The Triumph of Lulu Gribbin

How a teenage girl from Mountain Brook, Alabama, turned tragedy into purpose

- BY BOYCE UPHOLT

WHEN A BULL SHARK bit 15-year-old Lulu Gribbin in Walton County, Florida, she could understand what was happening—it was cleaving her left arm and her right leg—but she did not feel any pain.

“I remember just thinking that the whole thing was a movie,” Lulu says now, a year and a half after the attack. Certain details still stay crisp: awakening amid a gaggle of onlookers and staring down at the strawberry-colored nail polish on her toes. There was also a tingling feeling as a heroic stranger, a quick-thinking nurse, used the drawstring from some swimming trunks to create an improvised tourniquet. Lulu’s mental reel cuts off as she is being loaded into an ambulance. The next thing she remembers is waking up at the hospital, her first surgery complete.

That violent day—June 7, 2024—was just the beginning, though. Before Lulu made it home to Mountain Brook, Alabama, two and a half months later, she underwent nine medical procedures. And throughout that process, there was pain—searing, impossible pain—located not within her body but at the site of the missing appendages. Some nights, she woke up screaming.

Pain can unmake a person’s world, almost literally. You experience life as a story, one that’s projected by and through your brain. And Lulu’s brain simply couldn’t comprehend what she'd lost. Describing the sensation of her phantom limbs, she says, “It's like your arm is squeezing you and stinging you and poking you.” The rest of us will never grasp what she’s endured.