My memoir

To the misguided

I can’t find the sense
In causing another pain
Because of your own.

What causes such hate?
Contempt that becomes so vast
That it comes to this?

The experience
Of loss is one without true
Expression in words.

The emotion of
Grief is one without any
Remedy but time.

You cannot ever
Underestimate effects
Your actions will have.

Looking back on it, I can’t remember why it made me so angry that Colleen always left the cap off the toothpaste. It was typical sibling bickering, I suppose. She could get away with all the things that I couldn’t; when you’re the oldest, you’re just supposed to “know better.” Apparently, sometime during my two years before Colleen was born, I attended the lesson on how to put something away so it doesn’t leave a crusty trail of Crest all over the counter. You never know how much you can truly miss someone until your whole body aches to find a minty mess on the bathroom sink.

We were born and raised in typical American suburbia, in a town just south of Denver, Colorado. Columbine was actually quite a pleasant place to grow up. We made snow angels in the winter, chalky hopscotch boards in the summer. Every morning, perky blonde mothers on our block handed sack lunches to their pigtailed children as they skipped out the door to catch the school bus. If had you asked me ten years ago about my top neighborhood concern, my answer probably would have been “the next block party.” Safety was a given. We never had any reason to think something like this could happen.

As a proud member of Columbine High School’s graduating class of 1999, I felt it was my duty to fully embrace my blossoming case of senioritis whenever possible. Every day brought me closer to my impending graduation, and by April I could hardly combat the pressure to spend class time perusing the spring sales in downtown Denver or munching on Mexican food with my best friend Claudia in her new Jeep. On the morning of the 20th, feeling particularly proud of my perfect attendance so far that week, I decided that Tuesday was the perfect day for tacos. At 11:10am, as I ordered my brunch fajita, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold entered Columbine High with a duffel bag full of weapons. Before the hour was up, they had wounded 24 students and killed another 12, including my sister Colleen.

The first time my mother’s number appeared on my caller ID, I ignored it without a second thought. ‘As far as she knows’, I reasoned, ‘I’m in a very important lecture and simply can’t be bothered.’ After my phone began to rattle for the third time in a minute and a half, I answered in mock irritation, ready to chastise her for tearing me away from Shakespeare and his ingenious use of iambic pentameter. I had barely begun to speak when my mother’s frantic words silenced me immediately.

“Jessica,” she trembled, “you need to come home. Something horrible has happened.” The rest of our conversation is completely blurred in my memory. I vaguely recall wondering whether I was on the verge of screaming or vomiting. The next thing I remember is staring vacantly out the passenger side window of Claudia’s Cherokee as she sped towards my house. In my reflection I could see the glimmer of tears coating my cheeks, although I couldn’t feel their moisture.

Though the immediate effects of a great earthquake are catastrophic, there’s something to be said for the destructive abilities of the aftershock. For months my mother engaged in a pattern of self-accusatory behavior, reliving the events of that ominous morning again and again.

“Colleen hadn’t been feeling well,” she would tell me tearfully. “I knew she was running a fever. Why didn’t I let her stay home? What kind of mother sends her daughter out into the world with a fever?” Right before my eyes, my once composed and capable mother melted into a puddle of regrets and misgivings. She couldn’t even find consolation in my survival. In her eyes, I wasn’t alive due to any effort on her part; I escaped the tragedy at Columbine by cutting class, which displayed her incompetence as a parent in a different, albeit less glaring, manner.

In the fashion of a true alcoholic, my father seized this opportunity to return to his binge-drinking habits, eliminating two years of struggling through AA meetings and ten years of blissful (at least for the rest of us) sobriety. As his drinking increased, so did my mother’s weepy self-criticism, and his response was to match each of her “what ifs” with a shot of whiskey.

“What if she had been running a temperature of 100, instead of just 99?” my mother would ask. “I always kept the girls home when the thermometer hit three digits.” The only sound that came from my father’s end of the couch was the clank of an empty shot glass hitting the coffee table.

The shock of losing my only sibling, my baby sister, was one I never could have prepared for. As I witnessed the collapse of my entire family structure, the sole comfort I longed for was that of Colleen, the one other person in this world who could ever understand how it felt to console our increasingly unreasonable mother or sweep up the glass from a shattered bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the kitchen floor. The idea that no matter what I did or what I sacrificed, I absolutely could not see her was completely suffocating and unbearable. My solitary consolation came from Claudia, my only friend who never tired of my random bouts of tears, or 1 A.M. phone calls pleading for her to pick me up so I could escape yet another example of my parents’ faltering marriage. In September, it was Claudia who helped me pack up and move into my dorm at CU Boulder, although, to my parents’ credit, they had planned ahead in happier years and saved up enough for my in-state college education.

It has been almost eight years since Colleen’s death and still neither one of my parents has quite recovered. I guess I’m not sure you could even say that I have. If nothing else, I'd like to think that I've learned from my experience. Though I can't forgive Fate for stealing not just one, but three of the people I knew and loved, I’ve developed an understanding of appreciation that you cannot obtain until you’ve lost something so great. There's something about loss that colors the things that you still have. In her own way, Colleen colored my life.

WRITING RESPONSE:

Writing this piece that joins imagination with real events was a heavy assignment. I wanted to express something creatively without infringing on the real experience of someone who actually lived through such a tragedy. This is why I chose this event – I felt like I knew enough details about the situation to write about Columbine, but I’ve also closely witnessed the effect that a child’s death can have on a family, although the extent of this family’s collapse was more of a creative extreme I took as a writer. The combination of imagination and reality reminds me of a discussion I had when reading The Things We Carried by Tim O’Brien. Although it is true that he served in the Vietnam War, he claims that the stories in this book are fictional, and so this blurs the lines a lot when you’re reading the book. A more “reliable” form of depicting a historical event could possibly then be in a textbook or something along those lines, because they carry with them the promise of bearing facts. However, I think that personal accounts give you a more genuine view of what went on at a different level, although its legitimacy can possibly be altered by emotion, perspective, etc. The Museo Storico dell Liberazione made me think more seriously about the pain that comes with tragic events and how desperate it can make a person feel, and I tried to reflect that in my piece.