If I Don’t Make It, I Love You: Survivors in the Aftermath of School Shootings

The result is an important and horrifyingly thick anthology of mass murders…Highly difficult to read in one sitting, but we must not look away. -Kirkus Reviews

A harrowing collection of sixty narratives-covering over fifty years of shootings in America-written by those most directly affected by school shootings: the survivors.

If I Don’t Make It, I Love You, a text sent from inside the war zone like scene of a mass shooting, a text meant for Stacy Crescitelli, whose 15-year-old daughter, Sarah, was hiding in a closet fearing for her life in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, while a gunman sprayed her school with bullets, killing her friends, teachers, and coaches. This scene has become too familiar.

We see the images, the children with trauma on their faces leaving their school in ropes, connected to one another with hands on shoulders, shaking, crying, and screaming. We mourn the dead. We bury children. We demand change. But we are met with inaction. So, we move forward, sadder and more jaded. But what about those who cannot move on?

These are their stories.

If I Don’t Make It, I Love You collects more than sixty narratives from school shooting survivors, family members, and community leaders covering fifty years of shootings in America, from the 1966 UT-Austin Tower shooting through May 2018’s Santa Fe shooting.

Through this collection, editors Amye Archer and Loren Kleinman offer a vital contribution to the surging national dialogue on gun reform by elevating the voices of those most directly affected by school shootings: the survivors.