What sticks in Maryanne Elliott’s mind about the day her husband died is the yellow Post-It Note.
A phalanx of police officers in riot gear stood guard just inside the emergency room in Louisville, Kentucky. Maryanne wanted to check to see if her husband was there.
She’d heard there was a shooting at Old National Bank downtown where he was vice president. She couldn’t get him to answer the phone. She was sure he was fine − so confident of his well-being, in fact, that she didn’t bother to cancel a dentist appointment scheduled for later that morning.
A nurse appeared, her hand stretching across the line of officers with the Post-It Note.
Write down your name and your husband’s name, she instructed.
Tommy Elliott, Maryanne Elliott, she wrote. She remembers the ink was black.
This moment would come to signify the before and after for Maryanne − the near-perfect love affair with a man who still made her heart flutter after 20 years and the gulf of despair she experienced after his loss.
In the two years since Tommy Elliott was killed in a mass shooting, Maryanne’s grief has, in turns, left her aghast and overwhelmed, bewildered and incapacitated, grateful and wanting to die.
She’s sharing her grief journey −raw and imperfect, because she’s learned so much. She wants the grieving to grieve better and for well-meaning loved ones to feel confident in how to offer support.
She knows deep in her bones the grief rollercoaster that never ends. The stomach-churning emotional jerks. The sharp twists that take your breath away. The heights of sacred possibility that give way to free falls of unfathomable sorrow. It doesn’t matter that she’s experienced it all before. She knows the ride will start again.
Before our meeting, Maryanne had never told her whole story all at once to anyone. Bits and pieces to friends, tender moments and worries to others. For better or worse, Maryanne has always led with her heart. And every day since Tommy died, Maryanne has thought about their life together because it really was a grand love affair.
A last date and a final word
It was the Saturday before Easter, she said. She and Tommy had a double date. They played Top Golf and met at Silvio’s in St. Matthews for dinner. They drove separate cars that night. Tommy was waiting for her under the white neon sign, and she skipped across the street to meet him.
Her demeanor is schoolgirl-like when she talks about him, with a Duchenne smile — full mouth — the kind that lifts the cheeks and wrinkles the eyes.
“I told him, I said: ‘I’ve been with you 20 years, and you always make my heart skip a beat. You always do. I don’t know what it is. You come around the corner — you never come in a room where I don’t feel it.’”
The next morning, Easter Sunday, brought glorious weather. They visited her mom, went to Mass and had brunch at First Watch. They watched the end of the Master’s. There was an ease and comfort to the afternoon. The sweetness of those ordinary moments is what made their relationship so extraordinary — just how perfectly they fit together.
The next morning, April 10, 2023, Maryanne woke early. Tommy was already awake, heading to the bank for a monthly meeting.
“I looked up, and the sun was rising behind him through the French doors, and I said: ‘Oh, you’re just so handsome.’ And that’s the last thing I said to him.’”
Tommy smiled and bounced out of the room.
Texts and calls
Not long after Tommy left, Maryanne started the day in her home office with a Zoom call suddenly interrupted by a flurry of calls and texts from Nicole Yates, well-known in Democratic politics and a long-time friend of Tommy’s. After the third missed call, Maryanne ended her meeting.
“Do you know that there’s an active shooter at Old National?” Maryanne remembers Nicole saying. “Turn on the TV.”
Still, Maryanne wasn’t concerned. Everybody else knew Tommy as a banker and long-time Democratic Party fundraiser and political activist. But she knew him as her take-charge husband who always had a plan and knew exactly what to do.
He’s getting everybody into the vault, she remembers thinking. He’s got it figured out.
People had called, but Tommy wouldn’t answer — odd for a man Maryanne often chastised for taking too many calls at the dinner table. He always had his phone, always answered, so she knew there had to be a reason.
They’re hiding and have to be quiet, she told herself. There’s no phone service in the vault.
She wouldn’t fully understand for hours to come that Tommy was already dead.
Her beloved died of a gunshot wound at 8:33 a.m.
Maryanne hung up with Nicole, and nobody called her for a while. The silence felt strange.
Then at 9:20 a.m., Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, whom Tommy had mentored, rang.
I’m so sorry, she heard him say over the line.
But Maryanne’s brain refused to register what he said. What her mind told her instead was that the man in the most powerful position in the state was on his way to Louisville. He’ll figure it out and fix it, she thought.
Denial can take a powerful hold.
Maryanne decided to drive to an emergency room just in case. She called the head of Baptist Hospital, a friend, to see if anyone was taken there. Nobody was at Baptist, he told her.
As Maryanne pulled onto Interstate 64, she felt sick, though she still didn’t believe Tommy was truly hurt. She drove to U of L Hospital and couldn’t find the emergency room entrance and had a panic attack. Some kind medical students directed her.
“Your mind won’t let you go there, but you know something big’s about to happen,” she said.
