The minute the bomb went off, I remember thinking my life was over. As a bank teller at a credit union, I at first figured I’d been shot to death by a bank robber. But I had fallen through three floors and was still upside down in my chair, buried under about 10 feet of rubble. Then I heard a distant siren and eventually some voices, and I just kept screaming until someone yelled, “We have a live one!”

As I lay there, thinking over my life, I had so much regret. I was 28, weighed about 355 pounds, and all I did was work, go home, watch TV, eat Cheetos, go to bed and do it again the next day. I had no drive. I was so complacent. I remember begging God for a second chance. It wasn’t easy. Back at work, 18 of our 33 employees had been killed. How could I even continue? But one day my boss came in and said, “If you had a magic wand, what would you do?” I thought, I wouldn’t be a victim.

I started using that technique over and over. I asked myself, Given my current situation and limitations, what can I do? Even though I’d flunked out of college, I wrote on an index card, “I want to go back to school.” I found a program that would accept me, and eventually I got my MBA and graduated at the top of my class. Wow! What about my weight? Dieting never worked, so I researched gastric sleeve options. The doctor said that’s good for 75 pounds, but you need to exercise. I found a bicycle with tires big enough not to pop and started taking longer and longer rides until I rode across Oklahoma. I eventually lost 200 pounds. Cycling is also how I met my husband. At 45, I ran the Oklahoma City Marathon in honor of my best friend, who was killed the day of the bombing. When I turned 50, the same year I became CEO of the credit union, I knew I had to do something badass, so I competed in the Ironman triathlon. I finished last, but who cares? I did it! Now I want to ride my bike across the United States, and I’m still thinking about what else that magic wand might do.

November 22, 1963, really ate me up. A month after the assassination—and I first revealed this in my 2022 book, My Travels with Mrs. Kennedy—I tried to drown myself in the ocean in Palm Beach, Florida. I was up to my neck, fully clothed, when a police officer pulled me back to shore. I stayed with Mrs. Kennedy for another year and returned to the White House, rising through the ranks of the Service under Presidents Johnson, Nixon and Ford. But I was struggling. One question always haunted me: Could I have done something to save President Kennedy? I suffered from a variety of health conditions, and in 1975, I failed a physical exam at Bethesda Naval Hospital. The Secret Service retired me that summer. I was only 43 at the time.

I owned some property in North Dakota and flew out to work the land, but when I returned home to Virginia, I just wasn’t functioning. I became very depressed. I started drinking Scotch, and I smoked heavily. One morning when I was 50, I woke up, reached over for a cigarette and thought, Why are you doing this? I stopped cold turkey and soon decided to stop drinking too.

In 2009, a former fellow Secret Service agent who was writing a book wanted me to meet the journalist helping him. When Lisa McCubbin and I met, it was the first time since I’d spoken with the Warren Commission that I’d talked about the events of that fateful day. It had been all bottled up inside. The more I opened up, the better and lighter I felt. Lisa and I ended up writing four books together. We got to know each other very well, and she and I got married in late 2021.

My friends keep saying the same thing: “Clint, you’re a different man than you were in the 1970s and ’80s.” That’s because I believed back then that you could just push away your problems by putting your shoulder to the grindstone. Nobody talked about PTSD. There was no counseling for guys like me. Now when I talk to groups or meet people struggling with trauma, I tell them to find somebody they can talk to. It could be a friend, their spouse, a priest, a rabbi, a minister, a schoolteacher, a therapist. No matter how old you are, talking about it will help.

Everybody focuses on the horror of the shooting, but there are so many miracles that took place. People say, “Where was God?” Well, God was right there, because my son Kris took a bullet to the back that should have blown open his spinal column and left him bleeding to death on the church ground. And yet, a week after he got out of the hospital, he was back at church leading worship. He’s doing physical therapy to learn to stand and maybe even to walk again. Or what about me, taking a bullet to the chest that should have gone through my lung and caused me to suffocate. Somehow, at the angle it took, the bullet didn’t even penetrate my skin, even though I felt the blow. My younger son was fired at 28 times but was only grazed on his shoulder. My daughter-in-law has a bullet that was aimed at her femur. We have the X-ray of an intact bullet that stopped before shattering her leg. If that’s not God, I don’t know what is. So on days when I feel like having a pity party, I look around, I look up, I focus on the good.

We’ve been blessed. That’s not to say it’s easy. Even after six years, I have to work sometimes on finding love. I’m a fierce friend, but trust is a hard thing after something like this. The Bible tells us that we’re to love one another, but if you love, there’s liable to be more hurt. I tend to be more cautious now, more observant, a little more distant from people.

