LEWISTON, Maine — Perched halfway up a stepladder, artist Tanja Hollander reached for the ceiling as she held fishing line and a small metal hook in one hand. The ladder squeaked beneath her as she hung dozens of bouquet wrappers, most a translucent plastic or thin paper, from the gallery ceiling at the Maine MILL, Lewiston’s culture and history museum.
After a gunman killed 18 people in Maine’s deadliest mass shooting, Hollander and museum director and curator Rachel Ferrante collected every bouquet of flowers left outside the two shooting sites, struck by the wilted vestiges of grief. Of the two locations, Just-In-Time Recreation has reopened, while Schemengees Bar & Grille remains closed. In the gallery, each empty wrapper hovers eerily over the floor, as if held aloft by the hands that once offered flowers to honor the dead.
“The response to gun violence in communities is to leave flowers and thoughts and prayers,” said Hollander, who assembled the exhibit alongside Miia Zellner, an artist and member of the deaf community. “But then everything disintegrates and disappears and we’re onto the next, until it happens again.”
In the year since the shooting, Lewiston has done its best to forge a new path, but evidence of the tragedy remains. Blue hearts in doorways, “Love Always Wins” banners in public parks, stickers on laptops, and coffee mugs pledging peace and togetherness. No one can really say how a place devastated by grief moves forward — what residents do know is it only happens if they do it together.
Over the past 12 months, the current that has propelled the people of Lewiston-Auburn on the path ahead has been one of unity, and of faith in the new and familiar faces they count on to shepherd them toward healing.
There are emblems of it everywhere. On a recent sunny afternoon, a marquee sign outside Faith Baptist Church in Auburn read: Remembering Jason Walker / Pray for Family. A few weeks later, the sign paid homage to another victim, William Young.
Inside the pale brick building, pastor Jonathan Case leaned over a chair in his office and considered how best to distill the many words of comfort he wanted to share with his congregation this weekend as they reflect on the horrific attack that tore at the heart of the community. Seated across from him, pastor Willie Ponds said, “To be honest, we’ve been preparing all year.”
Case nodded in agreement and said he was continually spending time in prayer, contemplating the right message to offer.
“I pray, ‘God help me to have the message for the people that need it,’ ” he said. “But I have noticed it has been a lot of community, a lot of God’s love, a lot about [the love of] our church.”
Case, who ministers to Auburn City Councilor Leroy Walker and dozens of other churchgoers affected by the shootings, said the church’s goal has been to wrap its members in support over the past year, with the understanding that traumatic grief never really goes away.
“Leroy is such a strong man. But all throughout the year, he’s had times where he’ll talk to me and say, ‘Man, I’m really struggling,’ or, ‘Yesterday wasn’t a good one,’ ” Case said of Walker, whose son Joe was killed charging at the gunman inside Schemengees. “And so we know that it’s always present on his mind.”
Case’s own children were planning to go bowling at Just-In-Time — “for whatever reason, they changed their minds, and we thank the Lord for that,” he said. So he urges people to reflect on the attacks and share in the pain, knowing it was only chance that spared them.
“Those of us that weren’t affected directly, it’s going to be easy to say, ‘I don’t want to think about this, it’s too painful,’” Case said. “So we’re trying to constantly help our community remember these families, because they’re still suffering.”
The sign outside the church is one simple way to remember, he said. Once an announcement board, the marquee has declared prayers for one of the 18 victims every week since last October; Case said it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Walker said that for himself and so many others who lost a loved one, the grief doesn’t get easier to carry — it just changes shape. Some days, the memories of his son trickle back in painful clusters. But as the weight of the anniversary grew heavier, they seemed to come more in a flood.
Walker said the support of his pastors has been indispensable in helping him face a barrage of painful emotions.
“Having that support there just to talk or pray, it gives you an extra arm to lean on, or shoulder to cry on, to help you soften the day,” Walker said. ”As we’re getting nearer to the one-year, you gotta have someone you can go to. You can’t do this alone.”
