Ten years later, Mayra Alvear said the worst night of her life remains hauntingly painful and the death of her daughter, Amanda, sometimes very fresh.
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“This is something that always stays with you until God calls you back home. It’s a pain that you carry inside that you have to learn how to live with,” said the Haines City mother. “So it’s been like a roller coaster. Some days are good, some days are bad.”
Amanda Alvear, a 25-year-old Valencia College student and pharmacy tech, was a happy and outgoing young woman who in high school was an honors student, junior class president and prom queen.
On June 12, 2016, Amanda, who still lived at home, called her father to say she would be spending the night at a friend’s house, then went to a housewarming party with several friends before they decided to go to Pulse.
Early in the morning, Amanda’s best friend called the family to tell them about the attack and that Amanda had been at the club. Alvear, in her bedroom, pleaded to God for her daughter’s safety.
“I just remember screaming…going to my knees and asking God, ‘Please let her be alive, let her be injured, don’t take her from us yet,’” she recounted tearfully.
Like many other family members who could not reach their loved ones in the hours after the massacre, Alvear went to the hospital to search for her daughter, only to find she had not survived.
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“It was an awful nightmare,” she said. “My daughter decided to go out dancing. She was supposed to come home,” she said. “She was young, and she wanted to have fun.”
The week of June 12 was already a painful one for Alvear, as it was the birthday week of her son, Nelson, who died of cancer at the age of 12 in 2001.
Now her Christian faith, she said, helps her each year get through the tragic time, as she’s confident one day she will see her children again in the next life.
Alvear looks forward to the completion of the City of Orlando’s permanent memorial to those killed at Pulse. She sat on the advisory committee that helped draft the long-awaited memorial’s final design and firmly believes it will help keep alive the memory of what happened and honor the dead.
“It is important that the memorial is there, that the story is told, so people of future generations remember what hate can do, and what love can change,” she said.
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