Ed Gavagan
Benefitting Legacy of War
Ed Gavagan was walking home one night from the bar where he worked in Manhattan when he was jumped by three kids and stabbed six times in the back, side and neck. Doctors gave him a 2% chance to live, but against the odds, he survived. In the hospital he learned that the three kids were gang members looking for someone to kill as part of an initiation for moving up in the gang, and Ed was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But what’s even more remarkable than Ed surviving such a brutal attack is that he forgave his attackers and discovered - against a backdrop of debilitating depression and PTSD - a capacity for empathy he had never known.
Wise Words
“Then I see these kids coming toward me, and as a New Yorker, one thought I had was, ‘I see these three kids walking toward me. I don’t want to go between them.’ So, I stepped to the side to let them pass, and as I stepped to the side, they did not pass. They just jumped on me. And as they began to stab me, my first thought, my first real thought was, ‘Am I actually being stabbed.’”
“I just saw this knife plunge into my shoulder, up to the hilt. It was a 10-inch blade on the knife. And it seemed so preposterous that there was not a word spoken. There was not an altercation. They didn’t ask me for a wallet or, ‘What time is it?’ or ‘Are you the guy that kicked my brother?’ There was nothing.”
“And I have struggled to try and convey to people what it feels like when you’ve had your entire chest opened up and your organs taken out, and cut and pasted and patched and stitched and then stuffed back in and closed up, plus six stab wounds to the back and the sides and the neck.”
“And the closest I can get to describing it is imagine being drenched in a freezing lake of pain. If you’ve ever jumped into icy water, that shock of feeling that just makes you catch your breath, and your eyes go wide open and your mouth opens, and you just gasp at the pain. And that’s what it was like, and it just did not let up.”
“He had to lift up all of my organs and look for the knife wounds. It’s like just stabbing through a bag of apples, and you look for each cut in the apples and you have to fix each one.”
“But the thing that I was going to clarify about the depression is that for the first six or eight months, I did not feel depressed. I felt elated that I had lived. I felt like I had triumphed, like I had overcome. I was definitely in pain and there was definitely a lot wrong, but my primary emotion was that, ‘I have just done the impossible and I have made it, this is remarkable.’ And I felt so lucky.”
“Rather than listening to me, actually listening to what I was afraid of and helping people, people would say to me, ‘Well whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ And that was a terrible feeling, because I did not feel stronger.”
“And the other thing people would say was, ‘Well everything happens for a reason.’ And that just seemed so glib and so unsympathetic.”
“I guess the thing, the most important thing was I had someone who believed in me. My girlfriend just kept believing that I was going to be able to get better, and that I was a good person who was worth the effort.”
“A lot of people can’t sit next to someone who’s crying, without trying to make them stop. They’ll just say anything, ‘Please God, just stop crying, I can’t let you cry like this.’ And sometimes that’s what’s needed, is to cry.”
“And so I knew that they had committed this crime in order to move up in a gang, and the reason they were in the gang was they wanted to belong to something, be a part of something, be protected. That’s the function of a gang, have a purpose in life. And here they are, they had screwed that up. I didn’t die. They’re not in the gang. They’re arrested, they’re going to prison. And they’re 17, 18 years old.”
Links
Reach Ed at praxisnyc.com