Inside her family’s flower shop in Lewiston, florist Billie Jo Brito said she’s accustomed to being asked to “provide something bright in a dark time.”
Brito was nearly as busy this month as she was a year ago, keeping her headset on even as she sifted through flowers in case another request came through the phone. In the back of the store, she often fulfilled orders in blue and white, the local high school’s team colors that were adopted by the Lewiston Strong movement after the shootings.
The violence didn’t touch her own family, but she felt the ripples nevertheless. Her son’s longtime bowling coach, Bob Violette, died alongside his wife at the bowling alley, and Brito could not help but think of him.
Over the river, at a cafe on Lisbon Street, Lewiston Mayor Carl Sheline ordered a sandwich and thought about what he would say to residents at the memorial event to mark the anniversary of the attacks — how best to capture the sorrow and striking displays of resilience. Watching his city come together, he felt both anguish at the heartbreak and gratitude for the countless acts of kindness that community members offered to one another.
Sheline said that what is needed in this time, more than any speech, is to listen to people through their confusion and hope and pain.
“When people are grieving, you just need to be there for them,” he said. “We suffered a tremendous loss in this city. . . . Lewiston is forever changed, but the fact is, we are recovering.”
Seated on a plush sofa at the Maine Resiliency Center, which opened to support those directly impacted by the shootings, Arthur Barnard thought about his son: Artie Strout, 42, a pool player who learned the art of the game from his father’s hands, and was killed at Schemengees after playing a final round with his dad, only minutes after Barnard said goodbye.
In the beginning, even photographs of Artie were hard to look at. Now, Barnard craves the sight of his son’s face and finds it comforting to have some part of him nearby. He’s started to keep a framed photo in his car, and carries another picture, embossed on the side of a leather wallet, at all times.
There is only one known photo of the two of them together, which Barnard laments. He’s trying to locate a copy but can recall the image without hesitation: Strout is 15 and playing the guitar beside his father.
Barnard sighed, “I wish I was better at pictures.”
He’s not sure if he’s even angry at the gunman, an Army reservist who officials concluded was driven to violence by his rapidly declining mental health, displaying repeated red flags that authorities failed to act on.
“I don’t know if it’s anger, I don’t know,” Barnard said. “You can wish a lot of things.”
For others, rage has felt inevitable.
At her family’s home on Oxford Street in Auburn, Bobbi Nichols said she couldn’t help but direct all her fury at the man who killed her little sister, Tricia Asselin, at the bowling alley.
“You know you have to blame that person,” said Nichols, who was also at the bowling alley that night. “You think, how could he have done that?”
Although she didn’t know the shooter personally, Nichols grew up alongside members of his family. She thinks of them as good people and believes they tried to raise a good man. It helps her understand that somewhere along the way, the system failed them.
That failure, however, exacted an enormous cost. And so now, Nichols is angry at the system.
“So many people had seen his behavior, witnessed his behavior, had a problem with his behavior,” she said. “There’s a long list of people who voiced their concerns, and voiced they needed help.”
In a small town west of Auburn, Megan Vozzella wrestles with a very different kind of anger as she grieves for her husband, Stephen, a member of the deaf community who was killed alongside three of his good friends at Schemengees.
Through an ASL interpreter, Vozzella said that as time passes, nothing frustrates her more than being told that it’s time to move on. Particularly in recent weeks, she’s felt an ever-growing expectation among others that she will stop mourning and start healing, as if it’s a linear process that should be over by now.
“It’s not very easy to move on that fast,” Vozzella said. “And there is no time limit to say, ‘Move on and move forward to a new life.’”
At Lewiston’s Station Grill, surrounded by autumn decorations, Bethany Welch flashed her engagement ring across the wooden booth at restaurant owner Kathy Lebel and allowed herself to celebrate one of the few joys of the past year.
“You know you’re coming to help me try on dresses, right?” Welch said to a laughing Lebel, after replaying the video of her engagement last month. “I have to have all three of my moms there: my mom, and [my fiancé's] mom, and you, of course.”
