- April 19, 2024
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WINDERMERE No matter how busy life got, Jerald Wright always made time to stop in for the occasional glass of wine with his 80-year-old neighbor at Oasis Cove.
It was his way of checking up on her and making sure she was doing all right, and he loved the company. It’s just the kind of person Jerry was, his mother said.
His roommate knew how much those visits meant to both Jerry and their neighbor. Now, one year after Jerry’s death, he is the one who visits her and chats over a glass of wine.
Jerry, a Horizon West resident, was one of the 49 people killed at Pulse nightclub in downtown Orlando on June 12, 2016. He was 31 years old.
A Disney cast member who worked at Magic Kingdom, Jerry had gotten off of work late that night when he decided to meet up with friends at Pulse. His family members in Miami didn’t know he had gone out until early that morning, when they heard of the shooting and couldn’t locate him. They immediately drove to Orlando, dropping by Pulse in their quest for answers.
In the parking lot, right near the entrance, was Jerry’s car.
It has been a year of grieving, remembering and healing for the Wright family and for the families of 48 other victims.
But a project 11 months in the making promises to memorialize the victims and honor the survivors, law-enforcement officials, first-responders, medical teams and city officials who responded that night.
Winter Park artist Colleen Ardaman originally was asked to paint a mural on a building as a tribute to the Pulse victims, but she didn’t want to take the risk of it being painted over in the future.
“Paint fades, and it would be covered up,” Ardaman said. “I thought, ‘This is the biggest massacre in (modern) U.S. history, and 49 people died.’ Not only did it affect the Pulse community, it affected Orlando, it affected Florida, the United States and the world. I thought, ‘I need to make this bigger than just a painting on a building.’”
With the help of people such as Paint the Trail artist Jeff Sonksen, she came up with the idea for the Orlando Traveling Memorial, a movable wall of art that will travel the country and engage the victims’ families, survivors and visitors nationwide. The concept includes the theme, “From Adversity Springs Seeds of Greatness.” When complete, the project will be a 125-foot-long, 10-foot-tall aluminum wall.
The artwork depicts a “vine of life,” along which portraits of each of the 49 victims will be displayed. The thorns on the vine represent the pain their families have endured, and handprints of the survivors will be situated in circles among the portraits.
As the vine stretches on, a spirit of hope and restoration comes into the picture, releasing winged seed pods that represent the spirits of the victims, some of which come back to plant themselves and restore life and growth. At the end of the wall will be a segment with handprints of police officers, surgeons, first-responders, city officials and more.
But the portraits won’t be painted by the artists themselves — they’re all painted by the families of the victims. There are 49 aluminum panels on which Sonksen has hand-drawn a “paint-by-number” portrait of each victim for the families to fill in. He projected each image — altered to create layers of contouring — onto its respective aluminum panel and hand-traced it, marking the spots in which each shade of paint was to go. Eventually, the portraits will be photographed and installed on the wall.
“I wanted art that was so beautiful, captivating, graphically grabbing and easy to read as you drive by,” Ardaman said. “I thought, ‘I’m an artist, I can paint all the portraits,’ but then I thought, here’s a chance to let the families have an opportunity to heal. We’re going to let the people who need to heal paint them.”
It’s been a challenge finding the 49 families, Ardaman said, but seeing the families who have come forward to paint thus far has been rewarding.
“We had families come in, and it was what we were hoping for but didn’t know if it would take place,” she said. “They first had an initial heart-wrenching (glance), but they sit around and talk, tell stories, they’re laughing, they’re so concentrated on where the next paint stroke goes that it gets them into a whole other zone. At the end, they look back and they go, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s my loved one.’ It’s so healing and so special.”
The entire project will cost about $250,000, and the fundraiser to bring it to life is ongoing. Ardaman hopes to be able to add near-field technology, which will encourage visitors to the wall to interact through their phones. The technology would allow for the wall to “come alive,” so visitors could hear stories from survivors, songs, poems and more.
“We just want to help, we’re on a mission to support something much greater than ourselves,” Ardaman said. “It’s about how we respond to tragedy. This memorial gives them (families and survivors) a chance to come together.”
