Every year, right at the beginning of May, it shows up on my calendar. Not a birthday. Not an appointment. Not something I have to do. Just a quiet marker: May 4, 1970. The day four students were shot and killed at Kent State University.
I was two years old at the time, living about forty miles north on th’ veritable shores of Lake Erie. Which is to say, of course, I don’t remember it happening. Not in any direct sense. No memories of images, news broadcast flickering in the background, no moment of realization. Nothing like that.
And yet, somehow, I remember it.
Or maybe that’s not quite right. What I remember is everything that came after.
For the next decade or so—through childhood, through school, through just being in Ohio—it kept coming up. Every year, around the same time, people would talk about it again. Teachers. Adults. The news. It had a kind of seasonal gravity to it. Like something that didn’t stay in the past but circled back, annually, asking to be noticed.
Then time passed and like a lot of young adults, I moved away. And it disappeared.
Down here in NC, nobody really talks about it. You could bring it up in casual conversation and get a blank look. Kent might as well be a foreign city. Ohio, vaguely north. Lake Erie? Uh, I think I can find that on a map, gimmie a minute… The whole thing recedes into something regional, almost obscure.
But it never receded for me.
It’s still on my calendar. It still catches my attention. And every year I find myself wondering why this one event—only four people, a bit more than half a century ago—has stuck with me in a way that so many other, larger tragedies have not. Because it’s not like there haven’t been others.
There have been dozens—maybe hundreds—of mass shootings since then. Columbine High School massacre. Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Pulse Nightclub, the Naval Station in Pensecola; mein gott, there’s a Wiki page that just endlessly rolls on and on and on in chart form. Its horrifying. Names that briefly dominate the national conversation, then slowly give way to the next one. The scale is often larger. The loss, no less devastating.
And yet, I don’t mark those dates. I don’t carry them the same way.
Which raises an uncomfortable question: is that unfair? Why this one?
Part of the answer, I think, is proximity. Not just physical, though that’s part of it. Kent, Cleveland, Canton, Avon Lake, Rocky River, Elyria—these aren’t abstract places to me. They’re part of the same mental map. The same world I grew up in. Even if I was too young to understand it at the time, the event happened inside the geography of my life. But proximity alone doesn’t explain it. There’s something else about Kent State that feels different, even now.
It wasn’t just a shooting. It was the Ohio National Guard. It was authority. It was the people who, in theory, are there to maintain order, to protect. And in that moment, they turned their weapons on unarmed students. That carries a different kind of weight.
Most mass shootings are horrifying in a way that feels chaotic, senseless—violence erupting from somewhere that already feels unstable. But this… this suggests something else. Something more unsettling. If the people meant to protect you can become the source of danger, then what exactly is stable?
I don’t know that I had that thought consciously as a child. But I suspect I absorbed it anyway. Not as a conclusion, but as a kind of background unease. The sort of thing that lodges itself quietly and stays there.
And then there’s the timing of it all. Kent State, for me at least, feels like it sits at the far end of a long quiet stretch. An event that was rare enough, singular enough, to be revisited and remembered year after year. After that—much later, really—things change. The shootings become more frequent. Then common. Then, disturbingly, almost routine. To the point where some of them barely register in the wider news cycle anymore. Not because they matter less, but because there are too many to hold onto all at once.
And maybe that’s part of it too. It’s easier, in a strange way, to attach meaning to a single, recurring event than to a constant stream of them. The mind can circle one thing. It can’t circle everything.
Still, I don’t think this is just about me. Because people keep returning to Kent State.
Decades later, there are still books being written. Research being done. Entire graphic novels—like Four Dead in Ohio—built around trying to understand what happened there. And those aren’t casual undertakings. No one spends years assembling something like that, diving deep into old newspapers and interviews and maps, drawing hundreds of detailed frames across almost countless hours, unless there’s a question they can’t quite put down.
Which makes me think this isn’t just a personal quirk. It’s a kind of shared orientation.
Some events don’t resolve. They don’t settle neatly into “past.” They keep asking something—about authority, about protest, about what a society does when it turns on itself, even briefly. And different people, at different times, feel compelled to go back and look again.
I seem to be one of those people. Not in the sense of writing a 350-page book or dedicating years of research to it. But in the quieter way of keeping a date on a calendar. Of noticing when it comes around. Of asking, again, why this still feels like something that matters. And maybe that’s enough.
Maybe the point isn’t to distribute attention evenly across every tragedy, as if memory were some kind of moral accounting system. Maybe the point is just to be honest about the ones that stay.
This is one of mine.
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