She walked in and said to a nurse: “I’m just stopping by. Everything, I know, is fine, but I’m just making a stop to see if everything is OK, and I’ll be on my way.”
That’s when the nurse asked her to put the names on the Post-It Note. When the nurse came back, she said simply: Come with me.
“I knew it,” Maryanne said. “I knew something bad had happened like he was in surgery.”
Maybe Tommy did get shot, she thought. Maybe they were trying to stop the bleeding. Maybe he would need an amputation.
The nurse led her to an all-white room that had about 10 chairs. She was alone. She texted her daughter. She could feel the panic rising. She left in search of water and a Bible, fumbling through pages for Psalm 23. She needed something that would make her feel like she wasn’t going to come out of her body. She had no sense of time.
A nurse came back and pulled several families into a big room. Maryanne remembers seeing Karen Tutt, whose husband also worked at Old National.
I think something’s happened, she remembers Karen saying.
Oh, Karen, they’re fine, Maryanne replied. I promise you they’re OK.
Then someone shared what seemed like hopeful news: Everyone on arrival had non-life-threatening injuries. Maybe Tommy really was OK.
Maryanne’s friends started to arrive. Marilyn, George, Babar. They were all like family.
Maryanne was ushered into a smaller room again. She remembers thinking she was in the “good room,” and that she was sad for Karen because she wasn’t.
Nobody wanted to tell her. It was Maryanne’s friend, Marilyn, who shook her head and finally spoke up.
I’m so sorry. He didn’t make it.
Maryanne’s body filled with rage.
“You’re supposed to be my friend!” she shouted. “This is what friends do? You’re wrong.”
Maryanne didn’t have anywhere to put her anger. She wanted to do something violent. But her friend George grabbed her and held her tight. She fell apart.
Maryanne wanted to see Tommy’s body. She thought he was at the hospital. But a victim’s advocate explained he was still at Old National and that the bank was a crime scene. It would be bloody and difficult, but if she wanted to, police officers could make that happen. But there might be another memory she’d rather hold onto.
Maryanne decided to think about their last date instead, and that moment in the morning with the sun shining behind him.
Just as quickly as she’d collapsed, Maryanne snapped back to herself. She had to tell her kids, her mom, Tommy’s sister. Her heart ached for the other families who’d lost loved ones and wanted to reach out right away. She was concerned, too, about the shooter’s parents. She couldn’t imagine what they felt knowing their child was responsible. She wanted to get a message to them, too, that they did the best they could.
Maryanne left the hospital in what seemed like suspended time. She slid into the seat of her friend’s minivan and clicked the seatbelt. She noticed the color of the sky — a brilliant spring blue. She’d just lost the love of her life, but the world was still turning.
A house of grief
At home that night, before she got into the shower, she stuck her own Post-It Note to the bathroom mirror. The shock of Tommy’s death was overwhelming, and she needed something to remind her that it really happened. She made a numbered list in black ink.
Don’t see life without him. Do not want to move on ever. I will never talk or see him again. He is dead. I want to die to be with him. Have no joy in my life — only responsibility. Desperately want him.
That first week, their house was filled with friends and family. Some thought she was doing more entertaining than grieving. Others wanted to take her phone because the shooter had gone live on Instagram at the bank, and they didn’t want her to see any videos.
But she needed people. She needed to see the text messages and emails, hear the voices of people who called and feel their arms wrapped around her. It was like a blanket knitted together by people’s good hearts.
“There are hugs and prayers and well wishes that are just seared into my soul forever,” she said.
That first week, she started journaling. About Tommy’s funeral service. About how she always felt like Tommy was her sun, that she orbited him. And the conversation with a neighbor who said Maryanne had been his sun. They were best friends. Maybe they orbited each other. She wrote about loneliness and wondered how she might go on without the one person she felt connected to on a soul level. She’d never needed girls’ trips. She was happiest with Tommy.
Two weeks after Tommy’s death, Maryanne went back to work. He’d always waited for her at the end of the day, and she knew this time would be different.
“I said to myself: ‘Remember, he’s not going to be there. So, you are going to turn on all the lights in the house and you’re going to turn on happy music. And when you get upstairs, you’re going to turn all that off. You’re going to take a hot bath and immediately get in bed.’”
No phones. No scrolling. And it worked.
That was her life for the first three months. Simply functioning. She felt sick most of the time. She couldn’t concentrate. Sometimes, waves of sadness were so strong she felt they might overpower her.
Then in September of that year, Maryanne went to Spain. She had enough miles on American Airlines for a flight.
She told herself: “I’m going to walk the Camino. I’m going to find God, and we’re going to negotiate this out, and I’m going to come back healed.”
It didn’t work that way. In a rocking chair at the Charlotte airport, she emotionally hemorrhaged. She cried in the taxi and the entire flight over the Atlantic. She cried in the hotel and out sightseeing. She sent a text to her grief counselor: This place is so beautiful, and I hate it here.
