“This week it is a man in Uniontown, Ohio, near where I grew up. His wife’s coworker called for a welfare check after she did not show up for work. Officers found the entire family: father, mother, three children, aged fifteen, twelve, and nine—shot to death. What I always think of, in these stories, is that the last thing the children saw in life was their father, shooting them.”
“There are no poems to comfort the parents of a murderer. I know that there are some who think that that’s how it should be, that shooters forfeited any right to be remembered with affection. But watching Sue Klebold wrestle with the truth of who her son was—and the endless suffering that I sense my shooter’s parents also carry—prevents me from expelling them all from the greater human family.”
“I know that there will be a surge of outrage and indignance and then the rest of the country will fall back into its blessed somnolence; that there is now a queue of teachers sentenced to years of therapy, just like me; that nightmares will nest in the minds of children forever; that alcoholics will reach for the bottles after years of hard-won sobriety; that the wicked sorcery of trauma will ensnare not just individuals but this entire culture, guaranteeing a next time.”
“There is, though, something liberating in saying yes, a freedom in the surrender to the unpredictable. It requires a profound trust in people and in quotidian chaos, rather than in institutions, and a willingness to live alongside your own mortality, rather than trying to stay in front of it. There is no pretense of caution, no antiseptic curtain between life and death. There might be a black mamba in your tent. There might be a gunman in your school, and you will have to deal with it.”
