian pretended the protector was Chapstick.
The tattoo on her other forearm reads "I love you" in Maxx's handwriting next to images of two anime characters “Darling in the Franxx,” a show they watched together. In a scene where the characters are about to die, one says something along the lines of, "If there's another life after this, I will find you," Hathaway said.
"If there is another life after this, I really hope I meet him again," she said.
Jennifer Zanca
Jennifer Zanca had come a long way since the night when a bullet tore through her left shoulder, shattering the humerus bone and deltoid muscle.
She had emergency surgery to put a plate and 11 screws in her arm. She spent months in physical therapy to regain strength and mobility. She went to counseling and support groups as she tried to process the trauma of being injured in a mass shooting.
She went skiing last winter and by summer was able to get back on the golf course, at first holding her club with just one hand. She used a bone stimulator, a device that uses electric currents to stimulate growth, to help with healing and finally got to the point where she could lift her arm above her head.
But the injury was so devastating that it eventually became clear the wound was never going to heal because there was no blood supply to her bone.
Ten months after she was shot at Schemengees Bar & Grille, Zanca, 64, headed back to the operating room for a bone graft. Her trauma surgeon was familiar with wounds caused by high-velocity weapons — like the ones he treated while stationed in Iraq with the military. In a lot of ways, she said, the surgery felt like a setback.
"I think that's been one of the more difficult things to negotiate emotionally," she said.
Gripped by pain and unable to get comfortable, Zanca, a retired nurse, focused only on her physical recovery for the first six weeks. When she started going to therapy and attending sessions at the Maine Resiliency Center, she learned how trauma impacts the brain and body. She worked on strategies to calm her nervous system when she is around loud noises, sirens and crowded places.
She found comfort in the community at the center, where people understood how she was feeling without explanation.
Zanca also finds comfort in the good things that have come from tragedy — the new friends she's made, the inspiring stories of recovery, the love she feels from those around her.
"After the shooting, there was such an outpouring of support and just love," she said. "Our country has been so divided, and there's been a lot of vitriol, and for the first time, love was louder."
She went to the center one evening when a helicopter and emergency vehicles with blaring sirens rushing to a car crash left her shaken. She asked another survivor if he ever felt like he couldn't settle down. He told her he just missed his friends.
Those words helped Zanca refocus on being grateful, a feeling she has tried to keep at the front of her mind ever since. "I get to feel fear, I get to feel nervous, I get to be sad, I get to have grief," she said. "I get to have all that (because) I'm still here."
Justin Juray
In a year scarred by shock, sadness and sleepless nights, Justin Juray has managed to find the good.
After the shooting, he didn't know if he'd ever be able to set foot in his bowling alley again. Reopening after that kind of tragedy seemed impossible, but people in the community pushed him to consider it.
"This community needs this place, and we couldn't allow something like that to stop such a great venue," Juray said.
The bowling alley has been a staple in Lewiston for more than three decades. It has changed in ownership and name but remained a place where people gather for leagues and birthday parties and nights out with friends.
Juray, 44, grew up coming to bowl here with his father, and later joined an adult league. Three years ago, when the owner was about to close the business, Juray and his wife, Samantha, decided to buy it. They renamed it Just-In-Time Recreation.
The night of the shooting, Juray was bowling with his father while his wife worked in the kitchen. All three of them made it out uninjured, but two bowling alley employees and some regulars, who were more like friends, did not.
Juray spent the following weeks in a fog. A year later, that time is a blur.
"It was awful. There was nothing good," he said. "It was very traumatizing. It was very sad. It was a lot of funerals, a lot of crying, a lot of sleepless days and nights."
Juray started seeing a counselor and connected with the resiliency center. He worked on his mental and physical health and getting more sleep. He feels like he's made a lot of progress.
"Some days are better than others," he said. "Not a day goes by that I don't think about it, you know, but it's not the majority of my days now."
October has been difficult for Juray. He's not a fan of the month, he said, and he's been fielding lots of media requests for interviews. He continues to miss those who died and the sense of security he never imagined would be lost, but he's also seen the love and growth that came from tragedy.
"This community came together and has continued to come together," he said.