She met a group of strangers and walked with them for a week on the Camino.
“I didn’t find God in all the podcasts I had and in all the scriptures I had on my little index cards,” she said. “I found God in the bottle of wine. I found God in the funny stories that were told. I found God in the beauty of what I saw. That’s where He was for me. And I cried, and the group was so wonderful to me.”
When she got home, Maryanne began to feel a pivot. It had been six months.
“Grief is a full-on body experience,” she said. “You feel sick to your stomach or head. And I started to feel a little bit better then.”
Maryanne isn’t assertive or aggressive, but she is tenacious. She started to have the attitude of “watch me bring light to the world.”
“I don’t think I was conscious of this, but I think I was ready to start making a choice,” she said. “I knew I could live in the suffering or I could begin to make room for something else.”
It continued to take enormous fortitude for Maryanne to simply manage her grief. She had to focus on eating well, exercising and getting enough rest. She hadn’t yet found her emotional footing when tragedy struck again — and death came twice more.
Maryanne’s brother died Dec. 12, 2023, of pancreatic cancer.
Then on June 8, 2024, she lost her mother.
This time, Maryanne was there. She and her daughters told stories and watched funny videos. They combed her mother’s hair and gave her a manicure. The 96-year-old had been unconscious for a while but suddenly popped up and said: “Well, you all know I love you. Bye. Bye,” Maryanne remembered her saying.
She died the next day.
“She had a long, wonderful life,” Maryanne said. “And there wasn’t anything incomplete about it. I say she labored me into the world, and I had the privilege of laboring her out. It was such a gift.”
A gift, yes, but another loss nonetheless. One more person who loved her, gone. And she’s still grappling with the loneliness that brings.
Grief continues but so does love
On the two-year anniversary of Tommy’s death, Maryanne is shaping a new chapter for herself.
People want her to talk politics. They ask her stance on gun control and mental illness, and the culture of violence in America. She supports gun safety and background checks. She wants people to have good mental health. But she isn’t an activist and doesn’t want to lobby. Politics was her husband’s arena. She believes she has a different calling — to change the narrative around grief. The questions she’s asking are much more existential.
What do you do when the person you love the most — the one you had a soul connection with — is no longer here? What does love look like now? How do you persevere? What does it mean to heal?
She doesn’t have all the answers, but there are a few things she knows for certain and others she’s still learning. Here’s what she knows: What killed Tommy doesn’t matter. The number of bullets doesn’t matter. Neither does the type of weapon.
“Nobody understands that,” she said. “To me, if he died of a heart attack in the front yard it would be the same. He’s gone.”
It’s not that she’s unsympathetic or apolitical. She simply wants to focus on grief — others’ and her own.
She has learned that now is not forever — even in grief. And that even though people think it should, grief doesn’t have a predetermined timeline.
“You get past the one year, and people say: ‘You’re still talking about that?’” she said. “People say, ‘He’s not crying enough. Did he really care about them? Or he’s crying too much. Is he getting it together?’ We hold so many people to this.”
Losing Tommy has also taken away her fear.
“A lot of times, the line of thinking is when someone dies, it makes you realize what you have so you go home and kiss your dog and your child because one day you may not have them, one day the other shoe may drop,” she said. “It’s not fear anymore that drives me to gratitude that something might happen because something already did happen, right? But because it already happened, it opens you up to see because life is so profound. It is so beautiful.”
Maryanne accepts that beauty and tragedy can exist at the same moment. Like a sky so blue it forces you to take notice even when it’s above your husband’s grave.
“We all have our story,” she said. “We all have loss because we’re human. This just happens to be mine. Mine’s not special because the worst grief is our own grief. Grief is grief is grief. Love is love is love. There’s no competition or evaluation of who’s got it the hardest.”
Maryanne still has that Post-It Note on her bathroom mirror, the one she stuck up there the night after Tommy died to remind her he was really gone. She doesn’t remember when she added the first photo — one of them together on their last date at Top Golf. It helped her focus on how much they loved each other and not that he was dead.
She has since covered the entire mirror on his side — top to bottom — with more photos. Like a bulletin board of a schoolgirl’s crush. Their last photo together on Easter Sunday. A wedding picture. He was making her laugh from Day 1. She tacked up love letters and cards, sticky notes and cutout hearts. Always in his handwriting, and more often than not, with this line: I love you very, very much. Tommy.
“I have no doubt that I was loved and adored by him,” she said.
Maryanne knows she will grieve Tommy for the rest of her life. The loss is still there, permanently affixed like that sticky note.
But so is love.
Kristina Goetz is a former narrative editor and reporter at the Louisville Courier Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Old National bank mass shooting widow shares lessons about grief
The post A mass shooter slaughtered her husband at a bank. What she thinks about two years later appeared first on USA TODAY.