Then I remember that to live a life abundant, you can’t live in a cocoon. You need to be social; you need to be in community. We need to be a light for one another. That’s my role now. So many people have said to me, “By hearing your story, and what you’ve been through, it’s deepened my faith.”

My faith deepens too. The miracles continue. The doctors told my son he probably wouldn’t be able to have children again without expensive medical intervention, and we didn’t have that kind of money. But God has provided them naturally with another child; I’m crying right now just thinking about it. They named him Ronen, which in Hebrew means “song of joy.” This little boy is a redemption gift from God.

After the horrific days of 1992, I had a lot of grief and deep depression. I’d witnessed things no 16-year-old should. My mom and brother were gone, and my dad was in jail. Our family was demonized in the media; I felt I had no voice. I was living with relatives in Iowa and thrust into public school after having been homeschooled. I didn’t always want to be associated with Ruby Ridge. I tried to find my happiness by working hard, being a 4.0 student, getting married, starting a family, building a house and moving on. But I still wasn’t happy. I felt I had tried it all and was still miserable.

During this time, my son was a baby, and I didn’t want to leave him motherless. Because I had lost my mom, I knew how terrible it was to not have that support system. One very hard day, I thought, What would my mom do? She would read her Bible. And so I went and dug out my Sunday school Bible. I remembered that at our church in Iowa, if I memorized a verse, I earned a piece of candy. In that moment I remembered the verse I had memorized at age 7—John 3:16. I turned to it, and as I read, the weight of the world came off my shoulders. That began my walk of faith.

When you go through really hard things, when your loved ones have made sacrifices or you’ve made them, you want to know that this wasn’t for nothing. That there’s purpose in what you endured. I’ve spent my life looking for that purpose and found my purpose in God. But I also found it in talking to other people about what they’ve experienced. Listening to their testimonies, hearing their struggles, acknowledging, “Hey, you are not alone.”

My dad died in 2022 at 74, and I received so many messages from people who were touched in a deep way by our story. One gentleman wrote with his condolences to say, “Knowing people like you are out there makes the world seem like a better place.”

It’s the same humbling reaction I get when I share my story at different book signings [she’s authored a book called From Ruby Ridge to Freedom], church functions or fundraisers. Practicing forgiveness is another crucial part of my story that others relate to. I feel incredibly blessed to be a beacon to others as I take my own healing journey. If anyone’s experienced trauma, they know I can relate to them. I can see them. I now know that there is always hope and that though we sometimes feel like it, we are never truly alone.

Initially, it was my grandmother who prompted me to want to survive. As I lay there bleeding out, with my whole right arm and leg blown up, I kept thinking, I don’t want my 93-year-old grandma to have to live through my funeral.

When you survive something like that, you pretty much live with fearlessness. Whatever terrible thing happens, you think, This can’t be that hard. But nothing prepared me for the profound loss and trauma of losing my husband, Steve Sierra, in a car crash in 1994. I was pregnant with our second child, after having lost two through miscarriage. He was the primary breadwinner. We were financially extended. I was three months from personal bankruptcy. I couldn’t breathe. I was on bed rest because this was a high-risk pregnancy. My father came over, and I said, “Dad, I don’t know if I can go on. I don’t know that I can bring this baby into the world.” I just missed Steve so much. My father was very Germanic. He said, “Jackie, it’s been three months. Get over it.” I was so outraged, I told him to get out of my house. I didn’t talk to him for weeks. But I understood the message: You’ve got to get over it. I mean, bad things happen to good people all the time. But our challenge is to move beyond it. Not that you don’t grieve, not that you don’t have the loss, but self-pity is not going to get you anywhere.

I’ve always loved giving speeches about overcoming adversity, because I’ve had plenty of it. I lost the first time I ran for Congress, and I lost when I ran for lieutenant governor in 2006. You just keep going. Every time a door shuts, a window opens. But there comes a time when you need to pass the torch to a new generation. My husband, Barry Dennis, looked at me one day before I retired and said, “You’ve been a weekend wife for 20 years. When are we going to have time to enjoy our lives?” I’m 73, but I feel like I’m 42, so I will need to adjust.

Change is important and exciting and necessary, even if the path is not always clear. When you lose a loved one, people don’t know what to say or do. One of the things I did was to pay it forward. A friend and I created what we call the Merry Widows Club. This was over 25 years ago. We still get together. We laugh. We cry. We support each other. It’s a group of 12 women. We remind one another there’s always a way forward. You’ve just got to be willing to open your eyes and see it.

Laurence Gonzales, a resilience expert and author of Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, shares the best strategies for coping.