The Other Side of Yet: Finding Light in the Midst of Darkness - Hardcover

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Michelle D. Hord is a creative storyteller and media executive. A proud graduate of Howard University, she is the president of Hope Warrior, Inc., and former vice president of creative content and talent management at NBC Universal. Michelle has spent more than three decades in network news and entertainment. In a career that has spanned from television control rooms to corporate board rooms, she has consistently sought opportunities to inspire creativity in all its various forms. In 2018, she founded Gabrielle’s Wings, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to giving children of color in vulnerable communities the kind of experiences, access to programs, and exposure that she is unable to now give her late daughter, Gabrielle.

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Chapter 1: Face the Dark

— 1 — Face the Dark

January 1, 2019

Another year, another space in our earthly measure of time. I’m a year older, but I’m also a day further from my life with my daughter. I am always aware of her spiritual presence; our connection. I will never stop missing my little girl. I will never touch another child who is becoming and not have that painful muscle memory. There’s the realization that the other children will grow up, and my baby will not. I want to be out in the community, to meet people. I want to keep stretching outside my comfort zone, my concept of what’s possible. I care less about my professional work, and more about what I see and hear and share. The impact I can make on the world. I pray that God will lead me and I will follow. I will listen and look for the signs of where I am supposed to go, and how my work and my creativity can move mountains.

I was inspired to pursue journalism because representation was important to me, and I wanted to impact how the images of people who looked like me were portrayed. My first job out of journalism school was as a junior producer on the nighttime crime show America’s Most Wanted (AMW). I walked through the vestiges of murders, the FBI’s most-wanted criminals, and other tragedies. It was a job I was proud to have. A job that taught me more than I’d ever expected to learn as a journalist. It was also work that had life-or-death implications. In this first job, my charge was to help connect images frozen in yearbooks and holiday cards with real, live breathing children once again. To help people navigate impossible losses and somehow regain an impossible hope and happy ending. As a young but compassionate television producer, I was thrust into the worst possible nightmares of these families’ lives over and over again. The names and photos used for missing child alerts changed, but the fear and impossibility of the crimes remained the same.

It never failed. With voices shaking and bodies shell-shocked with horror and grief, family, neighbors, and friends would all say those four words over and over again.

“This doesn’t happen here.”

Wherever the “here” was, whatever the “this” was, from natural disasters to evil man-made ones, the shock was always palpable. And I was tasked to sit with it all.

The job was hard, but meaningful. I made $19,000 a year, but that didn’t matter to me—I had benefits and a stage on which to learn my craft. I learned the ins and outs of television production. I learned how to get things done. I also learned what it meant to sit with violence. I read police reports and looked at crime scene photos. I endured the crude jokes of law enforcement officials about the perps and the victims. These jokes, I came to understand, were a way to stay sane and keep their food down after seeing crimes that would have been too horrific for TV. I learned how to produce content that touched viewers and illustrated the victorious nature of the human spirit over devastating circumstances.

By the time I was twenty-three, I had been promoted to the role of missing child coordinator and was responsible for all of the missing children stories on the show. I often found myself behind closed doors with families while TV crews were set up outside hoping to get an interview or a statement. Because the host, John Walsh, had started his work after his own son was kidnapped and murdered, victims’ families would feel an instant connection with us when we walked in the door. As a result, my role evolved into being part television producer, part advisor/counselor, and part victim/survivor advocate.

No matter the season, my days would look like this:

A child would go missing. I would get paged and find a pay phone (hey, it was the nineties!). After gathering the details from our 1-800 hotline, I’d partner with the cops on next steps. I’d then get a public service announcement on all of the local Fox affiliate stations around the country. We knew that after a child went missing, we usually only had hours—literally—that would determine whether or not they would be found alive. Then I would fly to sit with the victim’s family. Over and over again, this was my job. The families were different. The towns were different. The stories were often the same.

My colleagues at AMW, as well as the other places I’ve worked in media, became my tribe. There is a kindred spirit among those of us who rush toward the fire; those of us who want to try to record history. We understood what it meant to have our pagers go off or to have the phone ring and know that, regardless of what we were doing, we had to jump into action. There were always others in the trenches, sweating, crying, trying to stay awake, and making sure that we could do whatever we could to get information out to people.

I loved it. I was an adrenaline junkie, and in a way, I think that’s also what made me a fun and effective mommy and class mom. I knew how to juggle it all. I was always trying to figure out where the story was, how to make it understandable and relatable, and always, always looking for those narratives that highlighted the human spirit.

One of the things I’ll never forget happened early in my career at America’s Most Wanted. There were very rarely happy endings, as you can imagine. But in 1992, when I was twenty-two years old, just a year out of school, we did a missing child story on a little girl named Genny May Krohn. Genny was from Milton, Florida, and as soon as we were contacted about her kidnapping, we got a public service announcement on all the Fox stations. In less than a few days, because of all of the national attention around her abduction, her kidnapper started to get scared. He actually told her that she had been on America’s Most Wanted and bought her a bike at a pawnshop. He then left her at a convenience store near her home.

Getting the call that Genny was alive is still very hard to describe. I wasn’t a mother yet, but it moved me. I remember sitting in the edit room overnight working on the piece. John Walsh flew down to Florida, and he sat down on the grass with little Genny who, with her pageboy haircut and pink T-shirt, seemed oblivious to the miracle she was. She told him that when she got on the bike to leave, her abductor told her that he had a hit man and that if she looked back or told anyone, the hit man would come after her. And she very nonchalantly and sweetly and innocently shrugged her shoulders and said, “If someone says there’s a hit man and it’s the first time you’ve been kidnapped, you believe them.”

Genny got to come home. There were people who sprang into action, as there always are in these cases. Strangers, in addition to family, friends, and loved ones, were looking for this little girl. America was looking for this little girl, and America found her. Volunteers waited alongside her parents on her neighborhood street for her to come home with the police after she’d given them the information she had on her abductor.

Police sirens wailed down the road as family, friends, and strangers stood with their hands clasped, holding their breath. She got a hug from a detective as she stepped out of the police car holding her own missing child poster, very much as if she was coming home from the carnival with a balloon. Her parents embraced her. I watched those images over and over and over as...