browser life

The second half of April has been bittersweet for me most of the past ten years. The timing seems particularly ironic this year as I'm experiencing absolutely beautiful weather during my first spring in Sioux Falls. Looking outdoors at the green grass and the prancing squirrels and listening to song birds in my yard, the scene is much more suggestive of new life than of untimely death.

But on April 28, 1997, my mother died of metastatic cancer at age 54. She had only been diagnosed four months prior, and her decline was swift and brutal. She was not ready to die.

On April 20, 1999, mere hours after I came home from the hospital from gallbladder surgery, I switched on the local news and got word that someone was inside Columbine high school across town and was shooting at students and teachers. I saw live images of a severely injured boy jumping out a window and a sign inside a classroom that read "1 bleeding to death". I saw hundreds of children fleeing the building in long lines, hands on their heads to prove that they weren't the ones with the weapons.

And then yesterday, which I believe was Holocaust Remembrance Day, a student entered one, possibly two college buildings on the Virginia Tech campus with two guns and an almost incomprehensible amount of ammo and fired away. He killed over 30 students and professors before pulling the trigger on himself. Over 20 others received gunshot wounds; most of the people who died had been shot at least three times each.

I had gotten to a reasonably healthy frame of mind about my mother's death when the shootings at Columbine High School happened, but because grief was not yet a distant memory, the sense of helplessness and loss was somewhat familiar even if it was in a different context. I commiserated with and, when I could, consoled others of all ages from all over the country and even some from halfway across the world. Even though I only knew the dead through co-workers, the fact that their appalling murders occurred in my hometown affected me personally in a permanent way.

And I was thinking about Columbine High the past week or so, partly because the anniversary was near and partly because I came across reminders when I was unpacking. I had saved some news stories from the days, weeks, months and years that followed, more with positive slants than negative. I had also saved essays, letters and poetry I had written as well as photos I had taken of the memorial because I don't feel we can learn from tragedy if we forget about it.

Then I switched on the tv while eating lunch yesterday, and remnants of that familiar sting came flooding back. That helpless nausea and darkness in the pit of the stomach. The initial disbelief, the hoping that the numbers on the screen are exaggerated, the realization that it has happened AGAIN.

Again, students jumping out of windows. Again, educators literally risking their lives to save their pupils. Again, a perpetrator dead so we will never really know what he was thinking.

Obviously, he was suicidal. I've been there, done that. What I do not and probably will never understand is how one goes from wanting to end one's own life to wanting to take others with them, particlarly others who are not related and may not have even known the person.

Even though my only connection to Virginia is that I was born there and once had a boyfriend that lived there, my heart still goes out to all affected. I feel an actual heaviness in my chest that I know all too well as grief. But fortunately, I also know from experience that these wounds can heal, although not always on the timetable we would wish.

I do wish that April showers didn't necessarily mean tears.