After Jerry’s death, his neighbors at Oasis Cove displayed a massive banner memorializing him. Along with others Jerry knew, they reached out to his mom, Maria, and the rest of the family with stories of Jerry’s kindness to them.
Many were strangers to her, but Jerry was the type of person to smile, say hello and chat with strangers, turning them into friends.
“He was a wonderful, sweet and loving person, one of those people that if you’d met him in first grade you were still in touch with him because he would never let the connections he made disappear,” Maria said. “I used to call him ‘Mr. Facebook,’ because he was always staying connected to the people in his life. He didn’t care if you were young or old or what. The connections he had with people were precious to him. There’s been an outpouring of love I’ve received from people I didn’t even know but that knew him.”
The Miami native attended Florida International University and earned a degree in hospitality management. He came to Orlando in 2012 to work for Universal Studios and Walt Disney World. He had a co-worker who got anxious in busy crowds, Maria said, so any time it was too busy at work, he would go and stand with her, because he knew it would calm her. He’d be the one to offer a ride or pick up a friend from the airport — all because he derived joy from doing so.
It’s all why she still has faith in humanity, she said.
“The way Orlando is remembering my child and the other 48 and all the people whose lives were shattered and are still dealing with injuries, that has been very (healing),” Maria said. “I still believe in people — my son loved people, he was a genuinely friendly person who thought people were the best thing ever.”
Jerry happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time the night of the Pulse attack. It could have been anybody, Maria said, and it drove home the belief that we are living in an increasingly dangerous world. Her simple message: We need to start with ourselves if we’re going to stop hatred.
“What killed my son was hate, and hate getting armed is going to always create death,” Maria said. “So instead of feeding that hate, we need to find a way to stop it, and we need to start with ourselves. When we were coming up here to find out whether Jerry was hurt, affected — at that point we wouldn’t even consider the possibility that he could be dead — I remember telling myself, ‘I’m not going to let hate go into my heart.’ That’s not who my son is, that’s not who we are, and God has helped me keep that.”
She and Jerry’s father, Fred, have since dedicated themselves to improve gun laws to prevent terrorists from having access to firearms.
The Windermere community room near Town Hall was quite warm on June 10, 2017, as the Wright family gathered around the table on which the paint-by-number portrait of Jerry sat.
Ardaman and Sonksen explained the process, which starts with filling in the areas of black. As the painting progressed, the remaining areas were to be filled with varying shades of gray.
Windermere Mayor Gary Bruhn offered the space a few weeks ago to Ardaman, who was looking for places in which to accommodate various families as they painted. It turned out to be just down the road from where Jerry had lived.
“This is something that’s going to affect Orlando forever,” Bruhn said. “I don’t think that we will ever forget — this is Orlando’s own 9/11 tragedy. This is something that we have to make sure we never forget. Being able to meet the families and hear the stories of their loved ones (is incredible). For me it’s about what I and fellow mayors can do to help the families and help them bring closure.”
And despite the overwhelming tragedy that brought everyone in the room together — Jerry’s parents, brother and sister, aunt, nephew and future brother-in-law among them — there were more smiles than tears.
“I thought it was going to be a bunch of crying, the most devastating experience for me to witness, and it wasn’t like that,” Sonksen said of meeting other families. “We sat around, Mom looks at the painting she’s doing and just smiled and said, ‘It looks just like him.’ I saw more smiles from people than I did anything else.”
Jerry’s older brother and younger sister, Joseph and Aida, bantered and joked with each other as they took turns filling in the blank spaces. His father, Fred, kept up with the multiple conversations in the room as he focused on the task at hand. Mom Maria and aunt Judy Swor took turns painting and tending to Aida’s and fiance Javon’s 3-month-old son, Jerry.
It had been just a week after Jerry’s death when Aida found out she was pregnant. Boy or girl, she said, her child’s name was going to be Jerry. And that afternoon, he napped soundly in his stroller as his family finished the black-and-white portrait of his Uncle Jerry.
The painting looked just like the elder Jerry, the Wrights said, as they hovered over it with their phones, snapping photos of what will become a precious and integral piece of artwork with a story.
“When we first started it was like, ‘How is this going to work?’” Maria said. “Now that it’s finished, it’s incredible, it’s beautiful. It’s a wonderful thing.”
Contact Danielle Hendrix at [email protected].