It hurts Welch to remember that her father, Joe Walker, won’t be there to walk her down the aisle or twirl her on the dance floor. It hurts more, of course, to remember the reason why.
She had wanted her fiancé, Wesley, to ask her dad for permission to marry her. Walker was killed mere weeks before her fiancé was planning to meet Walker privately and ask for his daughter’s hand. What should have been a light and gleeful conversation instead became a prayer he offered over Walker’s casket.
“We realized that his last opportunity to ask, in a way, would be at the funeral,” said Welch, 24.
But Welch, an ER nurse at Yale-New Haven Hospital, continues to live by her dad’s familiar advice: be bold, do the things you’ve planned, and keep moving forward. And so she permits herself to be joyful and to look toward the future, even though it is one where her father is just an echo ever-resonating in her mind.
The months following the shooting were a blur, she said, with only foggy, dark recollections of Thanksgiving and Christmas. So this year will bring the first real holiday memories without her father.
As those milestones approach, many survivors and grieving families have found support through the Maine Resiliency Center on Lewiston’s Main Street, which opened just 19 days after the attacks to guide the community through grief.
“The important thing is not thinking there’s an end,” said Danielle Parent, the center’s director. “Grief is a part of you. It’s like a hole, and you’re not trying to fill the hole. You’re trying to build a life around the hole so it doesn’t overwhelm you.”
All around the city, residents are trying to cobble together new lives, unable to shake the reality that there will always be a Before and an After.
Tracey Walker, Welch’s mother, struggled to return to her job as a bartender after her husband died. When she did, she risked encountering remarks by patrons that destroyed her few good days and rendered the bad ones nearly unbearable.
One evening, she said, a man approached her and asked if he could give her a compliment.
“I figured it’d be something like, ‘You’re doing really good keeping up with the customers,’ ” Walker remembered thinking.
“Instead he says: ‘You look happy without Joe,’ ” she recalled. “I was dumbfounded. I just couldn’t believe he had said it.”
These days, Walker works at Station Grill alongside Lebel, her husband’s business partner, best friend, and “work wife,” who also owned Schemengees.
For months, Lebel wrestled with how to bring the pool hall, her beloved second home, back to life. Recently, she settled on opening a new restaurant around the corner, with a name that’s tightly under wraps but that she says will pay homage to the legacy of everything she’s loved and lost.
Only two months ago, as she grieved Walker’s death, Lebel’s husband and Schemengees co-owner Dave Lebel died unexpectedly, heaping heartache upon heartache.
Talking about their final moments together still brings her to tears, but Lebel has been buoyed by the family — real and chosen — that has drawn ever closer to her in the past year. Even as she mourns the losses, she can’t help but smile looking at Welch’s engagement ring.
“It seems like every time something bad happens, my family just keeps growing,” Lebel said. “They’re my resiliency center.”
Around the block at the Maine MILL museum, Ferrante climbed up the ladder to hang another set of flower sleeves in the doorway of the exhibit. Squinting into the sunlight, she fastened a piece of the opaque plastic above the entryway and stepped back to watch it flutter.
Ferrante thought back to that frigid December morning, crouched on the ground outside the bar and bowling alley, when she and Hollander, filled with sorrow, decided to collect the more than 260 bouquet wrappers off the ground. Even now, it is a feeling she can’t shake.
“The experience of the last year that we’ve all had, dealing with our trauma and grief and healing, it takes you to an entirely different place,” she said, pinching a sleeve between her fingers. “I’m continuously struck by its beauty and its sadness all in one . . . . but art has the power to help heal us, and I think this is a perfect example of that.”
Sean Cotter of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Ivy Scott can be reached at ivy.scott@globe.com. Follow her @itsivyscott. John Hilliard can be reached at john.hilliard@globe.com or on Signal at john_hilliard.70. Follow him on Bluesky at iamjohnhilliard.bsky.social.