In ‘Healing A Shattered Soul’, Mindy Corporon touches on her family’s struggles

Many people know the basics of the day that changed Mindy Corporon’s life. A gunman at the Jewish Community Center murdered her father and son: William Corporon and Reat Underwood.

The specific tragic details of the day — how her family remembers it and how they’ve tried to heal — is less in the public domain.

Corporon’s new book, “Healing A Shattered Soul: My Faithful Journey of Courageous Kindness after Trauma and Grief of Domestic Terrorism,” gets very personal with all of those particulars, from Corporon’s nuclear family to the first responders who tried to help.

She points to specific helpful bystanders and first responders.

“Mickey Blount and Thomas Bates and Dan Stringfield were so crucial in the day. I thought it was fascinating how they were involved and how it affected them,” she said.

Her own guilt at having been the one to schedule the time for Reat’s audition at the JCC, or the last-minute swap that meant she wasn’t the one who drove him there, is also part of the tale.

Combining those stories with the experiences of her mom, her brothers, her son Lukas Losen, her husband Len Losen and other family members helped her understand the stages of healing everyone is in right now.

Several of them had already shared their stories with Corporon for her “Real Grief — Real Healing” podcast.

“I think the piece people didn’t know is how much we struggled, the three of us. They probably didn’t know I didn’t want to go to Florida, that I didn’t want to move. … They didn’t realize the effort we had to put into keeping Lukas alive,” said Corporon, who now lives in Pompano Beach.

The book details the struggles Lukas, who was 12 in 2014, had with mental health. Corporon said her son approved of her sharing that story.

“We were told by doctors to remove all firearms and sharp knives,” she said. “He couldn’t be at home for longer than 15 minutes by himself for a year. I wanted people to understand that trauma has such huge effects on people, and it lasts for years. And especially when it happens to children, you have to pay close attention.”

She confronted her own feelings about what she might have done wrong in handling the situation as a parent and is open about needing assistance to get through it.

“I wanted people to know it’s OK to seek help,” Corporon said. “We live in a society that thinks you should do everything on your own. You should never have downtime. You should go, go, go, and that’s not healthy.”

The mental strains everyone has experienced during the pandemic may help others understand the diminished capacity those going through the grieving process might be dealing with, she said.

“There are times when you feel like you’re crazy. Six months out, I was thinking they were going to walk through the door. For weeks and months you’ll have these thoughts that it’s not real,” she said.

Aside from mental health, she also sought help in understanding other religions. She didn’t know much at all about Judaism until after her father and son were killed when the gunman mistook them for being Jewish.

Her approach is to be very open about what she doesn’t know in order to seek understanding about those who are different from her.

“I have to say to them, ‘I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I want to ask a question about this, so will you give me a minute to find the words?’” she said. “If I come at it that way with curiosity, then it’s an easier conversation on their part, rather than me saying, ‘Why are you wearing that costume?’ That’s disrespectful, but that might have been something I would have said when I was in college.”

That philosophy of starting curious conversations in part of the basis of SevenDays, an annual event run by Corporon’s non-profit, the Faith Always Wins Foundation. This year’s event will be virtual and run on seven separate days between April 13 and April 25.

Whenever an event like the March shooting in Boulder happens, people tend to turn to Corporon for words of wisdom, and she doesn’t mind the duty.

“I feel like it’s a responsibility of mine, because I’m a white, Christian woman who doesn’t fit the profile of domestic terrorism, that I should make myself available, that it can happen to anyone,” she said.

“It could happen to anyone at any time.”

For more information on the SevenDays events, visit givesevendays.org/our-events.

This story was originally published April 6, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "In ‘Healing A Shattered Soul’, Mindy Corporon touches on her family’s struggles."