From personal loss to public advocacy: how I found the work that chose me

My mother died by firearm suicide when I was 22 months old. I did not go looking for this work. It found me through her.

TL;DR: Advocacy that comes from personal loss is different from advocacy that comes from principle. Not better or worse, just different. For me the work started with one shift in understanding. My mother’s death was preventable, not inevitable. That is where advocacy begins, when you stop grieving something random and start fighting something structural.

The story I inherited

I did not grow up with a mother. I grew up with the absence of one. Joyce died by suicide before I had memory of her. The gun she used had been bought for her by her own father, my grandfather, after she told her family she was struggling.

That detail matters. It is the whole story in one sentence.

For most of my life I treated her death the way a kid treats weather. It happened. There was nothing to be done. People die. Mothers die. Mine just happened to die in a particular way at a particular age, and that was the shape of my life.

The work I do now, the work people know me for, started the day I stopped thinking about her death that way.

When grief became something to fight

There is a turn that happens for some people who lose a family member to gun violence. Not everyone makes it. Plenty of people are entitled not to. Grief is private and there is no obligation to turn it into anything else.

But when the turn happens, it is sharp.

For me it happened in my thirties. I was reading about firearm suicide rates and I came across a number I could not put down. About 58 percent of all firearm deaths in this country are suicides. The CDC reported more than 27,000 firearm suicides in 2023. Most are men. A large share are veterans. The majority happen in the home where the gun lives.

I read those numbers and the floor moved.

It moved because I realized my mother was not a freak event. She was a statistic. She was part of a pattern that has been repeating for decades, and the pattern is documented, predictable, and in many cases preventable with steps as simple as putting time and distance between a person in crisis and a gun.

The grief did not go away. It got a job.

Preventable is not the same as inevitable

Almost every conversation I have about gun violence starts at the same place. Someone says, in some form, that there is nothing we can do. That bad people will find guns. That people who want to die will find a way. That the cause is mental illness or culture or evil, and that policy and design and access have nothing to do with it.

I get the impulse. If a death was not preventable, then no one had to do anything differently. No one is implicated. Nothing is owed.

But the evidence runs the other way.

Firearm suicide is the most lethal suicide method by a wide margin. About 85 percent of firearm suicide attempts end in death. Compare that to a pill overdose, where the case fatality rate is in the low single digits. Most suicidal crises last minutes or hours, not weeks. If you remove the gun from that moment, most people survive. Most survivors do not go on to die by suicide later.

That is not a debate. That is what research from Harvard’s Means Matter project and the Department of Veterans Affairs has been saying for years.

So when I say my mother’s death was preventable, I am not being sentimental. I am being literal. A gun in the wrong room at the wrong moment is a design failure. Designs can be changed.

The line between grief and public work

People ask me how I separate the personal from the public. The honest answer is that I do not separate them. I just know which one I am in at any given moment.

Private grief is mine. It belongs to me, my brother and sister, my stepmom, and the few people who knew Joyce. It is not material. I do not put it on stage. I do not bring it into a fundraising email. I do not perform it.

Public advocacy is different. Public advocacy uses the fact of her death, because the fact of her death is what makes the argument credible. It is the thing that lets me sit across from a lawmaker who would otherwise dismiss me and say, with no waver in my voice, that I have skin in this game that he does not.

The line, for me, is between facts and feelings. Facts can go anywhere. Feelings have their own room.

That distinction matters because people who have lost someone often feel pressure to either bare everything or say nothing. Neither is required. You can be a real person, share what is true, and keep what is private.

What I tell people who are just starting

Most of the people who reach out to me have lost a sibling, a child, a parent, or a spouse. They write because they want to do something and they do not know where to start. Here is what I tell them.

Start with one fact about the death. Not the whole story. One fact. The age. The state. The relationship between the shooter and the victim. The kind of gun. Whatever you can hold without falling apart. That fact becomes your anchor.

Find the data that surrounds it. If your loved one was a child killed in an unintentional shooting, learn the numbers on unsecured firearms in homes with kids. If it was a domestic violence homicide, learn what the research says about abusers with guns. Your story becomes more powerful, not less, when you can place it inside a pattern.

Pick one organization and show up. Everytown, Brady, Giffords, Sandy Hook Promise, or your local chapter of Moms Demand Action. Pick one. Go to a meeting. Volunteer for the boring tasks. The people who run gun violence prevention organizations are not waiting for charismatic speakers. They are waiting for people who will make calls and knock doors and show up next week.

Protect your nervous system. This work will eat you if you let it. Build the boundaries early. Decide which interviews you will do and which you will not. Decide what your family is and is not allowed to be quoted on. Decide who gets your phone number and who does not.

Be patient with the timeline. Federal gun policy in this country moves on a generational scale, not an election cycle. State and local progress is faster. Cultural shifts are slower than that. You are signing up for a long fight. Pace accordingly.

A few things you can actually do this week

If you want a way to act and not just feel, here are five things you can do in the next seven days.

Make sure any gun you own is stored locked, unloaded, and separate from ammunition. If you have kids in the house, this is not optional. If you do not own a gun but a household member does, have the conversation tonight.

Save the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in your phone. Send it to two people who would not already have it saved.

If you are in a household where someone is in mental crisis, consider temporary off-site storage of any firearms. Local police departments and some gun ranges offer this. So do extreme risk protection orders in the 21 states that have them.

Donate twenty dollars to one gun violence prevention organization. The amount is not the point. The act of becoming a financial supporter changes how you read the news the next morning.

Tell someone the story of why you care. Not on social media. In person. To one person. Watch what happens.

The work that chose me

I did not choose this work. It chose me when my grandfather bought a gun for his daughter, and she used it to end her life, and I grew up without her.

What I did choose was what to do with it. So can you.

If you want someone to speak to your organization, school, or community about gun violence prevention, leadership through loss, or what it takes to turn private grief into public action, I would be glad to talk. Visit /book-khary/ to start the conversation.