Six months after the shooting, Just-In-Time reopened to the public. The floors had been replaced, the walls repainted and a new scoring system installed. Above the lanes, panels were hung featuring photos of Lewiston taken by two local photographers.
The eight people who died there are remembered throughout the building — on the wall where their names are printed over an image of Maine, Lewiston marked with a red heart, and on two shelves of hand painted bowling pins. That display also includes the names of the 10 people who died at Schemengees.
"Statistically, most places are torn down or shut down or turned into a memorial," Juray said. "In some kind of sense, this is our memorial."
A week or so before the grand opening, there was a private gathering for people who had been there the night of the shooting. Staff from the resiliency center were on hand for support. Juray had extra security to help people feel safe. It was an emotional night, but it also felt good to see people — especially the kids — come back, he said.
"It was a good feeling because I know how I felt,” he said. “So to know that they were able to step foot through that threshold showed me that we made the right decision.”
Megan Vozzella
The weekend Megan Vozzella should have been celebrating her first wedding anniversary, she returned to the church where she was married. This time for her husband’s funeral.
Instead of reminiscing about their autumn-themed wedding, she was saying goodbye to the funny, sarcastic, fun-loving man she'd fallen for 14 years earlier. She spent the first few days after her husband’s murder in shock.
"I don't think I could really wrap my mind around what was happening," Vozzella, who is deaf, said through an interpreter. Steve Vozella was killed while playing cornhole with friends at Schemengees. Some of them were killed, too. It is believed to be the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history for people who are deaf and hard of hearing.
A year later, it still doesn't feel real. There are times she feels joy or happiness, then when it's dark, she'll flash back to that night.
"It destroyed our life," she said. "It threw everything into chaos."
As the shock wore off, Vozzella knew she had to be strong for her daughter, Bella, who is 13. She started seeing a counselor and going to the Maine Resiliency Center, where she knew she would feel safe for a few hours at a time. She found comfort in being around survivors and the families of other victims who understood her grief.
She has learned to set aside time to take care of herself, especially when she is feeling overwhelmed.
"We can't predict day to day what's going to happen, but I'm just trying to make sure that I'm meeting basic needs and focusing on my everyday life," she said.
Vozzella and Bella talk about Steve all the time and like to look at photos and videos of him. And they share memories — of camping trips, holidays, the way Steve would tease them both and playfully chase Bella through the house. Steve's photos are all over the house they moved into after they lost him.
They honored Steve's love of the holidays by carrying on their family traditions, like putting up two Christmas trees. Vozzella tattooed her husband's name on her arm, along with the ASL sign for "I love you," the last thing her husband ever signed to her.
The past few months have been especially hard as the shooting anniversary approached, Vozzella said. She wishes people could understand that she and the families of other victims experience ongoing pain, grief, anger, impulsiveness and apathy.
"We're taking this day a day at a time. There are different strategies to get through it, but it's an individual journey. Every person has to experience their own path and their own journey," she said. "And right now, within our group of victims, we're staying together. We are not going to leave each other again. We are bonded together and that's how we're getting through it."
Justin Karcher
In the 10 months since he was shot at Schemengees Bar & Grille, Justin Karcher, 24, has bought about 40 guns.
One of his purchases: the same model of AR-10 his shooter used.
“I had a bunch of guns before, but after I got out of the hospital, I bought like a ton of them,” he said.
When he received about $40,000 from a GoFundMe, he spent a sizable portion of the money on guns.
“I could, so I did,” he said.
Karcher holds three bullets in the palm of his hand.
“These are what he used on me,” he said, tilting his palm so the bullets clinked together.
He’d been shot seven times: once in the shoulder, and six times in his abdomen and chest.
“I mean, I lived, I guess, and I probably shouldn’t have,” he said.
He still has fragments of bullets lodged in his liver and kidney. The doctors said they were too dangerous to remove.
Karcher spent nearly two months in the hospital.
In the first week, he had 10 operations. For a month, he couldn’t eat or drink. He was intubated twice and could barely swallow. He had drains taken out and put back in and removed again. Nurses added a thickening powder to anything that passed through his lips — water, coffee, soda.
