Every year as the month of June approaches, Olga Disla struggles with crippling anxiety.
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“My cardiologist told me, ‘We are in May. You have to try to calm yourself down’,” Disla said in Spanish. “As the day where my life changed forever gets closer … it feels like the music in horror movies when the protagonist is about to encounter the killer.”
She recalls that day 10 years ago, when she was at home in Puerto Rico studying for her masters degree in education. Disla got a call from a close friend who had heard news of a shooting attack at a Central Florida nightclub and asked if she knew where her son Anthony was.
“When my friend told me the name of the club my life left me,” Disla said. “Because when I spoke to him the previous day he told me he would be there.”
Immediately she called her eldest son Marcos, who told her he was at the scene of the massacre.
“I think he was trying to protect me because he didn’t call me right away,” Disla said. “He couldn’t even find the words to tell me that he couldn’t find Anthony.”
She raced to the airport and took the first flight to Orlando at 4 p.m. without a suitcase or any clothes. Her sister picked her up from the airport.
“I felt it in my heart,” Disla said through tears. “When I saw her I just looked her in the eyes and I said, ‘He is dead isn’t he?’ She shook her head yes and I just screamed and screamed.”
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The day before, Disla said she had felt a powerful instinct to protect her son and told him not to drive to the club because she was concerned about car accidents. Anthony, hearing his mother’s concerns, got a ride instead.
Anthony Luis Laureano Disla died there of multiple gunshot wounds at the age of 25.
“Even to this day I think about how I could have prevented this if I could have had that power,” Disla said with a shaky voice. “But obviously I didn’t get that chance. You think about a car accident, not the reality of what happened.”
Ten years later Disla said her health has declined, exacerbated by the grief of losing her child. She had open heart surgery four years ago, suffers from hypertension and lost vision in her right eye after the retina detached.
Disla is now retired in Poinciana, where she moved to be closer to her eldest son and her youngest’s grave.
“The numbers mark time but they don’t finalize the pain,” Disla said. “I can’t tell you that I’m happy in my life but I have learned to live with that. My son is with me in my mind every day.”
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