Two days before Christmas, he was released from the hospital, finally allowed to move into the home he and his girlfriend had bought together. But he didn’t want to leave.
He still couldn’t walk well on his own, and he was scared he’d develop an infection. He’d grown close to his nurses. For weeks after his release, he missed the hospital.
With time, he learned to walk on his own again. He rejoined a pool league.
He keeps most of his guns locked in a safe in his bedroom, but one he keeps loaded in his truck. Another, by the front door, stays loaded too. He wants to be ready if anything should happen.
He knows that lightning can sometimes strike twice.
Karcher’s father was shot and killed in a Walmart parking lot in 2019. Karcher, not yet 20 years old, was there and watched his father die. He thinks it’s just bad luck.
“That’s kind of just like a freak thing that happens. I mean I guess it happens often, but the world goes on,” he said.
He wants to move on and for life to go back to the way it was before. In some ways, it has.
Karcher is playing in his pool league again this fall. He is competing in clay pigeon shooting competitions again. He’s been able to do some work on his truck.
But Karcher still attends regular physical therapy. His shoulder still aches. He doesn’t like being in crowded spaces. Bars and busy restaurants make him nervous.
“I don’t like being around a lot of people,” he said.
After he was released from the hospital, Karcher and his girlfriend got a puppy, a big Lab named Buck. By the end of summer, Karcher could lift Buck, more than 60 pounds at eight months, onto his lap and cradle him. He was getting stronger.
Karcher has only been to the resiliency center twice. He said it’s not his thing. He doesn’t want what’s happened to him to define him.
“Yeah, I went through all that, but I have to put stuff behind me. It’s not who I am. Like yeah, it happens. It happened,” he said.
Tammy Asselin
By the time Tammy Asselin dropped her daughter Toni off at school for the first time since the shooting, she'd set up counseling and made sure her teachers were prepared for a student who had just survived a mass shooting.
She and Toni, now 11, hadn’t been apart for a long time since that night a week earlier when they were separated as a gunman opened fire on the bowling alley.
On that first day back at school, Asselin, 47, wanted it to feel like a normal day. She didn't want her daughter to feel her anxiety, but she had a panic attack as Toni walked away from her.
"I didn't expect it, and when she turned the corner and disappeared for a quick second heading to her class, I was caught off guard by emotions," she said.
She hadn't yet started processing her trauma because she had been focused on Toni.
They both started counseling and went to the resiliency center as soon as it opened. The center, a critical part of their healing, gave them time and a place to focus on themselves, to feel like they were understood and not alone in their grief and trauma.
Toni, who was among the 20 children at the bowling alley, found it helpful to be with others who are on a similar path, Asselin said.
"Sometimes she wonders if she's different and I'm like, ‘You're not different. You went through something different, but you're not different,’” she said.
In those early months, Asselin thought a lot about what else she could be doing. Was it advocacy work? Was it talking with other parents?
Later, she felt it was important to speak to the commission investigating the shooting. Her goal was not to talk about herself, but to make sure people understood what the children at the bowling alley had experienced.
“I don’t believe I could begin to describe to anyone here what it could possibly feel like to be in my shoes that night, standing there alone and feeling unheard, desperate for answers,” she told the commissioners.
By summer, Asselin found herself at her most difficult point. She retreated, feeling withdrawn, depressed and anxious. She struggled with guilt because she wasn't always fully present with Toni. She had surgery to repair the torn muscles and tendons in her arm from when she dove for cover. She'll have another exploratory surgery soon to try to identify why she's had hip pain since that night.
"I have that constant reminder each day, of that little bit of pain and where it came from," she said.
But Asselin has started looking at the future in a different way, without grief on the forefront of her mind. She's thinking about how to move forward.
"There's also a comfort in our grief. I know what it's like to feel the way I have this summer," she said. "And I'm also scared to know the next step."
Portland Press Herald Staff Writer Grace Benninghoff contributed to this report.
This story is part of an ongoing collaboration with FRONTLINE (PBS) and Maine Public that includes an upcoming documentary. It is supported through FRONTLINE’s Local Journalism Initiative, which is funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
